The Peter Attia Drive - #414 ‒ Resistance training as we age： optimizing exercise selection and training intensity for muscle growth, function, and injury risk management ｜ Jeff Cavaliere, M.S.P.T., C.S.C.S.

00:00:00.000 Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. This podcast,

00:00:16.540 my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity

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00:00:26.720 wellness. And we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen. It is extremely

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00:00:53.200 of a subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership,

00:00:58.040 head over to peteratiamd.com forward slash subscribe. My guest this week is Jeff Cavalier.

00:01:06.400 Jeff is a physical therapist, strength coach, and founder of AthleanX, one of the most trusted and

00:01:11.380 influential fitness education platforms in the world. Prior to that, Jeff served as the head

00:01:16.540 physical therapist for the New York Mets, and he has spent decades bridging the gap between

00:01:20.920 rehabilitation, performance, and strength training. This is Jeff's second appearance

00:01:25.100 on The Drive after joining us last year for our Strength Roundtable. In this episode,

00:01:29.520 we talk about how to train for strength and hypertrophy while minimizing injury risk,

00:01:34.240 especially as you move from your 40s into your 50s and beyond, why junk volume is one of the

00:01:39.420 biggest mistakes lifters make, and how to think about productive reps instead, reps in reserve,

00:01:44.920 how to use them correctly, when to train to failure and when not to, Jeff's own injury

00:01:50.000 history, including shoulder and foot issues and how they shaped his philosophy on training around

00:01:54.880 pain, the differences between training for aesthetics and functional training and why

00:02:00.000 they're not actually at odds, Jeff's list of common graveyard exercises that increase injury

00:02:04.960 risk without delivering enough gains to potentially justify them, why calves, glutes, and smaller

00:02:10.800 stabilizing muscles deserve far more attention than they get, how to adjust training variables

00:02:16.160 like volume, intensity, and frequency as you age without giving up performance. And finally,

00:02:21.140 a body part by body part breakdown of some of the best bang for your buck exercises.

00:02:27.020 So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Jeff Cavalier.

00:02:36.000 Jeff, man, thank you again for coming back to Austin. So good to see you again.

00:02:40.200 Super happy to be back here.

00:02:41.840 You've been here in the heat. You've been here in the cool. It's all great.

00:02:45.180 It's a beautiful place.

00:02:46.220 We were talking to the driver on the way over and I said, where's the one place in Texas

00:02:49.820 that I should, if you were to choose one place, he says, honestly, Austin, because it offers

00:02:54.500 the most diverse opportunities and not just the nightlight, but it has the scenery, the

00:02:59.100 culture.

00:02:59.540 So I love it.

00:03:00.780 Awesome. 0.73

00:03:01.220 We'll try to get you to move here.

00:03:02.500 Yeah.

00:03:03.620 Well, there's a lot I want to chat about with you today.

00:03:07.500 And I also realized that for some people listening or watching right now, they might not know

00:03:12.000 a lot about you.

00:03:12.700 so maybe just briefly tell us a little bit about your journey to here we didn't talk about it

00:03:18.700 really on the round table so maybe just explain a little bit about how you found your way to doing

00:03:22.680 what you're doing right now growing up I always wanted to get ultimately involved in some career

00:03:28.740 where I could help people or educate because I always loved doing that my father was a doctor

00:03:32.440 I had aspirations at one point as the third kid of three to maybe become a doctor because no one

00:03:37.840 else had. But for me, I always had this other love of sports though too. So if I could figure

00:03:43.900 out a way that I could get into working with athletes at the same time that I could help

00:03:49.040 people, not just athletes, because it's a smaller population that I would find I would feel would

00:03:53.980 be my perfect fit. Well, I started being able to work strictly with athletes as I got a job

00:03:59.320 with the New York Mets. I'm a physical therapist. I was our head physical therapist for three

00:04:03.220 seasons and then left to pursue whatever this was ultimately going to become. But I started pretty

00:04:09.740 early making videos for YouTube, educational videos for YouTube, focused on trying to take

00:04:15.780 the lessons that I learned from training with top level athletes and apply them to people who are

00:04:21.100 never going to get paid to do this. We're never going to get a pro contract, but just wanted to

00:04:25.080 be able to benefit from what they need to focus on to perform at such a high level. Because I think

00:04:30.700 we all have a lot more we can do if we focus on the right things. And I started off with a couple

00:04:35.080 of videos and the next thing you know, a couple more subscribers. And I saw that there was an

00:04:39.680 opportunity to continue to pursue that path. And I did. And ultimately here we are now almost 15

00:04:44.720 million subscribers doing what I've done since day one, which is just trying to use the platform

00:04:49.760 to educate and empower people with the techniques and strategies from both the realms of rehab as a

00:04:55.980 physical therapist and strength and conditioning as my other role was with the Mets. Because to me,

00:05:00.400 they're all one continuum. If you're hurt, you're just less functional at the moment. But as you

00:05:05.060 become able to get higher and higher levels of function, you could get to extreme levels of

00:05:09.000 function and capabilities. And that's athleticism. What year did you start the channel in earnest?

00:05:13.640 2009 is when I actually started to make content for it. My years with the Mets were 2006,

00:05:18.100 seven and eight. When you think about the evolution of the channel, there's so much

00:05:21.580 content on there. How do you think about that from the standpoint of injury prevention to

00:05:27.980 a lot of the stuff that I actually probably discovered maybe on Instagram a few years ago,

00:05:33.200 maybe a little longer than that. I've been following you for quite a while,

00:05:35.780 but a lot of it is on, honestly, like, why is it that when you're doing a lat pull down,

00:05:39.740 you're not getting the right engagement? This is geared towards function and hypertrophy. As you

00:05:43.760 said, like, this is not about an injury. This is about making progress. Has that been an evolution

00:05:48.040 for you or have you always provided information on that continuum? I've always provided people

00:05:52.000 information on that continuum because I feel that's the part where my skill as a physical

00:05:58.040 therapist comes in. Because if you're in a rehab setting and somebody comes to you with whatever

00:06:02.940 ailment they have at the moment and they need help, you will never be able to follow the playbook

00:06:07.920 as instructed or as written or as the protocol comes that says, this is what you're doing one

00:06:13.060 week later, two weeks later, three weeks post-op, whatever. Something always comes up where that

00:06:17.440 individual has something that doesn't feel right, or they don't have the range of motion that's

00:06:22.480 expected, or something is preventing the playbook from being able to be executed, that's where you

00:06:27.660 need to be flexible enough to be able to say, well, okay, try this instead. It could just be

00:06:32.780 simply moving your leg further out into abduction to then go do a leg lift. All of a sudden,

00:06:39.480 pain-free motion again, they're able to do the activity. So if you don't have that ability to

00:06:44.380 have a lot of flexibility in your approach, then I don't think you can effectively perform a rehab

00:06:49.740 on somebody. It's no different in weight training and strength training. Not every exercise will

00:06:55.200 feel great for every person or feel as effective as it should. There's tips that you can give them

00:07:01.540 to increase the stimulus that you're feeling. And that might work for almost everybody, but

00:07:06.360 there's still going to be people who don't have that effect with the exercise they're doing. So

00:07:10.040 need to find exercise number two or three. And the beautiful thing about strength and conditioning is

00:07:14.820 there's never just one option. There's usually like hundreds of options to go to. So if you're

00:07:19.780 diverse in your playbook, you're going to be able to do that. So I think over the years,

00:07:23.680 my ability to navigate even similar issues, I've done 1700 videos at this point. I mean,

00:07:28.760 we've covered a lot of the same issues twice, but coming at it from a different angle and making it

00:07:33.600 click for somebody for the first time, because we're explaining it slightly differently is

00:07:37.320 probably where the power is. You've probably observed the same thing that many people have

00:07:42.220 observed, which is some combination of the human attention span appears to be getting shorter and

00:07:47.520 shorter, and platforms seem to recognize that and prioritize shorter and shorter content.

00:07:55.140 Now, I think I'm a bit of an unusual person in that I don't like short-form content. I really

00:08:00.100 like long-form content. I like watching a 20-minute video where I will learn something in depth

00:08:06.780 that's at the master's level, as opposed to a one minute video that just shows me something

00:08:13.060 at a superficial level that obviously, even if it's correct, it's incomplete.

00:08:17.580 How has your ability to provide content evolved in that environment? And are you still making a

00:08:23.940 lot of long form content? And how have you basically struggled with trying to educate

00:08:28.620 people as much as you can, but understanding that your opportunity to do so, like every one of us

00:08:35.240 trying to educate people, it's narrowing. It's been a huge challenge for me personally. And I

00:08:41.360 think even for obtaining the information that I do like to obtain, because I like you, I like to find

00:08:46.340 that long form content. I like to dive deep. I have no problem taking a three hour podcast or

00:08:51.540 even just a 40 minute video and chunking it down into sessions so that I can watch 10 minutes now

00:08:57.600 and then watch 10 minutes again later. I have no problem with that. What I don't like is the

00:09:01.680 watering down or the thinning out of the content specifically because it needs to fit this format,

00:09:09.080 this short form format. What you're forced to do as an educator is to pick and choose the things

00:09:15.060 that you think are going to be the most impactful, but you're not really even given the opportunity

00:09:19.260 to explain why. I'll give you a great soundbite, but is the soundbite really valuable if you don't

00:09:25.580 also understand why? Because unless you remember or memorize that soundbite and can implement

00:09:30.240 whatever the soundbite is telling you to do, if you forget the why, then you may never be able

00:09:34.260 to actually understand why you're doing what you were told. That is why I've always done

00:09:38.280 long-form content because I want to have the opportunity to explain the... We have a joke

00:09:43.200 internally at my company where they say, sets and reps, please, because that's what people

00:09:48.500 literally will say in comments. They'll bypass the entire explanation of why, which again,

00:09:54.340 I feel is not just... I'm not trying to make a long video. I'm trying to give you the information

00:09:58.540 that you need to be able to implement this,

00:10:00.320 not just on whatever I'm teaching you in that video,

00:10:02.580 but other things too.

00:10:04.000 Sets and reps, please, is basically the punchline

00:10:06.040 to like, I don't wanna hear any of that.

00:10:07.680 I just wanna know, tell me the what.

00:10:09.920 I struggle, I still struggle,

00:10:11.140 but I will always continue to make long-form content.

00:10:13.300 Now, we've had to make short-form content.

00:10:15.940 I've had to take clips from these longer videos

00:10:18.400 and convert them into things

00:10:19.900 that we can present in short-form format.

00:10:22.480 I have had to make them more intentionally engaging

00:10:26.460 in the first three seconds

00:10:27.820 because I know that is the attention span of the person who's about ready to flip that thumb one

00:10:32.060 more time and skip right past me to have something that's going to catch their eye just so that I can

00:10:37.900 have the opportunity to teach them whatever I think is going to be valuable. I think that's

00:10:41.720 a game that kind of sucks to be honest with you, but it's sort of part of what social media is 0.93

00:10:46.140 evolving into. Well, the good news is I don't know how many minutes we're into this discussion, 0.78

00:10:49.900 probably 10 or so. I can assure you that any of the people that need to get hooked in the first

00:10:55.520 three seconds are not only gone from this, they're like, they're 10 steps removed. Anybody who's

00:11:00.740 still sticking around is in this for the long haul. So we should not be apologetic for the fact

00:11:05.220 that we're going to talk about many topics in depth. Let's start with, well, one other kind

00:11:11.580 of personal question that I think helps set the stage, Jeff, is help people understand your own

00:11:16.220 personal injury history. You don't get to be in your fifties like we are without a lot of stripes

00:11:21.280 on your back. And I think that can also explain sort of where you're coming from. So I know of

00:11:26.820 at least two injuries you've had, you probably had more like, what are some of the major sports

00:11:30.420 injuries, training injuries that you've experienced? The most significant injuries that I deal with on

00:11:36.240 a daily basis are probably a result of poor training advice, overzealous attempts to become

00:11:43.540 something that I wasn't, you know, in my teens and early twenties in terms of being a lifter

00:11:47.760 or a bodybuilder. Most of all, not correcting some of the issues that I knew were there,

00:11:53.160 but I felt were like old man issues when I was 20. So for instance, I have incredibly flat feet. 0.76

00:11:58.140 If I took my shoes off now and still do you think I have flippers on my feet? That is how bad they

00:12:01.520 are. There's no arch on my feet. Knowing now what the implications of that could be with every single

00:12:07.380 step you take having to be the consequences of those absorbed somewhere else up the kinetic

00:12:11.760 chain, my knees, my hips, my back, I would have done something back then to become a lot more 0.97

00:12:16.400 diligent with finding the right orthotic with actually staying true to wearing the damn thing 0.73

00:12:20.980 not taking it out because it was uncomfortable in one shoe or it wasn't really gonna wear my 0.93

00:12:24.920 favorite shoes because of it so that had a lot of repercussions on my knees that I feel every day

00:12:30.900 every day now there's things that I've been able to do and work around which we can talk about

00:12:36.360 because I believe you should be training no matter what your pains are there's ways to train around

00:12:41.100 them. But I have been able to navigate that. Now, the other one that I significantly deal with is

00:12:46.660 in my right shoulder, torn labrum, 50% tear my supraspinatus rotator cuff,

00:12:53.040 degeneration in that shoulder as a result of the torn labrum. Your labrum is basically there

00:12:57.420 to provide a nice level of support inside the joint. When you tear that and that bone is able

00:13:02.980 to kind of move around a lot more freely than it should without the stability, you can get a lot

00:13:07.960 more accelerated arthritis and degeneration in that shoulder. I was told that I had the shoulder

00:13:12.160 of an 80-year-old person. So I'm only 50. That's a little disconcerting, but right now that doesn't

00:13:18.200 actually hurt. So I'm able to do almost anything in the gym that's not unwise because I've learned

00:13:24.260 how to sort of train around those things, but it's always going to be persistent there.

00:13:27.540 To be clear, you have a 50% labral tear and independent of that tore the rotator cuff.

00:13:34.060 Yes.

00:13:34.340 And you have at least a 50% tear in, did you say infraspinatus or supraspinatus?

00:13:38.860 Supraspinatus.

00:13:39.520 And the other three muscles are?

00:13:41.260 They're pretty intact, yeah.

00:13:42.480 And how many years ago was that?

00:13:43.860 So that was actually the funny part about that injury because that, I've told this story

00:13:47.880 before, that was on a day or on a bet.

00:13:49.880 Oh, I know this story.

00:13:50.820 Yeah, so I was coaching with the New York Mets and it was my second year with them.

00:13:56.000 And so I was very comfortable around the guys at that point.

00:13:58.380 Definitely would be known to ride each other's weak points and where their insecurities would

00:14:03.800 be.

00:14:03.980 and I think they all knew I wanted to be an athlete one day.

00:14:06.280 I wish I was a baseball player on the other side in uniform,

00:14:09.800 but I picked up a ball one day

00:14:11.520 and I was standing next to one of our all-star outfielders

00:14:14.640 and I said to him, just casually,

00:14:16.280 because we used to do our conditioning

00:14:17.280 on the out and right field.

00:14:19.560 I said, you know what's crazy?

00:14:21.040 It doesn't look that far from here to third base.

00:14:23.960 It just doesn't.

00:14:24.760 And he's like, really?

00:14:26.040 And he hands me the ball.

00:14:26.840 He goes, why don't you try throwing it there?

00:14:28.720 I said, it's not that far.

00:14:29.940 How close are you to the wall?

00:14:30.700 We're on the warning track.

00:14:31.620 So just in front of the warning track.

00:14:32.780 To me, it looks far as hell, by the way.

00:14:35.640 To me, it didn't look so bad.

00:14:37.120 Maybe again-

00:14:37.860 No, but I think when you're on the field, it's different.

00:14:39.440 It is different.

00:14:40.040 It's definitely different.

00:14:41.160 Things look a little closer.

00:14:42.280 So he handed me the ball.

00:14:43.960 I said, what do I get if I do it?

00:14:45.700 He says, thousand bucks.

00:14:47.800 And so I said, all right, give it to me.

00:14:50.300 And I basically curl hopped about three steps or so.

00:14:54.120 I backed up a little bit through it.

00:14:55.800 As soon as I let it go, I don't even remember seeing the ball land.

00:14:59.000 I think it was somewhere around second base that it landed

00:15:01.100 and bounced and rolled pathetically towards their base,

00:15:04.220 I felt like a zipper-like pain in my shoulder.

00:15:06.580 And I knew that I had just screwed up.

00:15:08.560 It was pretty debilitating for the next couple of weeks

00:15:11.200 in terms of that really acute injury.

00:15:12.800 But then I was able to, of course,

00:15:13.880 I still had to go to work every day.

00:15:15.500 But there's a lot of laughing that went on at my expense.

00:15:18.140 My ego has hurt way more than my shoulder at the time.

00:15:20.760 But I've since lived with that

00:15:22.380 because that was never repaired.

00:15:23.940 And I went through some periods

00:15:24.960 where I could not train with a variety of exercises

00:15:29.060 without pain.

00:15:30.180 impossible impossible and I tried all different ways I did everything I just mentioned to you

00:15:34.480 before the slight angling of the arm and the changing of the nothing would work except for

00:15:38.920 completely getting away from some of those irritating exercises and then getting into

00:15:42.420 some other movement patterns and I was able to get back to the point where now I can bench press

00:15:46.200 I don't part about bench press but I dumb about bench press I'm able to I'd say pretty much do a

00:15:51.700 full training routine without limitation from the shoulder I do know that if I were to go

00:15:56.520 do something like let's say a dip too low and I do this sometimes trying to demonstrate the wrong

00:16:03.180 way to do things and I'll show okay don't do this I'll feel it for days after so unless I'm

00:16:08.060 intentionally trying to show a mistake if I were to do something dumb like if I were to try to

00:16:13.300 attempt a muscle up again which I've done that could go from feeling so good right now to back

00:16:18.980 to feeling awful and it could be for a long period of time so I'm very careful in terms of the things

00:16:24.060 that I do engage in and don't do. When you had that failed throw to third base, did you sublux

00:16:30.440 as well? Or was the torn labrum a totally separate injury that resulted from presumably subluxations

00:16:35.720 elsewhere in your life? No, no. I had never had any other shoulder issues my whole life.

00:16:39.340 So that labrum you think came from that as well? Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cause when you try to throw

00:16:44.020 it that hard, that quick velocity, you can get a slap tear from that one extreme effort that was 0.99

00:16:49.580 overreaching by everything I had, basically adrenaline driving me to not look stupid. 0.96

00:16:55.360 I did have a nice punchline to that story. I don't know if I shared this one last time,

00:16:59.400 but I was subsequently challenged, just because I'll show you how dumb I can be with that 0.95

00:17:03.100 mentality of an athlete. The following year at home plate, we're looking at first base. Now, 0.95

00:17:09.020 that looks very close. I don't care. Even if you're sitting in the stands, it doesn't look

00:17:12.460 that far, but that's 30 yards. And so I said, isn't it crazy how like quarterbacks who throw

00:17:18.760 the ball 60 yards in the air is like that's a huge feat or they talk about how incredible it is i

00:17:23.660 said that's 30 that's half the distance right there you could throw this on a regular pass

00:17:27.340 knowing what i did the previous year another player stepped up and challenged me to see if

00:17:31.980 i could throw a football 60 yards 60 yards how did you go from 30 to 60 because i said it was

00:17:37.800 only half the distance to this accomplishment of 60 yards like i could do that my eyes closed right

00:17:42.040 now you can see how i tend to put myself in horrible situations quickly but i was then

00:17:47.780 challenged to do that. And we got out of spring training, went to Miami where we opened up our

00:17:54.020 season. And of course there's a football field there. So we're played on a converted football

00:17:58.700 field back before they moved into the new stadium and they walked off 60 yards for me. This time it

00:18:04.320 wasn't just one player. The whole team gathered around, everybody's there. And I had someone

00:18:09.700 pace out 60 yards and I had the football. I crow hopped a few times. I threw it. I threw it 60

00:18:15.160 yards. Some redemption. Some redemption. But sorry, this is only one year after you've

00:18:20.460 only one year. And this is what's so great about this story. It's not that I threw it 60 yards,

00:18:26.380 which by the way, I was handed $1,000 in cash shortly thereafter. So they did hold up to their

00:18:31.580 end of the bargain. What's interesting about that is the only difference was the plane that you're

00:18:37.920 throwing in. When you're a baseball player and you're throwing and you're out here, there's so

00:18:43.580 much stress on the shoulder and the rotator cuff from here. When you're in this position here like

00:18:48.480 a football player, there's so much less stress. You're putting your body into what we call the

00:18:53.200 scapular plane. You get a lot of triceps that are helping this movement. It feels completely

00:18:57.440 differently. I don't have the pain and stress in my shoulder when I throw from there. How is it

00:19:01.560 that one person not only destroys their shoulder doing the other thing, but does something that

00:19:06.860 somebody from the outside would be looking at as the same thing? Oh, he's throwing again?

00:19:10.600 but it's not. It's a completely different throw. Pardon my ignorance Jeff but I understand why a

00:19:16.580 pitcher would be out here because they often want to put spin on the ball but if you're the outfielder

00:19:22.240 and you don't need to put spin on the ball and you're just going for distance why wouldn't you

00:19:26.120 mimic the quarterback's mechanics? Probably a good question but I think that you're able to get more

00:19:30.860 torque from out here. Obviously that's because you have that longer distance in the arm so you're

00:19:35.780 able to throw that ball further and faster. With a football, usually your targets aren't as far

00:19:43.340 down the field. And when they are, your desire is going to be to arc them and lead them. It's

00:19:47.600 more timing than anything. I think when you're trying to throw for maximum velocity, you're

00:19:51.920 going to want to rely on that longer arc of movement. And when you're an outfielder,

00:19:56.000 ball's got to get there fast. You got to throw the guy out at second base, third base, like I

00:19:59.620 tried, or home. So to get maximum velocity, you're going to probably want to be out there

00:20:05.200 mechanically and a football player, they can do it with a strong arm and distances of 20 or 30

00:20:10.800 yards, 15 yards, 10 yards. But when you're throwing long and deep, you usually got so much arc that

00:20:15.540 you don't have to have as much of that speed, but just the arm strength to get it out there.

00:20:20.700 When you look at some of the greats, let's take Bo Jackson as an example. And obviously for you

00:20:25.160 and I, I mean, that's, we can remember every single play he ever had. I realized that some

00:20:29.500 people may be too young to remember what it was like to watch Bo Jackson, but one never got the

00:20:34.940 impression that bow is got that way through training he literally just seemed like he i

00:20:40.980 don't know was somehow born knowing how to do what he did is that because his natural innate talent

00:20:48.220 was around the mechanics of throwing or do you think that there are innate differences in the

00:20:54.560 structure of the rotator cuff that would enable him to get away with a higher torqued position

00:20:59.620 I think that the idea that athletes are born is not entirely accurate. And I also think that

00:21:07.440 athletes are made is not entirely accurate. I don't think that people who are unathletic

00:21:12.460 can achieve the highest levels of athleticism simply by spending the 20,000 hours and vice

00:21:19.260 versa. So when you look at a guy like Bo Jackson, like these outliers as just tremendous athletes,

00:21:24.760 they're always going to have characteristics that make them the outlier they're going to have higher

00:21:30.280 percentage of type 2 fibers they're going to have because we have a lot of muscles where we have

00:21:34.060 distribution of type 1 and type 2 slow twitch fast twitch they're going to be a lot more twitchy is

00:21:38.480 what we say they're going to have stronger mind muscle connection so when they go to do something

00:21:44.820 the reason why it looks so easy when they pick something up for the first time is that the

00:21:48.580 coordination requirements that are tough for a lot of us even just getting on a bike and trying

00:21:53.400 to coordinate that. They pick these things up so easily, most of all, because I think they have

00:21:56.880 great neuromuscular efficiency. They can do what they're telling their muscles to do. And I believe

00:22:02.000 they have amazing proprioception, which is another perception of your body's position in space or

00:22:07.140 really what your joints positioning is in space that a lot of us have to learn and practice and

00:22:11.800 get good at. They have inherently great proprioceptive intelligence. I think when you can

00:22:18.540 put all those things together and then you have someone who's actually very fast because speed

00:22:22.600 isn't something everybody has either when they're fast when they're explosive twitchy as i said

00:22:26.820 strong now you're able to do things and again when you can pick these skills up so quickly

00:22:31.740 you're able to do things that look almost effortless that others would require a lot of

00:22:37.360 effort to even make it look like they're doing it right let alone doing it at the level that

00:22:41.700 they're doing it so i mean bo jackson he was a once in a lifetime athlete it's just amazing how

00:22:48.520 short his career was because of injury and that's another thing no matter who you are you might

00:22:55.860 recover faster because of some of the things we talked about but injury is injury injury can

00:23:01.440 happen to anybody at any time especially in a contact sport like that but his was such a freak

00:23:06.800 injury too awful and again you don't see that injury a lot like if you said oh it was a acl

00:23:13.320 or something like that, you'd say, yeah, yeah.

00:23:14.920 But to have the avascular necrosis of a hip

00:23:18.000 that comes out of, I mean, it's just, it's crazy.

00:23:19.580 Even like, even not knowing,

00:23:21.440 because I remember actually when that happened

00:23:23.420 and he went down, he got injured

00:23:25.120 and what it could have been at that time

00:23:27.220 could have been a bunch of different things.

00:23:29.100 But when it was determined, okay, it's a hip fracture,

00:23:32.480 then to heal that way, heal him properly.

00:23:35.320 And then he develops avascular necrosis.

00:23:37.380 That's just sort of tragic,

00:23:38.420 especially as a sports fan to see like that

00:23:40.140 have to happen to him.

00:23:41.560 Because it could have healed normally.

00:23:43.320 but it didn't. That's somewhat tragic. One of my best friends from the Mets, David Wright,

00:23:48.180 amazingly talented all-star, perennial all-star. He was fielding a ground ball at third base,

00:23:54.280 coming in and Carlos Lee, big, they call him the caballo or something like big guy,

00:23:59.780 came down the line and collided with him. He broke his back, a transverse fracture of his

00:24:06.080 lumbar spine. It healed him properly, basically healed with a lot of bony spur formation.

00:24:12.860 Now he gets a lot of compression on the nerves there.

00:24:15.540 Feels like a hamstring injury the following year

00:24:17.540 because he's getting burning down the leg,

00:24:19.120 but it's not the hamstring that's causing the problem.

00:24:21.440 And ultimately that led to his retirement

00:24:22.980 or to him not being able to play the game that he was.

00:24:24.980 He was a surefire Hall of Famer.

00:24:27.000 Surefire Hall of Famer.

00:24:28.340 From a freak accident that just continued to cascade

00:24:31.220 in terms of its healing gone wrong,

00:24:33.560 basically took him out of the game early.

00:24:34.840 So some of the greatest athletes we've ever seen

00:24:37.880 can still be brought down by injuries

00:24:40.040 and it's tragic when it happens

00:24:41.360 because it has so much. So when you see athletes that combine the best of both worlds, which is to

00:24:46.360 say they have the skill to be all-stars, but then they also end up having the career longevity

00:24:51.180 to realize that dream. I can't think of a greater example than Tom Brady. It always annoys the hell

00:24:56.460 out of me when people talk about his lack of athleticism. I mean, it's the dumbest thing I've 0.99

00:24:59.620 ever heard, right? Like, that guy's a better athlete than anyone you've ever seen. Let's 0.99

00:25:04.240 forget that. But again, what also allows Tom to go down in history as the greatest football player

00:25:09.520 in the history of the sport is that he played so long and that he did so relatively injury-free.

00:25:14.380 I mean, he had an ACL injury that didn't derail him at all, missed a year. And when you think

00:25:18.040 about something like that, Tom is one of the most deliberate people in the world when it comes to

00:25:22.780 how he thinks about conditioning his body. And one of the things he talks about a lot is

00:25:26.780 pliability. And he talks about how, at least at his position, it's less important how strong he

00:25:32.200 is. It's more important how pliable he is. How trainable do you think that is across the board?

00:25:35.660 I think it's trainable. I think it's basically sometimes avoiding some of the things that

00:25:40.180 take away pliability. So if you're focused on just strength and just building as big muscles

00:25:46.260 as you possibly can, then you're going to be trading off some of the elasticity of that muscle.

00:25:51.600 So being able to build to a certain point or try to create as much growth as possible to a point

00:25:58.620 where you're still able to functionally use that muscle and to have the elasticity in that. So that

00:26:04.140 means you still have to work on your flexibility you still have to work your mobility i hate the

00:26:08.100 term muscle bound because it just sounds like such a cliche from the old days but that is really

00:26:12.660 essentially what's happening when you become muscle bound you're not also working in the

00:26:18.080 elements of flexibility and mobility and i think tom brady has always done that he's never been

00:26:22.680 worried about being mr olympia wasn't his physique that was leading his success on the field it

00:26:28.780 hasn't been for any quarterback and yet it still strikes me that there's something tom is doing

00:26:33.360 different than all the other quarterbacks or most of them? I mean, to me, when I think of Tom Brady,

00:26:38.960 and I've actually heard this from some players, he is the epitome of, and this is a great,

00:26:44.820 because it segues into anything we're talking about later on in fitness, consistency. He is

00:26:49.800 the epitome of consistency. Consistency is the key that unlocks every single door when it comes to

00:26:56.360 physical performance or just overall health and longevity. If you can stay consistent with what

00:27:01.280 you do, then you're going to have a lot more resilience to injury. You're going to have that

00:27:06.240 ability to focus on the things you know you need to focus on. And even if you don't like them,

00:27:11.320 I don't like stretching. I hate stretching, but being able to show up and continue to do that,

00:27:14.880 that's the consistency part of it. He I'm sure has so many things that he did in his preparation

00:27:19.940 that weren't his favorite things, but it was never a negotiable of him not doing them. So to me,

00:27:26.000 I think his superstardom and his legendary status comes from his consistency in doing even the

00:27:31.940 things that he didn't really want to do. I think what happens to a lot of people and even a lot

00:27:36.460 of athletes is that they tend to narrow down to the areas that they like the best or they perform

00:27:41.180 at well. You're never going to be as good as you can be if you always focus on the things you do

00:27:47.140 well. You have to focus on the things you don't do well at to sort of round out and fill in those

00:27:52.560 gaps so that you're able to create an end product that is more fortified than not.

00:27:59.220 And that's really a lesson that goes far beyond trying to be the best player in the history of

00:28:04.240 the NFL. That's true for all of us. And you've heard me talk about this a lot is I do want

00:28:09.440 everybody to think of themselves as an athlete. And then the sport, it's not football and it's

00:28:13.860 not tennis or necessarily anything like that. It's just life. Life is a sport. Luckily,

00:28:17.900 it's not as demanding a sport as being on a football field, but it's still a sport.

00:28:21.460 it's a sport where you get to define the rules you get to define the objective of the game but

00:28:26.120 if you treat it like that and then you start to adopt an athlete's mindset the athlete's mindset

00:28:30.300 says there's a distinction between training and exercise training has specificity training has

00:28:36.760 sometimes doing things i don't want to do it means creating a well-balanced and structured program

00:28:42.560 and i want to talk about all these things with you today so let's start with the idea of transitions

00:28:49.340 and stages in life. So I'm sure you feel the same way I do, but we're half the men we used to be

00:28:54.960 already. And we're not even there. Being reminded every day. Yeah. Sometimes people, I've said this

00:29:00.600 to people and they're like, I don't know what you're talking about. I feel amazing. And I'm

00:29:03.640 your age. And I'm like, that's great. I'm very happy for you that you do. But it's also, you

00:29:07.800 didn't do half of what I did when I was younger. You were sort of a fat, out of shape, bump on a 0.98

00:29:12.980 until two years ago. And so that's why at 55, you feel better than you did at 53. And that's great.

00:29:20.400 Nothing makes me happier than seeing somebody who's never done anything their whole life

00:29:24.040 and they're now finding their own. That's great. But there's another subset of people like you and

00:29:28.580 I who have been insanely active our whole lives and we're still doing fine. But if we're being

00:29:33.640 brutally honest, we're a fraction of what we used to be. We don't have the recovery. We don't have

00:29:37.560 the speed. We don't have any of those things. Knowing and understanding the inevitability of

00:29:42.180 some decline, how should people who have been active their whole life, who are showing up

00:29:47.280 in their 40s and their 50s and their 60s with the, I don't want to say inevitable, but the very

00:29:53.480 probable wear and tear that came from doing dumb things when you were young and experiencing a

00:30:01.720 decline because you're starting from a higher place, how do you think about coaching these

00:30:05.580 people such that they get to 90 and they can still do everything they want to do. And by the

00:30:12.200 way, do it at the level of what we would think of as a fit 65 year old. That's a good question.

00:30:18.480 First of all, I think you have to do what we've done, which has come to the realization that it

00:30:23.040 isn't exactly like it was when we were younger, because some people will fight that. They'll fight

00:30:27.960 the fact that things have changed. They'll fight the fact that it might require a longer warmup

00:30:32.820 than you used to do, or I used to be able to do this.

00:30:36.320 Like for instance, I'll say,

00:30:37.860 I used to be able to do just one quick warmup set

00:30:40.360 before I get into my working sets.

00:30:42.220 Why can't I do it now?

00:30:43.160 Like, I think we fight that for a while.

00:30:44.760 I did fight it for a while.

00:30:46.120 Probably in the last three to four years

00:30:47.620 was my transition period to start and realize

00:30:49.820 and see some of these changes.

00:30:51.480 And what was the signal for you that you needed to do that?

00:30:53.660 More achiness in the morning

00:30:55.040 when I would wake up from training.

00:30:57.160 I'm okay.

00:30:58.000 I'm accustomed to feeling sore when I wake up the next day.

00:31:00.860 I think that makes me feel alive.

00:31:02.180 The soreness I'm talking about is not joint soreness.

00:31:05.200 I'm talking about muscle soreness.

00:31:06.500 I know I worked a muscle two days ago or a day ago, but when it starts to get to be more

00:31:11.300 joint feel and joint related, I know that I'm maybe not allowing myself to recover enough

00:31:17.560 or I'm doing too much at too quick of a pace or I'm not preparing myself to do whatever

00:31:23.800 I am doing.

00:31:24.880 And therefore, I think that's the part of the warmup that I wasn't really doing enough

00:31:27.520 of.

00:31:28.300 And you just have to be honest with yourself and say, hey, what am I not doing that?

00:31:32.120 I could try that is going to potentially change whatever it is I'm feeling. I think you are going

00:31:37.880 to feel something though, and that is going to be your sign as to where you should start. And that

00:31:43.280 for me is usually in the form of either that joint soreness, like I said, or too much fatigue,

00:31:49.620 waking up fatigued, maybe even irritability at things that wouldn't have made you irritated

00:31:53.880 before. These are signs that you might want to start looking into your recovery. From the recovery

00:31:59.740 standpoint, the two factors of that are what is the actual work you're doing? And then what are

00:32:04.160 you doing to prepare to do that work? Sorry, in that second category, Jeff, just to make sure

00:32:08.520 I understand that the first category is what are the activities I'm doing to recover? And then the

00:32:13.280 second is how am I eating, sleeping, all the other things that go into it? Or what is the actual

00:32:17.380 workout that you're doing? What does the training look like that you're doing? So the training

00:32:21.320 itself could be problematic because it could be too much volume or what am I doing to prepare

00:32:26.440 myself and that does occur not just in terms of the warm-up or right before the workout but

00:32:31.180 you're eating your nutrition your sleep the other elements that will go into recovery i'm sure we're

00:32:35.920 going to find all of us will find one or two or five areas that we're probably not doing the

00:32:42.020 things that we could or should that might make us feel better and i say might because i don't

00:32:47.360 believe that there's one recommendation for people when it comes to preparing to do something or

00:32:51.980 recovering from what they're doing that's going to work for everybody. I think we have to conduct

00:32:56.600 our own experiment on ourselves and see what the end result is. How do you feel after doing

00:33:02.260 whatever it is that you're doing? So try something different. For me, I actually tried to utilize

00:33:07.460 bands before training. I could take my bands out and work on warming up my rotator cuff or doing

00:33:14.300 some of the movement patterns I'm going to be doing that day, but just doing with bands.

00:33:18.960 And I always say that the beauty about bands is that they're perfect for warming up because

00:33:23.680 they stretch as you're able to do more.

00:33:26.160 So they have that built-in capacity to handle more as you can give more.

00:33:30.140 So if you're just doing the first few repetitions with bands and you're just kind of feeling

00:33:33.380 creaky or you're not really warmed up yet, as you're able to do more, they can handle

00:33:37.680 more.

00:33:37.980 They can absorb more of what you can handle.

00:33:40.120 I like the fact that bands can be used to warm up.

00:33:43.340 And it's something that I started doing just individually.

00:33:45.980 I'm not saying that everyone should run out and try bands, but it is a good recommendation.

00:33:49.840 And when you do that, you warm up your joints, the muscles actually get more prepared to

00:33:53.740 do what they're going to do.

00:33:54.740 Now, even if I handled the same loads that I did in a workout without that warmup, my

00:34:00.000 joints are more ready to handle it.

00:34:01.900 Proprioceptively, my joints can feel what I'm about to do because I just did something

00:34:05.240 similar to that in that motion.

00:34:07.100 And then I actually can get into using the weights, which provide a different source

00:34:11.500 of tension.

00:34:12.440 The weights are going to be differently felt than the bands will.

00:34:14.420 I'm more prepared to handle that the joints are more prepared and as I said before that muscle

00:34:18.840 up all it takes is one bad repetition to make this shoulder go from 100 back to zero again

00:34:25.120 so you can imagine the accumulation of however many repetitions you're going to do in a workout

00:34:31.320 ill-prepared or not prepared well enough can pile up and start to have some negative consequences

00:34:36.300 so I think that's what people have to do they need to come to grips with the fact that not

00:34:40.460 everything is going to remain the same. I've mentioned before that I've always had great

00:34:44.940 eyesight after I had them fixed with LASIK, but I've had great near vision. Last two or three

00:34:50.200 years, I struggle every time I pick up something to read, a pill bottle or anything. It's very

00:34:54.580 difficult to read and it frustrates the hell out of me because I didn't do anything to merit that

00:35:00.200 type of decline. Nothing. I'm very consistent with what I do in all aspects of my life. So that is

00:35:05.960 simply just an age-related decline that has nothing to do with anything that I'm doing to

00:35:11.780 cause that acceleration of that. I take care of my eyes, have regular eye visits. It's something

00:35:16.160 else that's causing that. I have to understand that that is going to come from age. What are

00:35:20.520 you going to do about it? Yeah, no, it certainly will. When you think about this transition from

00:35:26.220 your 40s to your 50s to your 60s, and I focus on that not because there aren't people listening to

00:35:31.960 as who are 20 or 30, but I do think that there's a huge cycle between that 40, 50, 60. So I want

00:35:37.720 to kind of focus there for a moment. What do you think is the most prudent strategy for reducing

00:35:43.520 risk? And I'm just going to limit this to resistance training for the moment. Is it

00:35:47.700 reducing overall volume? So if I said to you, Jeff, when I was in my thirties and early forties,

00:35:54.620 I would be doing 25 sets per body part in the gym. Should I be taking that down to 10 to 15 sets?

00:36:01.960 Is it reducing absolute weight and therefore increasing reps a little bit?

00:36:07.640 So, hey, I've always trained at one to two rep in reserve, and I'm going to continue

00:36:12.600 to train at two rep in reserve, but that weight is actually coming down.

00:36:15.760 What it's taking me to get to one to two RIR is a lower and lower weight as I age.

00:36:20.380 Is it frequency of training?

00:36:21.920 The number of times, how many days that go in between training muscle groups?

00:36:25.180 How do you think about all the potential levers a person can pull to still maximize their

00:36:30.920 performance while minimizing the risk of injury? That is the essence of what we try to do. That is

00:36:35.940 what we have to master. So there's a couple parts to this. The first thing I'll give you the short

00:36:39.680 answer of those three options. I want volume to come down. I want productive repetitions to go

00:36:46.900 up. I want repetitions to actually mean something. And when I do that, that means the intensity is

00:36:53.980 going to go up. So you'll have to train harder, but I will save a lot of the junk volume that I

00:36:59.640 believe just winds up wearing and tearing and creating an accumulation of wear and tear that's

00:37:03.880 not only not necessary but again it's ultimately unproductive so we have to look at it though

00:37:09.260 starting from this concept of reps and reserve and whether or not you actually prescribe

00:37:14.060 to the exact reps and reserve specifications of hey one rir or two rir some people don't

00:37:21.840 train that way but they think you explain i i rattled it off quickly but i want to make sure

00:37:26.160 everybody knows what i mean so reps and reserve is essentially a measure of how hard let's say

00:37:30.260 you've taken a set so a zero reps and reserve is you've taken that set to full mechanical failure

00:37:35.820 where you cannot lift that weight anymore in good form one rir would basically mean that if you were

00:37:41.380 to do a grinder if you were willing to grind out one more repetition you probably have one more

00:37:45.840 repetition in you two to three rir is essentially where you've got another one or two left in the

00:37:51.880 tank, but it's still difficult, but you're stopping at that point. Nobody that was watching

00:37:55.900 you from the outside would visibly really be able to tell that you've reached your maximum.

00:38:01.860 4-R-I-R or more, to me, already starts to become junk volume. And it's exasperated by the fact-

00:38:07.820 Outside of a warm-up set.

00:38:08.760 Yeah, outside of a warm-up. It's exasperated by the fact that we, as a whole, and I'm talking

00:38:14.040 about, even some trainers themselves, we don't fully appreciate or have the internal scaling

00:38:22.120 tuned in to measure what real effort is. And that's for a variety of reasons. I would guess

00:38:27.900 that we undershoot what we're capable of doing by one to two to three repetitions often. So when you

00:38:34.300 don't have this measurement of zero, what zero means, then everything else is very difficult

00:38:41.700 to gauge, especially if you don't have a lot of training experience to be able to feel the

00:38:46.660 nuanced difference between a one or a two or a two and a three. So to me, what I want people to do

00:38:53.060 is to start at almost every opportunity, training as close to mechanical failure as possible. Now,

00:39:01.220 there's a few things that get in the way here. There's psychological failure. Psychological

00:39:05.260 failure is not necessarily I can't mechanically lift or make my muscles contract to lift this

00:39:11.900 weight again. It's I don't really feel like doing another repetition because the discomfort that's

00:39:16.480 caused by this repetition is something I'm not really willing to put up with. There's a big

00:39:21.500 difference between that and what your muscle can actually do. So when we push ourselves past

00:39:27.200 psychological failure, then we get into what we call form failure. And form failure is where the

00:39:34.300 speed of the repetition might go down. I'm okay with that. I actually advocate for slower

00:39:37.540 repetitions anyway, but the speed might go down a little bit. The form might get a little loose

00:39:42.360 in terms of like a little bit of cheating, but that's okay too because as long as you're

00:39:46.820 properly stabilizing your body when you're doing it, you don't look like you're performing a

00:39:50.840 different exercise. That's still okay, acceptable. What's not okay is joint pain. If you feel joint

00:39:55.520 pain at any step of the way, you should stop because you're probably not even training the

00:39:59.560 muscle at that point anymore. You're obviously putting the joints in the middle. And then

00:40:03.860 allowing yourself to just push to that point where the exercise can't physically be completed,

00:40:09.980 where the exercise you're doing in a bench press, you can't move the weights anymore.

00:40:13.600 That's where you stop. And that's where I believe people need to get themselves to do more often.

00:40:19.220 And most of us either have that calibration that's not calibrated correctly. So we're not

00:40:24.580 gauging that effort correctly. Even if it looks like we're doing the right things and we're

00:40:28.080 accumulating the right volumes, like you said, on paper, the signal's not there. The intensity is

00:40:33.940 not there. You need to get to a point where you can objectively say, well, the signal's here because

00:40:38.900 I can't move this weight anymore. And the more you do that, you can take away a lot of those sets.

00:40:45.460 And so even though you might be counterproductive, think, well, by training harder, I'm going to

00:40:49.100 apply more stress to my body and make it harder for me to recover. No, you're actually, because

00:40:53.600 you're applying less of that junk volume and certainly in terms of joints less of that wear

00:40:58.500 and tear because even just raising my arm up here every single time is another as I say rotation on

00:41:04.600 the tire at some point the tires on that car have to get changed you're going to run out of rotations

00:41:09.620 on the tire why waste them in a repetition that is completely non-productive for you mentioned

00:41:15.100 building muscle because that is what we're trying to do in this case we're training for hypertrophy

00:41:18.940 So if you're not pushing yourself to a point

00:41:22.400 where you can stimulate those high threshold fibers,

00:41:26.080 the ones that can grow, then what are we doing?

00:41:28.460 We're not accumulating anything

00:41:30.220 that's going to build strength or hypertrophy.

00:41:32.920 So therefore, we're not building that resilience

00:41:35.940 that we're trying to build.

00:41:37.400 So objectively getting you to do more of your sets too,

00:41:41.140 good form failure, not talking about ugly repetitions

00:41:44.320 and losing stability of your body while you're doing it.

00:41:46.520 I'm talking about good form failure.

00:41:47.600 then you can bring down those repetitions and those sets quite a bit get rid of it a lot of

00:41:52.600 that volume and through the increased intensity have a way better outcome so for certain exercises

00:41:58.540 it's safe and relatively straightforward to determine a zero rir to your point and i agree

00:42:05.000 with you completely this is exactly the thing we explain to our patients is especially people who

00:42:10.840 are new to resistance training and we're trying to build these habits you can't know what one or

00:42:15.580 two RIR is until you know what zero is. You have to fail. And so I want you to start to learn what

00:42:21.840 failure looks like. It's safe and straightforward to learn what failure is if you're doing an

00:42:26.160 overhead tricep extension, because the cost of failure is really low, especially if you're doing

00:42:30.800 it on a cable pulley or something like that. But how do we map that out to somebody who's

00:42:34.940 doing front squats or back squats? When we're talking about the big compound lifts, especially

00:42:39.380 if you're trying to train for strength, where your rep ranges are going to be lower, I don't

00:42:43.300 believe training all the way till failure is the way to go. I think saving one repetition there,

00:42:47.960 maximum two repetitions there. Well, I'm just saying to learn, when you want to teach them

00:42:51.120 what one or two RIR is, how does someone figure that out in a squat? Obviously with the right 0.95

00:42:55.600 setup, you can put somebody in a rack and have the safety pins there. And then you can even have

00:43:00.260 them squat to a box. So they have a little bit of the assuredness of knowing that they're not

00:43:03.660 going to bottom out. They can get to a box. So I think there's things we could do to manipulate

00:43:07.800 that. Deadlift, one of the things we do oftentimes is elevate the bar, either through a trap bar,

00:43:13.300 so the handles are elevated or put the plates on just to be able to give them a little bit more

00:43:18.340 security and knowing that when i do fail here it will feel like i'm in a safe secure position

00:43:24.060 you could always strip away the pads at that point or you can take away the box but again

00:43:29.120 in those big compound lifts it's not really even necessary to do that to go all the way to failure

00:43:34.720 to see those benefits you can take that one rep shot because again remember i said that the zero

00:43:39.380 RIR is really, truly that maximum last rep that is going to look like a grinder to people,

00:43:45.400 doing these things on those front squat or other lifts can become a recipe for disaster,

00:43:51.200 especially for people that- That's a sport.

00:43:52.560 It's called powerlifting.

00:43:53.160 Right, exactly.

00:43:54.240 It's not necessary when we're talking about those exercises, but something like a lat pull

00:43:59.160 down, like you said, or a barbell curl.

00:44:01.220 Like I say, a barbell curl, there's nothing safer in the world.

00:44:04.000 When you're going to fail, you can simply just release it from your body.

00:44:07.540 I'm not advocating to throw the weights around the gym, but it's in front of you and it's

00:44:10.900 going to safely go down to the ground, to the floor, to the bench, whatever's in front

00:44:13.900 of you.

00:44:14.360 You don't have to worry about that.

00:44:15.500 It's not like you're getting crushed under the weight in a bench press.

00:44:18.720 I gauge a lot of the train to failure or absolute failure recommendations based upon the environment

00:44:25.760 of the exercise you're performing and how safe it is to actually do that.

00:44:29.140 Because there's no benefit that you're going to gain that's going to outweigh the risk

00:44:33.900 that could come from a poorly performed repetition with a weight that's already in a fatigued state

00:44:39.500 where you're handling a weight in a fatigued state already. I know from all of my time training

00:44:44.400 that there are just certain days when I'm not able to push as hard as other days. And this is

00:44:51.340 not just true in the weight room. It's true on the bike. It's true in the pool. So it's true with

00:44:56.760 cardio, it's true with resistance. And I've long wondered why, what is it that allows me on some

00:45:03.720 days to push so much harder? And why are there some days where there's almost like a built-in

00:45:11.340 governor and it just says, I'm not going to let you go past this threshold of pain today.

00:45:16.760 I'll be honest with you. That is something that I've probably noticed a little more of lately

00:45:22.120 than I noticed in my thirties and my early forties, even up into my early forties, I had

00:45:27.100 almost a supernatural ability to do what I called burn the matches every single day. And I would do

00:45:32.520 this very strange thing, even on a recovery day, if I was out for a recovery ride, I would still

00:45:38.180 always do a four or five minute all out hill climb. Even an easy swim, I would still do an

00:45:44.880 all out set for 400 yards or 300 yards or something. Today, there are many days when I

00:45:51.060 could never do that. So do you think that's a consequence of aging? Do you think that's a

00:45:55.080 consequence of stress in life or other things that the body can only manage so many things?

00:46:02.040 And if you have too much stress in your life about work and kids and things like that,

00:46:05.560 you just can't bring all of your energy to a workout. I mean, what do you think is driving

00:46:10.300 that? I'll add one final question, which is really the question at hand, which is how can an

00:46:14.800 individual understand, are they at psychological limit or mechanical limit? Those are definitely

00:46:20.540 the two biggest contributors are the psychological and mechanical factors. However, psychological

00:46:25.600 could be driven by your recovery. So whether you're getting a good enough sleep that night,

00:46:30.820 whether you are undergoing stress outside the gym in your life, these factors chip away.

00:46:35.300 They chip away at your ability to tap into that next level, I think. They don't chip away at your

00:46:40.820 ability to show up. That's just part of your habit at that point. They chip away at your ability to

00:46:45.180 tap into that next level of intensity to train and do what you're saying burn the matches because

00:46:51.020 that does take a reserve you're tapping into reserves there and if the reserves are already

00:46:56.260 tapped out because of these other stresses or your again lack of sleep and other factors that

00:47:02.660 lead to poor nutrition that lead to the feeling that you're having then that's going to prevent

00:47:07.020 you from tapping in i think what contributes more to that though it sucks because it's sort of the

00:47:12.300 inevitable part of what we're dealing with, but it is the aging contribution. We know that as we

00:47:18.320 age, obviously we're losing type 2 muscle fibers, we're getting weaker, we're losing the muscle

00:47:23.860 mass itself. So things that used to be achievable with less effort because of higher levels of

00:47:30.380 strength and the higher distribution and proportion of type 2 fibers, that's starting to physically

00:47:34.980 go away. So things that you used to be able to do are going to become more challenging.

00:47:39.180 Now we try to like push through that

00:47:40.840 and say, okay, I gotta push harder.

00:47:42.640 But then we have the hormonal contributions to that too

00:47:46.160 that make pushing harder and doing harder things more easy.

00:47:51.540 That is starting to get challenged too as we get older.

00:47:54.320 So we start to get a decrease in the hormones,

00:47:56.620 the male hormones that are driving

00:47:57.600 and women see the same effects here too.

00:47:59.580 They're getting a decrease in their hormones 1.00

00:48:03.200 that provide that level of effort

00:48:04.540 and also the hormones that help to regulate stress

00:48:07.240 and help to regulate sleep

00:48:09.020 and help us to have undisturbed sleep.

00:48:11.500 These are all starting to get disturbed as we get older.

00:48:14.820 And I think that whole picture makes it more difficult

00:48:18.040 to do the things that we used to do.

00:48:20.320 Let's stay on this sort of physique hypertrophy side

00:48:22.720 of things for a while.

00:48:23.600 And let's take kind of a nuanced look

00:48:26.000 at muscle and muscle groups specifically, head to toe.

00:48:30.680 And I wanna talk about the most common misconceptions,

00:48:34.380 the biggest mistakes people are making,

00:48:36.160 and maybe what the greatest unlocks are for folks who have been frustrated in lack of gains in these

00:48:43.060 areas. And whenever possible, or whenever you feel that it adds value, feel free to distinguish

00:48:49.360 between male and female. But I also kind of assume at the end of the day, male and female training

00:48:53.600 has to be pretty similar, right? I mean, the same principles of progressive overload apply. So I

00:48:59.600 don't know if that even makes sense as a valid question. I also realize that of course, men and

00:49:03.520 women sometimes have different goals with respect to what they want physique wise. But anyway,

00:49:08.940 feel free to handle that partisan any way you choose. So where would you say we're starting

00:49:12.160 at the top? Shoulders, traps? Shoulders. Okay. So you got somebody like me with salmon shoulders.

00:49:16.960 They don't really bulge out at all. And by the way, I'm taking notes for myself. What are the

00:49:20.580 biggest mistakes people make? And when people want to beef up their shoulders, what should they be

00:49:25.400 doing? What are they doing wrong? The shoulders are a three-headed muscle, posterior deltoid,

00:49:30.300 middle deltoid and front deltoid. So people do take an approach where they try to choose

00:49:35.520 exercises that will focus more on one head versus the other. There's a lot of people who say that

00:49:41.100 the front delt doesn't need to be trained because it gets a lot of work and pressing and overhead

00:49:45.660 pressing. It depends on how detailed you want to get or how specified you want to get in terms of

00:49:51.340 building up shoulder development, but it's a head of the deltoid, it's a muscle and it needs to be

00:49:56.220 trained. I think if you were to try to develop optimal size of your shoulders, you're going to

00:50:00.880 want to choose exercises that do focus on each one of the heads of the delt individually and

00:50:06.060 with the most attention. You're not going to isolate one versus the other, but with the most

00:50:09.360 attention. And then you're going to want to make sure you're still doing your compound lift, which

00:50:13.260 is always part of every muscle we're going to talk about. What's the compound lift you could

00:50:18.100 do where you have other muscles assisting that work? So you can push that muscle to and through

00:50:24.540 its failure point, like we talked about. For me, it starts with a vertical pressing movement of

00:50:29.800 some sort to be able to do some vertical pressing, which is really a point of contention for some

00:50:35.060 people, because that's going to be orthopedically one of the things that hurts the most.

00:50:38.120 But there's always some modification to that, that I believe you should be able to do.

00:50:45.440 And sorry, let's just say, why is the vertical press so important to you? Is it because it's

00:50:49.780 getting all three heads simultaneously? It gets all three heads simultaneously. It's a functional

00:50:53.920 requirement of life to be able to lift our arms up overhead. I'm not saying that we have to lift

00:50:57.900 our arms up overhead with weight in our hands, 40, 50, 80 pounds, whatever we're doing.

00:51:01.860 If you want to put a suitcase into an overhead bin.

00:51:04.380 I just witnessed it as we were flying here, someone trying to lift their suitcase. I was

00:51:08.500 wondering if I had to step in and jump in and help because it looked like a struggle to get

00:51:11.880 it up into that overhead bin. You need to be able to handle weight overhead. And so I also think that

00:51:17.140 it also uses full range of motion to do that. We never want to forego full range of motion.

00:51:23.100 Full range of motion is the nutrient to the joint.

00:51:26.320 If we only stuck with movements

00:51:27.880 that worked the front, middle, and rear delts,

00:51:29.980 we could theoretically stay below shoulder level

00:51:32.000 our entire training session.

00:51:34.320 I wanna see you get your arm up overhead 0.96

00:51:36.260 so we're getting that shoulder

00:51:37.380 through its full range of motion,

00:51:38.700 joint itself through its full range of motion.

00:51:40.520 It's not always about just the muscle itself.

00:51:43.640 It's about the joint that you're trying to train around

00:51:46.540 to get the full function that we're looking for.

00:51:49.780 Now, someone like you, Jeff,

00:51:50.960 with some arthritis already in your right shoulder.

00:51:54.060 Let's just assume you had a little bit

00:51:55.540 of AC arthritis as well.

00:51:57.540 So now-

00:51:57.940 I do have some of that too.

00:51:58.580 So there you go.

00:51:59.160 So what are the modifications you make?

00:52:01.540 How do you safely accommodate that motion?

00:52:04.260 Because obviously, gosh, I mean,

00:52:05.940 back when I was a kid in high school,

00:52:07.220 we were doing it behind the head.

00:52:09.560 I don't think people are doing that anymore, are they?

00:52:11.220 Most people are doing an overhead press in front, I assume.

00:52:13.240 Not if they've been watching me.

00:52:14.000 I hope not, no.

00:52:14.780 But this is the thing that people get a little bit disturbed by

00:52:17.440 if I say this or if I throw an exercise,

00:52:19.600 I say into my iron graveyards.

00:52:20.960 It's not because I want to have an issue with the exercise.

00:52:24.140 It's that I know I can give you an exercise that will give you the same benefits without

00:52:28.860 the risk.

00:52:29.780 What's the point?

00:52:30.500 Right.

00:52:30.680 We should just make that disclaimer now because I can already see the hate comments coming

00:52:34.940 in because there is always going to be at least a hundred people on planet earth that

00:52:40.040 love every single exercise and have a great argument for why you should be doing back 0.99

00:52:45.100 squats on a piano, standing on one leg with an elephant strapped to your testicles. 0.99

00:52:49.960 and anybody who says that's a dumb idea 1.00

00:52:52.400 is a total poser. 0.99

00:52:54.160 Yeah, totally.

00:52:55.000 And it's like, no, you're right.

00:52:56.200 If you can do that without getting injured,

00:52:58.160 you should absolutely do it.

00:52:59.100 Well, that's my answer to that.

00:52:59.940 It's like, if that's what you do,

00:53:01.200 and again, go back to what we mentioned before,

00:53:02.800 if you can feel a greater stimulus that way,

00:53:05.340 no, but it's the best way I feel my middle delts work,

00:53:07.480 then do it.

00:53:08.440 I'm not saying don't do it,

00:53:09.840 but I have to make recommendations for people

00:53:11.760 that I think are largely appropriate

00:53:14.480 for the majority of people.

00:53:16.020 And I don't think that that exercise

00:53:17.460 is going to give people this superior benefit

00:53:20.380 that I can't get from just simply getting your elbows

00:53:22.380 out in front of your body

00:53:23.240 and doing the press from in front of you.

00:53:25.380 For me specifically, I can do things like a landmine press

00:53:30.400 where I can get my elbows out

00:53:31.860 even a little bit further in front of my body.

00:53:33.760 So tell folks how you do a landmine press.

00:53:35.020 So a landmine press is essentially take a barbell,

00:53:37.240 put it into a corner of a room if you're training at home,

00:53:39.700 put a towel there so you're not ruining

00:53:41.000 the corner of your room,

00:53:42.500 but you basically put the empty bar in the corner.

00:53:45.120 You load up your weight on the front side of the barbell.

00:53:47.120 you put two hands on that end of the barbell

00:53:49.160 and you're pressing up and away from your body like that.

00:53:52.500 All you're doing there is taking away

00:53:54.400 some of the verticality of the exercise.

00:53:56.600 Again, going straight up is gonna require

00:53:58.640 the most range of motion at the shoulder

00:54:00.820 and people that have orthopedic issues

00:54:02.860 might find that all that range of motion

00:54:05.160 is tough to tolerate right now.

00:54:06.660 So when you put it out in front of your body,

00:54:08.340 you're cutting down that angle by about 45 degrees.

00:54:10.640 And you want people doing this symmetrically,

00:54:12.820 meaning not off to one side, straight up and down the middle.

00:54:15.140 I love asymmetric loading, I love that too.

00:54:16.840 Oh yeah. So you'll do one arm. You could do that too. Yeah, absolutely. I could do them up and

00:54:20.780 over. I love to do things that are a little bit more challenging in the multiple planes when we

00:54:25.400 can, but if we're starting out and we're trying to get somebody to actually just feel this motion,

00:54:28.760 definitely I would have them start right center chest and push up and out. But you're basically

00:54:32.800 cutting down some of that overhead requirements from the range of motion requirement, which is

00:54:37.340 going to make the exercise feel a little bit more tolerable. You're also, as I mentioned earlier,

00:54:41.440 you're getting a little bit more tricep involvement, the closer those elbows get in

00:54:45.280 because you're getting more flexion at the elbow,

00:54:46.800 so they have to extend.

00:54:48.140 So you're getting some assistance from triceps

00:54:50.220 on your way to being able to do your shoulders,

00:54:53.920 which is, I think, a good point to point out here.

00:54:55.880 Any injury you're dealing with

00:54:57.100 is not a mandate to completely rest.

00:54:59.100 It's not.

00:54:59.560 It's a mandate to choose safer,

00:55:02.360 more appropriately loaded and progressed exercises.

00:55:06.520 That's the requirement here,

00:55:07.540 not to completely rest

00:55:08.980 because resting in and of itself

00:55:10.520 actually contributes to more of the dysfunction.

00:55:12.880 time is one part of recovery but the loading of the tissues themselves is another promoter of

00:55:20.500 recovery so when you remove that load entirely things start to go wrong at an accelerated pace

00:55:25.340 so what you want to be able to do is find the exercise modification that you can do and then

00:55:31.520 you progress you add more weight to that or you start to step closer to this landmine so that

00:55:36.920 your positioning is now a little bit more vertical and then to the point where you can actually press

00:55:40.640 overhead vertically. And it's not going to always be limited potentially if you follow the right

00:55:46.240 progression. There's an analogy I use. If you thought of an injury to a certain joint or painful

00:55:51.060 exercise like this overhead press, it shouldn't be looked at as a city shutdown. It's just a

00:55:55.660 single road closure for now. That's it. We can take that overhead press that I can't do. Let's

00:56:00.840 say just the dumbbells overhead. And then we reroute it. And we do this landline press instead.

00:56:07.420 Okay, great.

00:56:08.000 We didn't shut the whole city down to do this.

00:56:09.880 Now let's just say though,

00:56:11.180 that all of those are harmful at the moment.

00:56:13.140 They're all hurt.

00:56:13.960 And I use pain as the guidance,

00:56:15.520 pain of joint pain as the guidance.

00:56:17.920 Then we take the back roads

00:56:18.980 and we do something completely different,

00:56:20.100 like a row.

00:56:21.000 Because if I row,

00:56:22.180 I'm not training my overhead pressing at this point,

00:56:24.520 but I'm putting the shoulder through range of motion.

00:56:27.360 I'm going into extension of the shoulder.

00:56:29.040 I'm bathing that synovial fluid into that joint.

00:56:31.940 I'm helping to promote recovery.

00:56:33.600 These little steps along the way,

00:56:35.140 though they might look remedial,

00:56:36.400 are part of the overall progression back to function.

00:56:40.540 So when we talk about, again, this landmine press,

00:56:43.140 don't think that you're married to this exercise

00:56:44.700 for the rest of your life.

00:56:46.040 Understand it's a step in the way

00:56:47.520 to being able to overhead press.

00:56:48.920 And I think that's what people do a lot of times

00:56:50.480 is they just, they feel like

00:56:52.280 they're not able to do the thing,

00:56:54.540 so therefore don't do any of it

00:56:56.620 or choose something completely different

00:56:58.700 that's not gonna provide the same stimulus

00:57:00.360 that we're looking for.

00:57:01.660 And we talked about that with squats a little bit

00:57:03.480 the last time we were here.

00:57:04.700 Just doesn't feel right for you.

00:57:05.940 But there's other things you could do to maybe progress yourself to the point where

00:57:08.660 squats would feel right again.

00:57:10.420 But for overhead pressing, I need that.

00:57:12.020 And I need to have that as my compound movement, whatever form it might take, whatever step

00:57:16.000 in the progression it might take.

00:57:17.680 In the hierarchy of barbell straight in front of you to dumbbells is the idea that with

00:57:23.600 dumbbells, look, I'm going to allow you to take a little less pressure off the AC joint

00:57:28.720 by bringing them, like the more midline you're going, you're approximating the landmine.

00:57:32.940 So for you personally, with your shoulder history, are you using a barbell or are you

00:57:38.080 using dumbbells?

00:57:39.080 I'll use barbells infrequently, maybe 20% of the time.

00:57:43.000 And again, sometimes because I want to retest my abilities to see how close I've come to

00:57:48.000 being able to use them pain-free again.

00:57:49.860 And I can, I can use them pain-free now.

00:57:52.180 One of my best modifications when you're doing a barbell press, if you have shoulder issues,

00:57:56.760 is to narrow up the grip.

00:57:58.080 Because the narrower the grip is, you can see the elbows follow.

00:58:01.300 So as I start to narrow my grip,

00:58:02.920 my elbows will follow,

00:58:03.920 the elbows start to bring obviously

00:58:05.440 a change in shoulder alignment with it.

00:58:06.980 So now I'm back into sort of that scapular plane

00:58:09.280 and I'm able to press from there.

00:58:11.220 So that's one modification I'll make

00:58:13.200 if I use the barbell.

00:58:14.500 I will almost always opt for dumbbells.

00:58:17.380 One of my favorite things to do with dumbbells

00:58:19.540 is just simply do one at a time.

00:58:21.040 So you mentioned the asymmetrical.

00:58:22.340 I love being able to do one dumbbell at a time.

00:58:24.740 I can handle more weight that way.

00:58:26.180 So that's back to that idea of increasing the stimulus,

00:58:29.500 increasing the intensity.

00:58:30.820 I can increase the intensity, improve the mechanics of the exercise on the joint because

00:58:35.860 I can take that one dumbbell, push it up and overhead and then stack the joints.

00:58:40.420 I talk a lot about joint stacking, wrist over elbow, over shoulder, and have that good

00:58:45.260 stability from underneath.

00:58:46.300 When I'm pressing from out here, we don't get that same level of stacking.

00:58:49.860 So if you have any instability type injuries like a labrum tear, you're not going to feel

00:58:54.600 as comfortable out there unsupported as you are with everything stacked on top of each

00:58:58.180 other.

00:58:58.860 So I like to do that variation of the exercise.

00:59:01.800 It also feels, some exercises are just more fun.

00:59:04.200 It feels fun to be able to-

00:59:05.000 You do that seated or standing?

00:59:06.320 Standing.

00:59:07.100 I like to do as many things as I can standing

00:59:09.120 because even for a shoulder exercise,

00:59:12.300 again, if I'm advocating not trying to always go so light

00:59:15.840 and again, increasing some of the weight you're using here,

00:59:18.540 then I like the fact that I can have my legs to rely on

00:59:22.180 if I need a little bit of that extra cheat

00:59:24.060 to push myself through to those higher intensity repetitions.

00:59:26.900 I'm not saying that you always have to do them with cheat or with a push press, but

00:59:30.240 they're there if you need them.

00:59:31.980 Otherwise, you could simply do them as a strict rep, but still standing is just a more athletic

00:59:36.740 position for people to be in.

00:59:39.060 I think that has the best carryover.

00:59:40.800 What I'm hearing you say is if you only have time for one deltoid exercise, it should be

00:59:46.440 the overhead press because it's the compound movement that hits all three heads.

00:59:50.860 Yeah.

00:59:51.380 Okay.

00:59:51.740 I believe so.

00:59:52.280 So now if you could add a second or a third movement, presumably you're not going to want

00:59:57.520 to bang on the anterior portion again, because you're getting enough of that through presses,

01:00:02.420 but you're going to want to do something for the lateral head or the posterior head.

01:00:05.400 Yeah. So either of those other two options, again, I agree with your question there entirely.

01:00:09.200 That would be the third choice. The front delt would be the third choice of the three.

01:00:12.980 But I think if back to what I said originally, if you were trying to

01:00:15.360 maximize hypertrophy of the shoulder, you can still do front delt exercises. Again,

01:00:19.640 there's a lot of fear around doing that. 0.77

01:00:21.060 It's a silly question. You know, when you see somebody who's, and this again is both male and

01:00:25.020 female, both tend to prioritize having a nice separation. Is that visually created by the

01:00:31.700 lateral delt or the anterior delt? So that's where I think the front delt is a little under

01:00:35.820 appreciated because I think it does create, if you're talking about the visual aesthetic of it,

01:00:40.240 that separation between the chest and the deltoid, because you're getting that line that comes in

01:00:45.080 on the anterior part of the shoulder. But when you're looking at that roundedness of the shoulder,

01:00:50.280 That is almost entirely coming from the middle delt.

01:00:54.660 You're not even really seeing the rear delt there.

01:00:56.460 The visual benefits of the rear delt

01:00:58.020 is when someone turns to the side

01:00:59.140 and then you see whether they have a rounded shoulder there

01:01:01.760 or whether they have like an emptiness to their shirts

01:01:04.160 in the backside of their shoulder there.

01:01:05.760 But the rear delt is one of the most functionally important

01:01:08.680 for maintaining proper balance of the joint itself.

01:01:11.680 So I think as a physical therapist,

01:01:13.940 my next answer should be the rear delt.

01:01:16.080 Rear delt.

01:01:16.540 Because I know the exercises that go to training that

01:01:18.740 are going to have a lot of other benefits to you posturally and again, maintaining joint health for

01:01:23.540 the long run. But if you're talking about strictly aesthetics and what you wanted to do to have a

01:01:27.980 better appearance when looked at from the front, then it's going to be the middle delt.

01:01:32.080 So what's a middle delt exercise?

01:01:33.620 So any lateral raise is good. I do like the cable lateral raise a lot because it's got tension

01:01:40.960 throughout the exercise for a longer portion of the range of motion. If we do a lateral raise

01:01:45.880 with our arms at our side,

01:01:47.420 the exercise has basically zero tension at the bottom

01:01:50.320 and it starts to rise up as I raise the dumbbell up.

01:01:54.340 But with the lateral raise of the cable,

01:01:57.200 first of all, I have a stretch tension on the delt itself

01:01:59.720 in that starting position.

01:02:01.560 And as soon as I start to pull,

01:02:03.380 I'm already getting higher levels of tension

01:02:05.720 in the middle delt.

01:02:07.080 And they are maintained as long as you sort of manipulate

01:02:10.360 your body or your arm position in space as you go.

01:02:13.220 We're always trying to get, when we use cables,

01:02:15.120 this perpendicularity between the cable and that moving structure. So if I have my arm here,

01:02:19.920 it's my forearm that's really the moving structure that I'm focused on. How long can I maintain

01:02:24.780 this relationship of the cable and my forearm and this perpendicular alignment? If I can do that and

01:02:30.400 pull up, again, I sort of manipulate my arm in space to feel where that is, then I'm going to

01:02:35.300 feel that middle delt working at a high level throughout almost the entire range of motion. 0.97

01:02:40.020 For people who are just listening to us and not watching us, you're doing kind of a cable

01:02:43.900 Rays is almost the wrong word. You're basically doing a cable movement across your body

01:02:48.340 Like a rowing

01:02:49.140 Yeah, because you don't need gravity when you have the cable

01:02:50.920 You're doing an across the body kind of row and by the way what we'll do in the show notes for this podcast

01:02:56.680 Is we'll link to videos you've made on each of these because that'll actually make it really productive for people to go and see like

01:03:03.440 Okay, that's exactly what he means

01:03:04.720 Okay, and by the way, I have no affiliation with the company, but I have become

01:03:08.820 Completely enamored with and obsessed with voltra. Have you been using this thing? No, do you know what i'm talking?

01:03:13.880 about. It's kind of electromagnetic. I really, really like it. Oh yeah. What have you been using

01:03:17.780 it for? One of my patients gave it to me. I love that. I actually bought a second one. So now you

01:03:22.120 can pair them and I use it for a lot of things right now. Like where you can manipulate the

01:03:26.580 separate tensions, eccentric tension. Yeah. That's the first thing that I fell in love with

01:03:30.080 was the manipulation of concentric and eccentric tension. It's frankly, I mean, just a space saving

01:03:35.500 device. Like I've got one of those big free motion things. I'm selling it. I've got all these other

01:03:39.700 things I'm just getting rid of because it just replaces them. Frankly, if I didn't already have

01:03:44.520 a lat pull-down machine, I'd get rid of that thing too, because you can do pull-downs on this thing.

01:03:49.640 You can do belt squats with this thing. I mean, all you need is a really good rack and this device

01:03:53.660 because it clips into- Yeah, we had one in the gym for a while as by a company, Coneo, who had

01:03:58.980 lent the piece to me. We were able to do some really cool things with it, but it was hard for

01:04:05.480 me to show them to people on YouTube because nobody had the machine and nobody could do it.

01:04:10.800 But as far as like geeking out on the stuff myself, I love that. I mean, I love the ability to

01:04:15.160 increase the eccentric load even more than we can concentrically because our bodies are able,

01:04:20.660 obviously, to handle a lot more eccentrically than we can concentrically. So if you can take a

01:04:24.240 load that you can handle concentrically, but then double that load eccentrically,

01:04:27.520 you're getting challenged in a big way. And I've been so interested in which exercises I have more

01:04:33.560 eccentric strength than others. You know, and it might just be a function of the absolute weight,

01:04:37.920 but it's been amazing to me on some areas where having a big eccentric load is manageable and

01:04:44.880 in others where the eccentric addition above concentric can't be that much. It can only be

01:04:49.420 like 10 or 15%. So I think I'm scratching the surface of how to use this thing, but I am

01:04:54.020 enjoying that. There's a million things you can do with those. They even have the different modes

01:04:57.760 of the elastic. You can make it feel like a band or like a chain. Right, right, right. Like a chain

01:05:02.260 So, I mean, it's really cool stuff. It's definitely for the nerdier types like ourselves who like to do this. But as long as we know how to use it and apply it with the people who see us, then they can benefit too.

01:05:13.180 Okay. So that's your go-to middle delt. Obviously, the rear delt is something you already alluded to where you could be doing a row, you could be doing face down on a bench, doing a lateral raise or something like that. What would be your kind of number one go-to rear delt?

01:05:27.000 I believe that though a smaller muscle group and though one that doesn't often get trained

01:05:33.020 directly, it definitely gets skipped the most out of the three of the delts by most people.

01:05:38.100 So number one, skipping is leg day. Number two, skipping is rear delt day.

01:05:41.780 Rear delt day, yeah. It doesn't get the love it should. But again, as a physical therapist,

01:05:45.660 I know its importance in more than just looking a certain way. I, at the same time, believe that

01:05:51.600 it doesn't get loaded anywhere near what is capable of being loaded, or it doesn't get

01:05:56.820 subjected to the stresses that most, when they do actually don't skip the day, they

01:06:01.080 actually do the exercises, they're not loading it enough.

01:06:03.820 So for me, the most effective way to hit the rear delt and hit it with a lot of weight

01:06:07.960 is a seated cable row.

01:06:09.980 And we do the seated cable row with wide elbows, so you have your elbows lifted up away from

01:06:14.200 your sides, and your goal is to drive the elbows back behind your body.

01:06:18.460 And all you have to do is just simply, you could even do it sitting in your chair.

01:06:21.840 If you drive your elbows back behind your body in a row, you'll feel that rear delt

01:06:26.120 really, really contract strongly.

01:06:28.660 Well, with a row like that, we can utilize good weights and we're getting good assistance

01:06:33.800 from the other upper back muscles and from the lats to do the exercise.

01:06:37.640 But the rear delts will feel the brunt of that load if especially you're focused on,

01:06:43.460 this is where I think sometimes it's never just the movement.

01:06:46.560 it's not just A to Z, it's A through Z when you do a movement. I don't ever want people to just

01:06:52.920 look at an exercise and say, oh, I see he's going from here to here on this row, just moving those

01:06:57.600 elbows back. How are you moving it back? If you focus on driving it with your rear delts and

01:07:02.940 contracting your delts as you pull, you'll feel less on the lats. You'll feel less of the

01:07:06.560 contribution from the other areas that are contributing, but not dominating. It's easy

01:07:10.860 to let the muscles that are usually dominating that movement, like the lats, come in and

01:07:15.440 dominate. But if I focus on that rear delt doing the move, which relies on the knowledge of knowing

01:07:21.700 the rear delts are going to pull the elbows back behind the body, that's part of this whole why

01:07:26.080 these shorts versus long videos, we have problems because I want you to not just see the exercise,

01:07:31.880 but understand why this works. When you understand it's the moving of the elbows back into extension

01:07:36.460 behind the body that drives the rear delts, then you know why that exercise could work and you could

01:07:41.640 actively work to make that movement recruit more of the rear delts when you do it. And your load

01:07:46.920 is going to be significantly more than you'd ever use if you were doing a IY or a T, which a lot of

01:07:51.740 people will do if they say, I'm going to do some rear delt work. Nothing against those exercises,

01:07:55.200 they're fine, but those are light work for a muscle group that can definitely handle more.

01:08:00.060 Again, for people who aren't able to watch us, one of the things that you

01:08:02.840 did that I think stands out is the elevation with which you're doing it. So the higher those arms,

01:08:08.420 So you're almost pulling to your face.

01:08:10.020 Upper chest, the elbows are going to drift away from your sides around 45 degrees or

01:08:15.820 maybe enough to 60 degrees or so.

01:08:17.780 They're going to drift out away from your sides.

01:08:19.640 Yeah.

01:08:19.820 So if you're just doing a normal narrow grip cable row, you're not getting enough rear

01:08:25.760 delts.

01:08:26.040 And that's how, again, this is why I love exercise so much because that is how you shift

01:08:30.000 the focus.

01:08:30.520 It's still the same exercise.

01:08:31.720 It's still a row.

01:08:32.460 It's still a seated row.

01:08:33.460 But if my elbows are driven tight to my sides and I ducked tightly against my sides, I'm

01:08:37.520 going to get more lats.

01:08:38.220 If I allow my elbows to drift, I shift it away from the lats into the upper back and

01:08:42.220 rear delt.

01:08:42.800 So movement is not enough to describe what you're doing.

01:08:46.740 It's the muscles that contribute and how you do the exercise that determines the effect

01:08:50.940 you get.

01:08:51.900 Should we say anything then about the anterior delt as a dedicated activity or have we kind

01:08:56.040 of hit it?

01:08:56.500 It's simple enough.

01:08:57.380 As I said, if aesthetics were your goal and you wanted to build the ideal shoulders that

01:09:02.520 way, I would still do a front delt exercise.

01:09:05.100 something as simple as a front dumbbell raise could do the job or a cable stretch raise because

01:09:10.460 I can hold on to the cable, step away from the machine a little bit. My arm is now behind my

01:09:15.520 body to start. So I'm getting a good stretch on the front delt to start and then I can rise from

01:09:20.220 there. So you could also do this in an incline position sitting on an incline bench, maybe

01:09:25.440 60 degrees or 70 degree incline. You sit there, your arms will be behind your body just because

01:09:31.300 of the positioning of the incline bench to start. So you have a little bit of a stretch on the

01:09:35.080 front delt before you go into your front raise. Any injury considerations with that? Are there

01:09:39.060 any people whose shoulders are going to hurt with that pre-stretch? No, I don't think so. No,

01:09:42.960 I think that's a pretty safe position to be in. I mean, just getting back behind. I think a lot

01:09:46.700 of us don't do enough of that. Actually, we don't get behind our body enough. That's a good safe

01:09:51.160 position of the shoulder because you're not in an elevated position. More problems with the

01:09:54.560 shoulder come when it's elevated than when it's down at your side. Any of the impingement type

01:09:59.520 issues or things that you feel that are uncomfortable come more when you get past

01:10:03.500 this area they call it of a painful arc, which is beyond 60 degrees of elevation and abduction

01:10:09.500 into like the 120 degrees or past shoulder level. And then of course, when you get towards terminal

01:10:15.060 range of motion, that stuff can become more problematic. But positions of the shoulder down

01:10:19.400 with your arm at your side don't tend to be aggravating. And when you're starting from that

01:10:23.320 precess position and lifting, let's say you're at that 60 degree incline, how high do you need to

01:10:27.600 lift? Just arm parallel to the ground? Parallel to the ground, yeah. All right. So that's pretty

01:10:31.040 good on dealt everything you just described how many sets are you thinking how many working sets

01:10:37.600 meaning one to two rir working sets for total right that's key because without the intensity

01:10:43.480 indicator there it's going to vary completely so i given that i'm a big believer in the intensity

01:10:48.840 being near failure at failure you're looking at eight to ten sets in a week is needed some people

01:10:56.280 separate those depending upon what split they're following but i mean if you're doing just let's

01:10:59.920 say a traditional bro split, we call it, where you're just doing one muscle group at a time.

01:11:04.460 I mean, you've hit eight high intensity sets across the exercises.

01:11:08.100 So you could mix them up. You don't have to do them all each week.

01:11:10.700 No, no, you can vary. I mean, I like to always include the compound. I might shift the focus

01:11:15.220 between the rear delt and middle delt specifically if I was limited to time or volume.

01:11:20.040 Okay. Where do you want to go next? You want to talk about go down the arm or talk chest and back?

01:11:25.720 Well, let's go down the arms.

01:11:27.220 Okay. Let's hit the triceps. 0.99

01:11:28.620 Okay.

01:11:28.780 So there's, again, three heads of these bad boys.

01:11:31.040 Three heads here again.

01:11:32.080 So you don't have to be as specific here because really there's one differentiator between

01:11:37.300 the long head, the tricep, and the other two heads, the lateral and medial head.

01:11:41.500 All three of them extend the elbow, so they straighten the elbow out.

01:11:44.780 The long head, because it has an attachment that crosses the shoulder joint onto the scapula,

01:11:49.260 is affected by positioning of the arm itself, the shoulder itself.

01:11:54.260 So when you put your arm up overhead,

01:11:57.400 you're putting that long head in a more stretched position

01:12:00.220 to start the exercise.

01:12:01.240 When you put that arm back behind your body

01:12:03.300 and extend your elbow,

01:12:04.940 you're having an effect on the degree of contraction

01:12:07.360 of that long head

01:12:08.780 because you're getting a more complete contraction

01:12:10.320 if your arm is back behind your body.

01:12:12.620 So what I always recommend is,

01:12:14.420 though there's three heads,

01:12:16.020 I really like to see you do a good compound exercise

01:12:19.060 that just focuses on extending the elbow.

01:12:21.460 do an exercise that places tension or higher amount of tension on the long head in that

01:12:28.280 stretched position and do an exercise that places more tension on that long head or takes

01:12:34.100 advantage of the fact that the long head could be in a position of greater contraction with

01:12:38.260 the arm back behind the body so those are my three real staples or requirements the compound

01:12:44.060 exercise is not as big or as important to me in terms of let's do something like a bench press

01:12:50.880 where I'm getting assistance

01:12:51.840 for like a close grip bench pressure,

01:12:53.260 I'm getting assistance from the chest and shoulders too.

01:12:56.100 I think you still do a heavy lying tricep extension

01:12:59.740 as your compound exercise.

01:13:01.260 And you're also checking off that box

01:13:02.940 of the stretching of the triceps long head

01:13:04.980 at the same time.

01:13:05.560 That's my favorite exercise for a number of reasons.

01:13:09.580 So laying on the bench, you've got a bar,

01:13:12.160 you could use an easy grip bar.

01:13:13.460 Easy bar or regular straight bar,

01:13:15.100 but that could be harder on people's wrists.

01:13:16.460 Okay, but you would prefer a bar to dumbbells.

01:13:18.660 Dumbbells are okay.

01:13:19.360 I don't mind dumbbells at all. I use dumbbells a lot myself, but people sometimes can feel it to

01:13:23.940 be a little awkward because they can't ever time the dumbbells right in terms of extension.

01:13:29.160 So again, the technical term for what you just described, right, would be humoral extension or

01:13:32.880 extension of the elbow. And so how much do you need to get enough long head pre-stretch? Are you

01:13:41.360 doing that with, so again, for people listening, I'm trying not to use my hands that much.

01:13:45.220 If I'm laying on the ground and I bring my arms up to, my humerus up to perpendicular to the ground, is that enough stretch?

01:13:54.520 No.

01:13:54.760 Or does it need to be really opening the axilla up? 1.00

01:13:58.160 Yeah, you have to open up those armpits for sure.

01:14:00.300 You got to get your body to a position where I'd say, so if you're laying on your back and your arm was directly pointed to the ceiling, you would be at a 90 degree.

01:14:09.560 90 degree.

01:14:09.840 Right.

01:14:10.160 So I'd say you're going to want to be at least 120 degrees or so more.

01:14:13.380 you go another 30 degrees back behind your head a nice ballpark area for that is that your arm is

01:14:18.480 sort of approximating towards your ear so your bicep is sort of getting close to your ear so

01:14:23.020 this is the workhorse of the tricep i believe this is the best exercise you can do it could

01:14:26.920 be loaded up really well again i like the compound nature here comes from the fact that the lats can

01:14:31.840 assist you in coming back to the top so if you have a little bit of fatigue you always have that

01:14:36.200 lat that can actually pull and kick in and help to pull that arm back up towards the top of the

01:14:42.160 extension. Matter of fact, there's a great exercise that utilizes that on purpose. It's called a PJR

01:14:46.980 pullover, where you're just taking a dumbbell, in this case, two hands on the dumbbell, allowing it

01:14:51.600 to go back into what would traditionally look like an old Arnold pullover, but you'll let the elbows

01:14:55.900 bend. So they bend at the bottom. Now you got that good stretch on the long head of the triceps.

01:15:00.120 You extend first to get the momentum going. Use the triceps to extend the elbows, and then you

01:15:05.140 continue it by using your lats to drive the dumbbell up to the top. If you compare this

01:15:09.500 exercise to an overhead tricep extension where you can easily be starting in the same position,

01:15:15.780 but when we're doing the overhead tricep extension, our humerus stays generally fixed.

01:15:21.860 You're saying with a dumbbell? No, with a cable. I'm sorry, with a cable. Yeah.

01:15:24.600 How do you compare those two? Do you prefer the lying one or would you do them both and just say,

01:15:30.200 I'm going to use much more weight in the lying down one because I'm getting lat to help me lift

01:15:34.760 it back to a perpendicular 90 degree position. I don't like that exercise performed that way

01:15:39.920 very much because I think that, again, we talked about that perpendicularity of the cable and the

01:15:44.480 moving segment that is lost pretty quickly in that exercise to become pretty parallel pretty

01:15:48.680 quickly. So you lose a lot of the tension. What I advise when people do that push away type exercise

01:15:53.480 is to get the arms up overhead in a higher position. So if you're using a rope, when you

01:15:58.740 pull down, you can see that that's pretty perpendicular there. And as you come to the top,

01:16:02.720 the rope is still sort of perpendicular to the forearm to a greater degree. You'll feel it much

01:16:06.940 more in the tricep throughout the entire exercise as long as you are doing it from a higher arm

01:16:12.180 position throughout. When you start to lean forward and do that again you can see like as I'm leaning

01:16:16.600 forward the cable is going to be right about here almost in line with my forearm and you're going to

01:16:20.200 lose some of that tension. The dumbbell variation which is I thought you were asking about the

01:16:24.860 dumbbell overhead variation where you have two hands on one dumbbell and extend overhead that

01:16:29.640 one gets more elbow flexion but doesn't get as much of that shoulder flexion up behind the body

01:16:35.240 relatively so you could feel it less than the triceps for that reason but it does create some

01:16:40.780 internal rotation of the shoulder to grab the dumbbell in that position that could be very

01:16:45.760 uncomfortable for some people the more you can get your elbows out in front of your body externally

01:16:50.560 rotating your shoulders and getting your hands to almost squeeze the dumbbell and your elbows almost

01:16:54.840 to pinch together that will alleviate some of that shoulder discomfort but you can manage that

01:16:59.440 by simply taking an incline bench

01:17:01.860 and performing it on an incline bench

01:17:03.320 because now your arms don't have to be back

01:17:05.220 like they would in a vertical position here

01:17:07.200 all the way to here.

01:17:08.000 I could be in an incline bench

01:17:09.080 and get that level of extension of the elbow

01:17:11.960 but not have to have this arm

01:17:13.800 as high on my body as I have to.

01:17:16.320 And then so it feels more comfortable to people.

01:17:19.500 And when you're in this vertical position,

01:17:20.920 again, you're bearing the weight of gravity completely

01:17:22.900 and you're gonna have the most range of motion

01:17:25.180 at the shoulder to do that

01:17:26.240 than you would in a,

01:17:27.160 we talked about 120 degrees on the lying version so there's less of that overhead range of motion

01:17:31.960 that's required in the lying version of that okay so clearly you've established what the workhorse

01:17:36.780 is on that one lying tricep extension with a bar ideally what would be the for lack of a better

01:17:42.420 word the accessory or additional tricep activities you would add to that then if we wanted just the

01:17:47.240 one that hits the median lateral head the function of just extending the elbow i still love a classic

01:17:52.380 tricep pushdown i don't care if you do ropes if you do a straight bar whatever seems to be most

01:17:56.760 comfortable. What are the pros and cons of each? I think it depends on people's health of their

01:18:00.780 wrists. Some people might find the rope gives the wrist a little bit of a break. Whereas if you have

01:18:04.860 the bar, you have two hands on a fixed bar. Because of that, if you have some immobility

01:18:10.620 issues in your wrist, then what happens is the shoulders actually do get affected by that. The

01:18:15.700 position of the shoulders, the position of the elbows gets affected because if I can't grab onto

01:18:20.160 a straight bar because I lack the ability to get a fully flattened wrist, then what happens is your

01:18:25.860 elbows will flare. Your shoulders will internally rotate. So now all of a sudden you're doing your

01:18:30.000 push downs for what I call this jackhammer position, which is like this because I can't

01:18:34.840 get there. So I have to do this. When I do that, now all of a sudden I'm pushing down. If I have

01:18:39.400 a straight bar a lot with my chest, I basically turn this into a straight bar dip. And so I'm

01:18:44.260 taking a lot of the focus away from the triceps. So is there a difference between, let's just say

01:18:49.920 you're doing it with a single arm to make life easy. So you're doing a press down where your

01:18:54.580 palm is facing laterally. I'm trying to be descriptive for folks not watching, but

01:18:59.560 you're sort of coming down this way versus turning the palm to the floor this way. If

01:19:04.300 assuming your wrist can accommodate both, does it have any bearing on the tricep provided the

01:19:09.680 upper arms in the same spot? If the upper arms in the same spot, no. And that's where there's

01:19:13.600 some controversy around because people, I've actually talked about the underhand tricep

01:19:19.540 pushdown that people can do. And there are benefits to the underhand tricep pushdown.

01:19:23.280 if you are not, you have to be conscious

01:19:26.520 about what's happening to the rest of your anatomy.

01:19:28.320 We're not just a disconnected arm.

01:19:30.320 We have multiple joints here.

01:19:31.580 So what I'm saying is that when people

01:19:33.480 do this underhand grip, what happens is

01:19:35.900 the elbows will tend to become more approximated

01:19:39.160 to the body.

01:19:40.080 And then what that will do is it will actually

01:19:41.860 give you a chance to stay in this closer position

01:19:44.580 and get into a deeper position back behind your body

01:19:47.640 to get that long head into a more contracted state.

01:19:50.400 Whereas if I'm here and my elbows are out in front of me,

01:19:52.400 I can't, I almost get blocked by the bar.

01:19:54.260 I can't really get back to that position.

01:19:56.100 So it's a subtle difference.

01:19:57.640 But again, when we talk about training like an athlete,

01:19:59.780 again, I always say that the reason why we say that

01:20:01.920 is because athletes would care about the subtle differences

01:20:04.520 because it matters.

01:20:05.880 And when you're looking for every edge,

01:20:09.100 when you're looking for every possible nuance

01:20:11.680 that might contribute to a better exercise,

01:20:13.900 you need to consider these things.

01:20:15.120 So the arm position gets affected by that wrist position.

01:20:18.800 And so if you are able to get into that position

01:20:21.880 more effectively because of the change in wrist position,

01:20:25.040 then you might want to consider that too.

01:20:26.520 The trade-off there is it's a weaker wrist position,

01:20:29.140 so you can't handle as much weight as you could

01:20:31.500 when your palms are on top of that bar.

01:20:34.040 So trade-off.

01:20:34.940 But again, tension is the language that muscles speak,

01:20:37.140 not necessarily the weight, right?

01:20:39.840 And even though you have less weight,

01:20:41.620 if you're able to get the elbow behind you

01:20:44.160 and get that huge amount of stretch into it-

01:20:46.240 Right, you're going to get a little bit more stimulation

01:20:47.440 on the long head added to the other two

01:20:49.760 that you're getting just from the extension itself at the elbow.

01:20:51.880 That is, again, this dance that we play between, well, a little less tension, but more effective

01:20:55.860 contraction.

01:20:56.520 So I feel, what is the end result?

01:20:58.360 It's all going to factor into that tension, that language the muscles are speaking, to

01:21:03.040 determine how much of an effect you're feeling.

01:21:05.380 Okay.

01:21:05.960 What other exercise would you consider a very important one for someone who is struggling

01:21:10.060 to add mass or strength to the upper arm?

01:21:12.820 This is another controversial one, but it's true.

01:21:15.300 You need to do an exercise that would get that long head in its fully shortened position.

01:21:19.560 So something that contracts that elbow with your arm behind your body.

01:21:23.680 So we're talking about some form of a tricep kickback.

01:21:25.980 You could do it with a cable.

01:21:27.460 You could do it with dumbbells.

01:21:28.740 You could do it on an inclined bench face down.

01:21:30.960 But the long head of the triceps will be in its fully contracted state when you are able

01:21:36.440 to get full elbow extension and shoulder extension at the same time.

01:21:40.360 And that is one of the only exercises that allows you to do that.

01:21:43.320 Other than some of these pushdown variations I've talked about where you can get a straightened

01:21:47.680 elbow and get your elbow positioned back behind you a little bit. You could do that on a pushdown

01:21:53.160 if you had a long rope, right? A long rope that you could position your arms behind your body.

01:21:58.660 And we call it a drag pushdown. We're actually dragging your hands down your body. So when you 0.93

01:22:02.680 finish, your hands will be on the side of your legs. Your elbows will be back behind your body.

01:22:06.960 You'll have the same type of effect there, but not everybody has a rope long enough to pull that off.

01:22:12.220 A regular gym rope won't cut it. If you attach two ropes, you could possibly do that.

01:22:16.220 Before we move on to bicep, maybe we can talk about this after or before, but benefits and

01:22:21.860 cons to supersetting tricep with bicep with deltoid. How do you think about the entire

01:22:27.960 complex? Because it's not uncommon for somebody to say, I'm going to do arms on a day.

01:22:31.120 And that might just be delt, bicep, tricep, if they're going to do chest and back on another

01:22:36.080 day. So how do you think about the trade-offs of that? All that does is really affect your

01:22:40.320 overall volumes for the week and how you're distributing your volumes for the week. It

01:22:43.740 Wouldn't impact my exercise selection, I don't think, triceps, if I was training biceps in the

01:22:50.380 same day, unless I had some kind of orthopedic issue where the accumulation of multiple positions

01:22:55.960 from these different exercises is causing me to feel more joint soreness. Again, if we're choosing

01:23:01.260 the right exercises, it shouldn't be doing that anyway. So if that's not the case, I don't have

01:23:05.960 any objection to people doing biceps and triceps together. They tend to look at them as two smaller

01:23:10.300 muscle groups that because they're antagonistic to each other feels good to train them on a day

01:23:14.020 while you're fatiguing one you're not necessarily fatiguing the other so i feel fresh on both sides

01:23:18.500 of that people that do triceps at the end of shoulders or chest it's another good thing to do

01:23:23.620 when you're talking about maximizing recovery because all those pushing muscles that have a

01:23:27.720 similar function are going in the same day so when i come back the next day if i'm doing pulling

01:23:32.280 biceps and upper back and back then i'm getting a complete reprieve of those muscles and if i go

01:23:38.020 do legs the next day. I'm getting a reprieve of two days of rest before I come back to them again.

01:23:43.180 So that's really the consideration is how it impacts recovery. But from an individual exercise

01:23:47.160 selection, my choices wouldn't change on the triceps if I trained them with biceps. If I did

01:23:52.400 train them with something that was doing a similar function like chest and shoulders, then I might

01:23:57.700 decide on how I want to change exercises up. Like there, the bench press we know is going to act as

01:24:02.360 a secondary compound to the triceps or it's going to help the triceps. So let's say you did that

01:24:07.140 split you said i'm going to do chest shoulder tricep is one day back bicep is another day

01:24:12.300 you would still start presumably with your chest exercises because it's the biggest compound

01:24:17.440 movement and you would move probably from chest to shoulder toward tricep unless again it depends

01:24:22.280 on how aesthetically driven somebody is and what they're trying to accomplish here if they had

01:24:26.340 weaker triceps or weaker development of their triceps you might want to prioritize your triceps

01:24:30.920 first and go do your triceps training first when you're most fresh and then come back and do the

01:24:35.380 others if they weren't of as high a priority. So for those of us with puny biceps, what are we

01:24:40.600 doing wrong? What are the most common mistakes people make and how do they fix it? When it comes

01:24:44.680 to biceps, I believe the number one stimulus for bicep growth is the eccentric overload of the

01:24:50.060 biceps. The fact that, especially when we're talking about most of these pulling muscles,

01:24:54.960 the eccentric is going to be the part where you're lowering the weight under a slower tempo,

01:25:00.000 trying to accentuate the stretching tension that we get

01:25:04.200 in addition to the fact that the weight itself

01:25:06.160 is applying tension.

01:25:07.220 So we're getting tension two separate ways.

01:25:09.320 We could do that with a heavier barbell curl.

01:25:11.900 We could do a cheat curl where you're actually,

01:25:14.540 yeah, you do some repetitions that are as strict as you can,

01:25:16.880 but you get a little bit loose on the form

01:25:18.600 to get the weight up

01:25:19.940 and then you have to really fight the weight on the way down.

01:25:22.140 You will always be stronger on that way down

01:25:23.940 than you are on the way up.

01:25:25.160 So if you never really do that

01:25:27.180 and tap into some of the cheating

01:25:29.560 of the concentric to get up,

01:25:31.260 then you're never really gonna apply

01:25:32.260 the same level of eccentric overload that you can.

01:25:35.840 So I like doing the barbell curl with a cheat.

01:25:39.420 Chin-ups are one of my favorite ways

01:25:40.780 to eccentrically challenge the biceps.

01:25:43.260 So if I get up there and lower myself down,

01:25:46.660 I can change the exercise

01:25:48.020 to be a little bit more focused on the biceps

01:25:50.780 by just opening the angle a little bit of the chin-up.

01:25:53.400 A lot of times people will do a chin-up

01:25:54.620 and they'll pull until their biceps

01:25:56.520 are touching their forearms and that's going to get a lot of lat engagement but if i can just open

01:26:00.920 the angle and get my body a little further away from the bar now i've shifted some of that focus

01:26:05.520 to the biceps and i want to again handle those eccentric repetitions as slowly as painfully

01:26:13.340 in a good way as possible i was always a fan of doing chin-ups and trying to challenge myself to

01:26:20.720 hold on to the bar for as long as i can i used to win the flexed arm hang every year at field day

01:26:25.360 because I used to basically work at it

01:26:27.480 in the off season of field day.

01:26:29.280 I was like determined to win that every year.

01:26:32.180 I enjoy trying to hang and hold myself

01:26:34.680 in a flexed arm position.

01:26:35.460 What did it take to get the top mark?

01:26:37.000 I remember this vaguely.

01:26:38.040 I bet you I was around 45 seconds to a minute

01:26:40.620 I was able to do it for.

01:26:41.980 Like, I think that was like

01:26:42.800 the winning requirement was,

01:26:44.380 which is still tough now.

01:26:45.760 I usually do them only in a fatigue state though.

01:26:48.000 So at the end of a workout,

01:26:49.180 it's a great way for me to finish.

01:26:50.160 And remind me,

01:26:50.580 it's taken me back to third grade.

01:26:52.460 You had to keep your chin above the bar.

01:26:53.680 Chin above the bar, yeah.

01:26:54.260 get up there, chin above the bar, and just hold for as long as possible. Now I extend it past that

01:27:00.520 though. So now what I'll do is it's not just chin below the bar. I keep going until my feet hit the

01:27:04.560 floor. So as long as I can go for a set is what I'll do. But again, I like to do that as a finisher

01:27:10.040 at the end of what I'm doing, not as the primary source. Any type of eccentric overload is great.

01:27:16.140 And again, when it comes to biceps, where's the risk? If I'm on a chin up bar, I simply let myself

01:27:21.000 go and my feet hit the floor. If I have a barbell and it's going down, it's going to accelerate

01:27:25.020 faster. I put it on the bench or wherever I have to put it back in the rack. It's not like

01:27:29.280 the stress that we have when we are doing a bench press of some sort where the weight's coming down

01:27:34.620 on top of us or a squat when the weight's coming down on top of us. We have such a safety net when

01:27:39.080 we do these exercises that not utilizing them is a big opportunity missed. Now, what about hitting

01:27:46.020 different parts of the bicep how about for example like a preacher curl versus an incline bench with

01:27:52.380 arm behind you curl like what are the trade-offs or advantages so short head long head is the

01:27:57.300 differentiator here the two heads of the bicep are the short head long head the long head

01:28:02.180 gets its name because its attachment is higher in the shoulder it's actually attaching inside

01:28:07.160 the shoulder joint to that labrum and then the short head has an attachment that's lower the

01:28:12.280 long head is going to be better hit because again, it's crossing that shoulder joint with things that

01:28:16.420 place it on stretch by getting it back behind the body, which is the incline dumbbell curl that you

01:28:22.540 mentioned. The incline position when my arms are hanging is going to put them back behind the body

01:28:27.020 a little bit. And it gives you that slight pre-stretch on the exercise. That slight pre-stretch

01:28:31.080 is supposed to allow for a better recruitment of the muscle fibers to the exercise. But it also,

01:28:37.000 I believe this main drivers, it just gives that second level of tension, that second source of

01:28:42.900 tension beyond just the dumbbells itself. You're getting a stretching tension on top of the

01:28:46.740 dumbbells themselves. So an incline dumbbell press is good. That could become a little bit

01:28:51.280 irritating to people that have shoulder issues though, if they go too low on that.

01:28:56.080 You would incline at what? 60? 45?

01:28:58.960 45 might be a little right on the edge there. I say 60 degrees is more comfortable for me.

01:29:03.600 the short head is really again just flexing the elbow getting your arms out in front of your body

01:29:10.140 so that's the preacher curl cable curls just a standard cable curl the traditional barbell curl

01:29:16.360 would hit more of the short head and then there's also this concept of what you see is what you

01:29:21.760 train so when you're looking in the mirror if your arms are rotated outwards and you can see

01:29:28.320 the inner portion of your bicep more that's your short head this portion you see on the inside is

01:29:33.120 a short head, that would be working more of the short head. So I have an exercise variation we

01:29:37.060 call the no money curls. I have no money. My hands are out here at the side. I got nothing.

01:29:41.060 External rotation of the arms there, curling from that position there is going to work more of that

01:29:45.320 short head. When I have my arms internally rotated more and curling from that position like I would

01:29:51.380 from a drag curl, anything like a garanda drag curl, then I'm seeing more of that outer portion

01:29:56.280 of the bicep visibly in the mirror. Then I'm going to be working more of that long head also. So

01:30:01.420 that's another indicator of how you can differentiate between the exercises now for

01:30:06.660 someone who's not a bodybuilder or really in the minutiae of trying to differentiate is bicep one

01:30:12.580 of those things where as long as you were adhering to really good principles of eccentric loading

01:30:18.940 getting something on long head and short head exact arm position might not matter it's get the

01:30:23.940 volume right get the stimulus right and go yeah i think for most of these muscle groups if people

01:30:29.120 did even just these basics and they were just trying to make sure that they're checking off

01:30:33.740 the boxes of actually doing some exercises for biceps, shoulders, chest, all these muscles we're

01:30:38.040 going to talk about, they're going to see amazing results from them. Arnold was famous for having

01:30:42.520 his golden six, just having six exercises that you can do that are going to essentially provide

01:30:48.200 the biggest bang for their buck. You worry about progressively overloading on them and getting

01:30:51.600 stronger. They're going to create a good physique at the end of the day. But the nuances I think

01:30:57.040 help a lot when it comes to training around and navigating around injuries or limitations,

01:31:03.120 because again, back to what we said in the beginning, if you have the understanding of

01:31:07.380 where you can go when you do hit one of these roadblocks or closures, then you have the

01:31:12.360 rerouting possibilities. And if you don't understand what's part of making up that

01:31:17.140 movement, you don't have the ability to do that so freely. And would you put bicep and tricep in

01:31:22.160 the same category as dealt where you're talking about eight to 10 working sets per week to make

01:31:26.400 gains or do you need a little more? I don't think you need a little more. I think if anything,

01:31:29.900 you could get away with less. I mean, as long as they're high effort taken to failure sets,

01:31:34.460 I mean, they're a smaller muscle group. They don't need as much and they're definitely going

01:31:37.820 to get additional benefits from the other compound movements that you do. When you're training chest,

01:31:42.620 you're going to be training your triceps. When you're training your back, you're going to be

01:31:45.800 training your biceps. So you're going to get some additional volume in any way in their accessory

01:31:50.400 role. Okay. What are your favorite forearm exercises that aren't obviously getting all

01:31:55.240 the work already with bicep and stuff like that? Forums, I think it's rather boring when it comes

01:32:00.360 to forums because if you look at the wrist function side of forums, meaning the extending

01:32:05.500 and flexing of the wrist, you can get a lot done with two basic exercises, just simple barbell

01:32:11.540 wrist curls or barbell wrist extensions or dumbbell wrist extensions, dumbbell curls or cable. You

01:32:15.720 can do the same thing. Whichever position or whichever device you want to use, you can do that.

01:32:19.680 When you extend the benefits beyond that to the forum itself, we can move our forum in space

01:32:25.160 and still work forearm muscles.

01:32:26.880 So the brachialis is a muscle,

01:32:29.400 the brachioradialis is a muscle that crosses

01:32:31.380 from the upper arm down to the forearm itself

01:32:33.780 that we can get with reverse curls

01:32:36.100 and exercise that we can load more heavily,

01:32:38.940 but it is a big muscle that sticks out

01:32:41.300 and provides a lot of forearm development.

01:32:44.020 So just limiting it to wrist curls and wrist action

01:32:46.680 is not enough to train your forearm.

01:32:48.460 You can get even more into the minutia

01:32:50.560 when you start to do radial deviation,

01:32:52.480 and older deviation and pronation and supination,

01:32:55.020 and those are all amazing movements.

01:32:56.540 I like to just resist them all with bands.

01:32:59.180 I've actually done a video where I show you

01:33:00.400 how to do all those movements with just bands.

01:33:02.760 And again, it's something that can match your ability level

01:33:06.700 based on just how much resistance

01:33:08.020 or how far away you step from the anchoring point.

01:33:11.280 I do like one other functional type exercise,

01:33:13.820 which we used to do in baseball a lot.

01:33:16.160 It's just a roll of some sort.

01:33:17.460 So an over-under roll, you could take just a barbell itself

01:33:21.980 and roll forward until you fatigue

01:33:24.400 and then you roll backwards fatigue.

01:33:25.960 All it's doing is basically the rolling forward

01:33:28.260 is essentially creating wrist flexion

01:33:30.920 and getting the flexors

01:33:31.840 and the rolling backwards of the bar

01:33:33.640 is getting a wrist extension,

01:33:34.880 training the extensors on the back of the forearm.

01:33:36.780 And you're doing that on the ground?

01:33:38.360 Just standing in space with a barbell in my hand.

01:33:40.780 Just rolling over that barbell

01:33:42.060 until you can't do it anymore.

01:33:43.480 We've shown before a more elaborate version,

01:33:45.420 which is really pretty cool,

01:33:46.500 but you take a band and you wrap it around

01:33:48.500 the edge of a barbell that's in a rack.

01:33:51.980 you take that band and then anchor it to a kettlebell or a dumbbell. You just tie it around

01:33:56.440 the kettlebell or dumbbell. You have that. And now what you do is you roll over the top of that end

01:34:00.780 of the barbell until you lift that kettlebell weight all the way to the top. And then more

01:34:05.200 importantly, you unroll it just as slowly and under control because what it wants to do is just

01:34:10.240 go right back down to the ground. So you have to unroll it very slowly and go back down to the

01:34:14.540 ground. So it's another way to like almost gamify forearm training because again, forearm training

01:34:18.920 can be pretty boring and straightforward but effective okay let's go to everybody's favorite

01:34:24.320 let's talk pecs pecs international chest day every day uh i was talking to a buddy of mine yesterday

01:34:30.720 and i hadn't talked to him in a while and he's a really serious guy when it comes to his training

01:34:35.160 and i was like all right what's new in your workouts man and he goes chest day every day

01:34:39.360 yeah yeah which of course he's being facetious but the fact that that was his joke i mean it's

01:34:43.420 the centerpiece on the torso so i think when people that and ab so when people see themselves

01:34:48.380 in the mirror every day that is the thing that catches their eye first so i think that's why it

01:34:52.220 gets so much attention when it comes to the chest there's two major requirements here you want to

01:34:57.920 get some type of pressing movement and you want to get some type of movement that adducts or brings

01:35:03.380 the arm across the chest so when it comes to the pressing movements you have options of obviously

01:35:09.340 barbells dumbbells machines they're all going to do pretty much the same thing in terms of the

01:35:15.820 movement itself, but how it feels can be drastically different. And this is where when

01:35:20.940 you have shoulder issues, and I can speak from experience here, some of them are going to feel

01:35:25.160 a lot more uncomfortable than others. When I was going through that period of inflammation in that

01:35:31.220 joint, which was long after, by the way, long after the injury itself, I had kind of re-aggravated

01:35:36.360 that injury in demonstrating some of these bad exercises to do early on on my channel.

01:35:40.400 I couldn't do any pressing. I could not do any pressing. There wasn't a pressing variation that

01:35:44.640 I could find that was comfortable for me. So I did all of my work through the adduction crossover

01:35:49.840 type exercise, taking a cable, grabbing onto the handle, and then crossing my arm over my body.

01:35:55.080 I think the ability to pull the cable in with your bicep to kind of get it going or know you

01:36:00.160 have that option takes away some of the instability that might come from having your arm way out in

01:36:04.680 front of you and that long moment arm that could be placed on the chest. So I found that to be a

01:36:10.600 good rerouting option for me. I was able to, after doing those exercises, get back to the point where

01:36:16.620 I could press. But when it comes to the press itself, incline, flat, decline, if I had to

01:36:21.700 choose one, I'd say incline because most people have weaker development of their upper chest

01:36:26.920 relative to their lower chest or middle chest. So an incline bench press will cover the weakest

01:36:33.120 point of development and still do a really good job of hitting the rest of your chest.

01:36:37.020 But I think dumbbells give people with any issues

01:36:40.280 the most opportunity to train pain-free.

01:36:43.740 And if you still have pain when you train with dumbbells,

01:36:46.820 slow it down.

01:36:47.800 The slowing of the dumbbell,

01:36:49.580 especially during the eccentric portion of it,

01:36:51.660 is gonna give your joint the opportunity to feel safe

01:36:55.740 and overcome any instability

01:36:59.180 that might be causing some of your pain.

01:37:01.520 I believe that a lot of times,

01:37:02.900 even though there's structural problems in the shoulder,

01:37:05.580 when you combine structural issues with instability they feel really vulnerable those

01:37:12.000 structures feel very vulnerable so when you can provide stability mostly just by slowing the pace

01:37:16.340 down then that structure itself could feel a lot more supported and safe and it doesn't cause the

01:37:23.060 pain and discomfort that it would and you're able to get into those fine-tuned positions we talked

01:37:27.240 about before where you know it feels good there yeah you can sort of bring the elbows down a

01:37:33.160 little bit and so you're at a angle that maybe doesn't allow for the maximum i mean you're using

01:37:37.660 more tricep potentially but you're also taking more stress off the ac joint it feels like something

01:37:42.140 that is overall but it's interesting that you would preferentially say look if you've only got

01:37:47.460 time for one pressing movement make it the incline over the flat and then let's get you over doing

01:37:52.320 flies or cables or something as well sure that's probably a common mistake people make is maybe

01:37:56.660 spending a disproportionate or too much time pressing and not enough time using the adduction

01:38:02.340 Definitely. And I think that you should not over-exaggerate the angle of your press though

01:38:06.560 when you're doing the incline bench. I like to keep it around 30 degrees or so. The higher you

01:38:11.460 start to go, the more you start to shift that focus into the shoulders and that front delt again. So

01:38:15.380 I think 45 degrees would be the maximum for me, but 30 degrees where I like to train from on that

01:38:20.000 incline. And then let's talk a little bit about different ways that one can do adduction. You

01:38:23.940 obviously referred to cables. Of course, all of us grew up watching Arnie do flies. It looks like

01:38:28.880 there's a lot of risk on the shoulder with just a heavy fly on a bench. I've thrown that one in

01:38:33.800 my iron graveyard too. And again, only because- I cannot wait to see the comments of people who

01:38:38.700 are just so angry that you've said that. I'm so, look at, they say it's fear-mongering. I'm not

01:38:42.920 fear-mongering. I'm saying I hate the exercise. I'm recommending people do the alternative because

01:38:49.160 the alternative can give you many of the same benefits without the risk. The anterior shoulder

01:38:54.940 capsule is quite vulnerable in that position, period. You have a weight in your hands and

01:39:01.160 they'll argue just use lighter weights. What if I want to use weights that are somewhat heavier

01:39:05.800 because I want to challenge myself more eccentrically? Well, I could take the exercise

01:39:09.160 down to the floor. I'm still doing the fly. You like the fly? I'll do the fly. I'll do it down

01:39:12.940 on the floor. Now I have- But can you get as much stretch when you're on the floor?

01:39:15.700 You can't get as much, but again, we're doing these little trade-offs back and forth. If I

01:39:19.900 wanted to get a little bit more stretch, I could stand up and go do a cable crossover.

01:39:22.740 and because I can position myself differently

01:39:25.620 in a cable crossover

01:39:26.520 and I could get my arms in a slot

01:39:28.920 that are more comfortable for me

01:39:30.360 and because I can control some of that vulnerability

01:39:33.360 to stretch because I can utilize the biceps

01:39:35.840 to offload that in any way

01:39:37.400 by engaging them more or not in that back position,

01:39:40.240 then I have a safer exercise option

01:39:42.300 that still most importantly gives me the adduction

01:39:45.380 and also gives me better resistance

01:39:48.100 through more range of motion of adduction.

01:39:50.160 If I take a dumbbell fly and I pull it to the top,

01:39:52.180 once I get to the top, I don't have much resisted adduction anymore. If I have my cables and I pull

01:39:56.820 them, I could go to midline and still go past midline and still get more of that effect.

01:40:01.980 Do you remember the old Nautilus machine? You'll never see these things anymore,

01:40:05.440 but I feel like they were some of the best machines ever engineered. But this machine

01:40:08.760 that was just a fly machine, it had round bolsters that I'm sure other companies make it besides

01:40:15.260 Nautilus, but it allowed you to do a fly with your arms at 90 degrees. And so you could actually

01:40:22.060 load this thing up to the ends of the earth and your shoulders didn't hurt whereas today you go

01:40:27.120 into most gyms the fly machine is a handle you just can't go that heavy yeah why the difference

01:40:32.300 because i think people didn't take to that machine as much because they didn't feel that big stretch

01:40:37.760 as much and what happens a lot of times is when you extend your arm out the elbow out you start

01:40:45.480 to involve other muscles that get subjected to stretch that get perceived to be stretch itself

01:40:50.720 like on the pec itself the only thing that's going to dictate the stretch on the pec is the

01:40:54.440 position of the humerus relative to the body so if i get to here whether i'm here whether i'm here

01:40:59.980 is not really affecting the stretch of the chest but you feel the bicep stretch when you're out

01:41:04.680 other muscles start to get involved the corcal brachialis you start to feel other things get

01:41:07.900 involved that give the perception of more stretch and when that happens people feel like i like this

01:41:14.260 exercise more because i can feel this stretching me more again it's the unsupported nature of that

01:41:19.600 that I don't like as much.

01:41:21.000 When we're doing that cable crossover,

01:41:23.260 it may seem unsupported,

01:41:25.440 but it is supported

01:41:26.180 because the stacks are going to engage

01:41:27.620 at some point,

01:41:28.200 depending upon how far away I get.

01:41:29.860 So I know I've got that bottomed out position

01:41:31.880 depending upon how far away

01:41:34.140 from the machine I get

01:41:35.100 or how much I pull.

01:41:36.620 Do you like to cable fly

01:41:37.600 with single arm or double?

01:41:39.540 I like them both.

01:41:40.460 I like them both.

01:41:40.980 When I'm really trying to focus on one side

01:41:43.080 is when I'm trying to get

01:41:44.240 like a really good contraction on that side.

01:41:46.020 If I'm just trying to move heavier weight,

01:41:47.960 then I want to grab them both together

01:41:49.280 and make sure I do that.

01:41:50.540 What I always advise people against

01:41:52.060 when doing that exercise

01:41:52.880 is like leaning too much on that

01:41:54.620 because they'll lean in as they do it.

01:41:57.340 And basically that promotes

01:41:58.600 the rounding of the shoulder.

01:42:00.380 They'll get too much dominance

01:42:01.480 of the shoulder to do it.

01:42:02.840 I always say as you're pressing,

01:42:04.700 you want to lean back,

01:42:05.920 almost want to stand upright.

01:42:07.080 So your chest is out in front of the movement

01:42:09.020 and doing the majority of the work

01:42:10.240 and not your shoulders

01:42:11.080 tending to round out

01:42:12.280 and dominate the movement.

01:42:13.620 I don't care what direction you go there.

01:42:15.660 You can go straight across midline.

01:42:17.680 You could go high to low.

01:42:18.920 when you go from this position from a higher grip position down towards a lower grip position you

01:42:24.220 work more of your lower chest because basically simulating more of a dip and then if you go from

01:42:28.980 a lower hand position to start and a higher hand position at the finish then you're simulating more

01:42:34.020 of that orientation of the upper pec fibers you're mirroring their direction more so you hit those

01:42:38.960 more effectively that's again that's more of a weak point and would you say like 50 50 if you're

01:42:44.600 going to do 10 to 12 working sets of pec, would you say half of that should be pressing? Half of

01:42:50.220 that should be fly? I think that's fair. Yeah. You mentioned dips. Where do they belong in our

01:42:55.100 toolkit for triceps and lower pec? I like dips. I know that people find them to be, they believe

01:43:01.340 them to be somewhat of a risky exercise, but I think if they're done responsibly through reasonable

01:43:08.400 ranges of motion, not extreme ranges of motion, I've seen recommendations of people saying to get

01:43:12.980 really really low and things change when you're fatigued so when you start to get more and more

01:43:18.500 fatigued in the set even something that started out that seemed to be a good safe exercise can

01:43:22.880 become unsafe because of the fatigue the dip is one of those exercises that can become more and

01:43:27.480 more unsafe because of fatigue because all of your body weight is being basically sunken downward as

01:43:33.020 you're trying to hold and push yourself back up but as it sinks down it's putting more and more

01:43:36.920 internal rotation onto your shoulder but if you're aware of that as a negative feedback point like

01:43:43.420 that is something you're trying to avoid then you stop yourself in that range of motion higher than

01:43:49.360 the point that becomes vulnerable and if you start to perceive that your fatigue is overcoming your

01:43:54.940 ability to control yourself in that range of motion then you stop the set so i think there's

01:43:59.140 ways that you can do that exercise you could also put a band there and do an assisted dip so you're

01:44:03.980 just basically hanging it over the handles and you're putting your knees on top. There's a lot

01:44:07.280 of things you can do, but I don't like to avoid the exercise entirely because I think it's one

01:44:11.040 of the best ways to stimulate, especially the lower chest with that good stretch from the

01:44:15.560 bottom position. So you're basically using depth and range of motion to manage. Cause again,

01:44:19.840 you're the perfect candidate of somebody who shouldn't like that exercise with your torn 0.95

01:44:23.140 labrum. Yeah, always. I use depth and control of that depth. When I do try to get a little bit more 0.70

01:44:27.580 into a stretch position, I feel like how stable can I keep my body position? One of my big keys,

01:44:32.040 I say is to be able to drive your shoulders down.

01:44:34.720 You want your shoulders away from your ears.

01:44:36.720 If you start to feel that your shoulders

01:44:38.080 are riding up towards your ears

01:44:39.740 or you feel like you're shrugging,

01:44:41.460 you don't have control anymore.

01:44:42.920 You should at any point in time

01:44:44.140 be able to keep your shoulders depressed

01:44:45.640 and have that distance between your shoulders and ears

01:44:49.240 as a check and form check

01:44:51.800 regards to your stability of in control of your shoulders

01:44:55.560 in those bottom positions.

01:44:57.240 Then when I get to the top too, same thing

01:44:58.600 because when you get to the top,

01:44:59.720 your whole body weight is gonna wanna sink you down

01:45:01.480 into that shrugged position. You want to actually actively drive your elbows down, unshrug the

01:45:06.900 shoulders. But the dip would fall into the pressing category as would a push-up. Any of these where

01:45:12.860 you're just pushing your arms out, down, overhead in terms of a chest activation, it's usually the

01:45:18.360 push-up, the dip, and the bench press as your main pushing options. Only the adduction exercises are

01:45:23.180 going to be the ones that cross that arm across midline. Do you want to do back next or abs? I

01:45:27.000 I mean, stay on the front of the body or?

01:45:28.580 Stay with the abs.

01:45:29.520 All right, let's talk abs.

01:45:31.200 They say that most of the ab work is done in the kitchen.

01:45:34.740 That is so true.

01:45:36.920 Strengthening the abs

01:45:37.940 and getting aesthetically pleasing abs

01:45:40.540 is really two different things too.

01:45:42.420 I think that when we look at the contributions of nutrition

01:45:45.740 and whatever ab exercises you're doing,

01:45:48.300 this is nutrition 99 times out of 100

01:45:50.640 is what is responsible for what you're seeing.

01:45:53.400 Nutrition is gonna control your body fat levels, period.

01:45:56.660 What you see when you get rid of that body fat

01:45:58.840 is determined by your dedication to ab training.

01:46:02.380 I do not believe that doing the compounds

01:46:05.000 is enough for your abs.

01:46:07.340 I never believed that.

01:46:08.680 I think that there's so many other things

01:46:10.120 that your abs are responsible for

01:46:11.980 in terms of motions and movement patterns.

01:46:15.100 You're not doing that all

01:46:16.000 from a series of compound exercises.

01:46:18.040 As a matter of fact, in the compounds,

01:46:19.620 their role is mostly just to stabilize.

01:46:21.740 They're not creating rotation.

01:46:23.560 They're not preventing rotation.

01:46:24.980 Sometimes they're preventing rotation,

01:46:26.020 but they're certainly not creating rotation,

01:46:27.380 not creating rotation under load.

01:46:29.180 So how do we do that?

01:46:30.760 The exercises that you pick

01:46:32.520 once you get your body fat levels low enough

01:46:35.040 should hit these major functions.

01:46:37.860 My major functions when it comes to abs

01:46:39.680 are their ability to create top-down movement,

01:46:42.920 which means pulling my ribcage towards my pelvis.

01:46:45.800 Because the flexion of the spine

01:46:46.980 is really the main responsibility

01:46:48.320 of the movement of the abs.

01:46:51.260 Their stabilization requirements are huge,

01:46:53.320 but there's no movement going on there.

01:46:55.020 So the flexion of the spine is coming from top-down movements, bottom-up movements where

01:46:59.440 the pelvis is moving towards the ribcage itself, any type of reverse crunch.

01:47:03.640 The same two things, but done with rotation.

01:47:06.820 So it's now not just top-down, but it's top-down and rotating.

01:47:10.040 So we call it top-down rotation.

01:47:11.980 Bottom-up with rotation. 0.72

01:47:13.560 So anything where you're pulling that pelvis up, but rotating at the same time or twisting. 0.95

01:47:18.180 Then we have the obliques themselves that are going to be feeding right into working

01:47:23.060 in conjunction with the abs.

01:47:24.520 And then sort of mid-range movements where both ribcage and the pelvis move towards each

01:47:29.260 other at the same time.

01:47:30.540 So those are like V-ups and up exercises that do that.

01:47:34.000 How you do these, anything done on the floor is generally going to be easier, generally

01:47:39.200 going to be easier than if you were to perform them hanging from a bar because we have more

01:47:43.640 of our body weight being subjected to gravity that we have to lift.

01:47:47.080 Anything like a leg raise done from the floor is a hell of a lot easier than a leg raise

01:47:50.680 done from a bar.

01:47:52.160 how do you do top down on a bar if you're gonna do with weight you're gonna do a cable like a

01:47:57.740 crunch pull down okay yeah and how does one think about their portfolio when they think about all

01:48:02.800 those things so obviously the easiest top down is a crunch and then crunch with rotation is top down

01:48:09.080 with rotation leg up from the floor with rotation hanging leg raise with rotation you're basically

01:48:15.600 picking from those. How are you defining sets and reps for this funky muscle group?

01:48:21.040 So I believe it's hard to define sets and reps for people when it comes to ab work because a

01:48:26.580 couple of things. Number one, we all can do different amounts. More so, we do a better job

01:48:32.300 of creating good quality contractions when we're not just focused on a number.

01:48:37.800 If I really just wanted to get a good ab workout, I'd really just focus on getting slower,

01:48:42.860 meaningful, concentrated contractions on the abs

01:48:46.280 because it's too easy to involve the hip flexors.

01:48:48.540 It's too easy to involve momentum.

01:48:50.360 And we get so lost in the ability to say,

01:48:52.940 yeah, 30, 35, 40 of what?

01:48:55.640 40 of what?

01:48:56.400 Of waste.

01:48:57.040 Like there was nothing that actually

01:48:58.240 was very productive there.

01:48:59.740 So I'd rather see you either just do it

01:49:02.580 until you can't do them anymore.

01:49:04.220 So just train the exercise to failure,

01:49:06.040 whatever that is,

01:49:07.180 and know that you've done them slowly and concertedly

01:49:09.680 so you're doing the right thing

01:49:10.940 for what you're trying to develop.

01:49:12.220 or I'd like to see you just do them

01:49:14.900 for a series of specific amount of time

01:49:18.600 but focus on rotating through them as fast as possible.

01:49:22.080 So I might not get complete fatigue

01:49:23.800 from the one 30 second bout that I'm doing

01:49:26.900 but knowing that I'm gonna go immediately to the next one

01:49:30.160 mechanically offset so I can still do it

01:49:33.880 even if I'm fatigued from the other one, right?

01:49:35.340 There's always a mechanical drop down effect

01:49:37.420 that's happening so I can still keep doing exercise

01:49:39.900 but knowing that the end result of this

01:49:42.000 will be at the end of these six minutes, seven minutes,

01:49:44.400 whatever, I'm gonna be toast.

01:49:45.680 I can do that if I shift the focus a little bit

01:49:48.540 around the abs from the top-down movement

01:49:50.960 to the bottom-up to moving those focuses around

01:49:53.760 is gonna allow me to keep going for 30-second intervals

01:49:57.140 with very little rest periods in between

01:49:59.420 that at the end of it all will have a cumulative effect.

01:50:02.660 So those are the two ways that I usually like to do it.

01:50:04.980 We've got plenty of workouts where I've posted

01:50:06.780 where I do it in follow-along fashion,

01:50:08.580 where I just program it and tell you what to do.

01:50:10.680 but there's a lot of variety within those

01:50:14.020 because it's the movement pattern that's most important.

01:50:16.700 The exercise itself isn't not as important.

01:50:19.080 It's the ones that you tend to feel the most

01:50:21.820 and feel the best contraction on

01:50:23.880 are the ones I try to push people towards.

01:50:26.380 What would be your favorite pure rotation exercise?

01:50:29.600 If you're gonna pick one pure rotation exercise,

01:50:32.100 would it be one knee up, one knee down

01:50:34.500 with a cross body cable?

01:50:36.500 So I like any type of, we call them sledgehammers

01:50:39.020 where you just basically take two hands on a cable

01:50:41.300 and you're trying to rotate.

01:50:43.780 What I also like from those

01:50:45.080 is when you get out to that position,

01:50:47.420 having to hold them and then step out even further.

01:50:50.560 Because especially if you're doing with bands.

01:50:51.660 And you would prefer, you want to see that standing?

01:50:53.620 You want to see that in a split stance?

01:50:55.040 Standing, yeah, standing.

01:50:56.120 Well, I mean, this is standing.

01:50:57.220 This is a squared up stance, standing.

01:50:59.260 If we wanted to get really powerful with it,

01:51:00.980 I could split your stance a little bit more

01:51:02.220 because now I'm focused on driving as much power

01:51:04.140 from the ground up and I could do that too.

01:51:06.740 And those are explosively performed.

01:51:08.520 but still under control everything that I say is explosive is still under control because it's not

01:51:14.660 enough to just get yourself out into that position but to control it on the way back always so I like

01:51:20.460 to do any of those variations again we could do them even isometrically where if I have the let's

01:51:25.660 say again band in my hand and it's out in front of my body I can jump out even further laterally

01:51:33.460 which is going to increase the tension on the band and want to whip myself back and to rotate

01:51:37.300 towards the anchor point don't let it you keep your body face straight ahead you're undergoing

01:51:42.520 like these spontaneously increased rotational demands or these isometric rotational demands

01:51:48.340 and that's a great way that is that's a really good athletic way to train because a you're on

01:51:52.140 your feet but because we do get subjected to so many spontaneous forces that require

01:51:58.520 to change body position and we don't allow it some people that have a hard time being able to

01:52:04.480 do this well, you might've seen it before. They'll take a physio ball and they'll hug the

01:52:09.020 physio ball with a cable. So they're doing the rotation with it. It's a great way to go for

01:52:13.160 beginners too, because they feel like, okay, I'm hugging and I'm moving as a unit. I'm not just

01:52:17.280 like moving my hands in space. Cause a lot of the tendency, if you're just doing these band

01:52:20.700 exercises for beginners is to try to move with their hands only. I want you to think of your

01:52:26.160 hands being united with your belly button and core and you're moving it as a unit. Cause that's 1.00

01:52:31.260 how you're actually going to train the core itself. So if you find that your arms are

01:52:33.920 independently moving, lock them up with that physio ball. And that sort of helps to do that.

01:52:38.440 Let's talk about Dorian Yates in the back. Again, notwithstanding the fact that like a

01:52:42.980 bodybuilder will break this down into every possible angle of the back. But if we're just

01:52:46.540 talking about this through the lens of normal people who are going to throw eight to 12 sets

01:52:50.720 per week at the entirety of their back, inclusive of traps, rhomboids, lats, the whole thing,

01:52:56.860 even the lower muscles, the erector spinae muscles, how would you create a protocol?

01:53:00.140 and again always for the person who is saying look i want more of a v-shape i want to taper

01:53:05.200 down here a little bit i have to get my lats bigger what are the mistakes and how do we need

01:53:08.760 to train the back is obviously made up of a lot of muscles and it's a big area the most effective

01:53:14.660 way i think to look at it programmatically is to think vertical pulling horizontal pulling low

01:53:20.200 back specific upper back focus right upper back scapular type retraction work so the upper back

01:53:28.980 work pulling versus the vertical or horizontal pulling is mostly dictated again by the positioning

01:53:34.560 of those elbows like we referenced earlier like the more those elbows drift during like say a

01:53:39.840 seated row and they drift higher the more you're going to get into that extension of the arm as

01:53:44.840 the main focus so you're going to get more of this mid back rhomboids upper traps mid traps

01:53:50.340 that's going to be tapped into the most when you allow the elbows to drift if you do a row which

01:53:56.760 should be a basic compound exercise to perform, then you're going to get more of the lats if

01:54:01.820 you're doing that with a tighter arm position. The issue with the row could be that someone with a

01:54:08.300 low back issues or weakness might find that any freestanding row position could be challenging

01:54:13.000 where they start to fatigue more in the low back prior to their lats. In that case, the chest

01:54:18.380 supported row done face down on an incline bench gives you the option to continue to overload your

01:54:23.720 lats as you start to build up your low back strength. I don't ever recommend you do chest

01:54:28.620 supported rowing and that's where you stay. I think everyone should be able to row under load

01:54:33.040 from a standing position. And so you just have to work your way up to the point where you can do

01:54:37.300 that. That's where the low back strengthening comes in. Okay, so you're working your way up

01:54:42.320 from your chest supported row to your standing barbell row variation, but at the same time,

01:54:46.840 you're working on your low back. You got to strengthen your low back. And there's a lot of

01:54:50.240 ways to do that. I like classic hyperextensions over a physio ball. I like reverse hyperextensions

01:54:57.100 just to my favorite ways to do that. I like Superman type exercises where you're laying

01:55:01.800 flat on the ground and you're raising your thighs off the ground the same time that you're raising

01:55:05.760 your arms up because then we could stimulate some of that upper back muscles too. Those are the

01:55:09.760 things that look a little rehab-ish but at the same time they're only looking rehab-ish because

01:55:14.440 they're exercises that you never do and they're exercises that target smaller areas relative to

01:55:20.220 they're larger neighbors let's go through the superman as an example so if you're doing that

01:55:26.040 what constitutes a working set failure how many reps how long a hold how do you think about it

01:55:32.300 anything where especially these corrective type exercises because i say corrective like you're

01:55:36.440 correcting a week low back in this case so these corrective exercises they should always be done

01:55:41.160 with a mentality of really good high quality repetitions so i hate when we say do a set of

01:55:49.400 15 of these. I'd rather you think of that as doing 15 sets of one, right? I want you to feel

01:55:55.840 every single one of those purposely in the low back. And also in a Superman, you're trying to

01:56:02.560 teach the low back to be supported by the glutes. One of the biggest reasons why we get low back

01:56:07.380 issues is because the glutes are not doing their job to basically support the pelvis from below.

01:56:13.320 And so it's causing the low back to have to take on more of the brunt of that. So the low back

01:56:17.680 gets overworked if you can do the exercise where you squeeze in this case the squeeze your glutes

01:56:22.940 together first get that stability then lift off the ground and get into this extension then you're

01:56:29.000 going to feel it differently but you're going to feel it properly so doing enough of those in this

01:56:33.640 15 sets of one mentality will start to get that neuromuscular re-education that's lost it's not

01:56:39.920 so much about being able to overcome huge loads there it's about being able to train the muscle

01:56:44.940 neuromuscularly to start to respond more effectively. So I think when you start to do

01:56:50.680 some of those exercises and work them in, and I work them into regular back day, it's the end,

01:56:56.040 but it's just no less important than the heavier vertical pull or push exercises.

01:57:01.800 I see. So we're going to hit lower back primarily through the horizontal and vertical stuff. So for

01:57:07.440 example, a seated unsupported cable row, when you're going heavy, your lower back has to do a

01:57:12.040 lot of work if you're doing a standing row more so in the standing row yeah yeah so that's where

01:57:15.520 you're getting lower back but then you'll finish it with the superman with direct work yeah got it

01:57:20.160 yeah and try not to be bored with them thinking that there's something remedial there they're

01:57:23.860 just as important as the other exercises because they help to connect those weak links that are

01:57:29.820 probably taking away some of the capacity you have on the bigger exercises because they are the weak

01:57:35.080 link going back to the kind of workhorses of this are the vertical and horizontal pulling

01:57:40.280 but the key is if you're doing this for the purpose of your lats keep the elbows in elbows

01:57:45.840 are gonna be tighter yeah so you do not need wide grip activity here you don't need a wide grip lat

01:57:51.500 pull down like if you used to think yeah well i want a v-shape i should be grabbing the thing out

01:57:56.060 as far as possible but really you don't need to no the wider the grip actually you start to shift

01:58:01.040 the focus to the muscle called the teres major which is they call it the lat helper so it does

01:58:05.780 functionally very much the same, but the angle of the hands being that far out actually shifts

01:58:10.680 more of the load away from the lats to the terriers major. Again, aesthetically, something

01:58:15.000 that a bodybuilder would want, it's going to actually support the overall appearance of what

01:58:18.940 you're seeing back there. But functionally for 99% of us, you don't need to go that wide to do that.

01:58:23.940 And you're probably just inviting some awkwardness to the shoulder joint that you might feel the

01:58:29.380 repercussions of down the road. And then upper back and scaps specifically, what are sort of

01:58:35.480 your favorite activities? My favorite is the face pull. I talk about the face pull all the time.

01:58:39.820 I like the face pull because it isn't necessarily just the corrective in nature. It could actually

01:58:44.900 be loaded up enough to cause hypertrophy of the rear delt, the mid traps, the rhomboids,

01:58:51.120 the rear delts. Like it's got a lot of benefits. Tell people how you like to do it. You're doing

01:58:54.520 with a rope, you're standing in front of a cable machine. So it's definitely become a lot more

01:58:58.100 popular since I've talked about it for many years, which I love seeing. I see people literally do it

01:59:02.080 in the gym now, but there's two ways to do it. The first thing is you really should attach two

01:59:07.780 gym ropes to the device to be able to do this properly. When you do one, like the regular gym

01:59:13.300 rope that we see in all the gyms, it's not long enough to get the elbows open enough to a 90

01:59:20.000 degree angle. What's going to happen is your elbows are going to be bent in this position.

01:59:23.740 The bending of the elbows, once you add weight, starts to drive what? Starts to drive your hands

01:59:29.100 forward and your shoulder into internal rotation. So if I can get my hands wider, it's still going

01:59:33.800 to promote internal rotation, but I wind up being able to get into a stronger position here and work

01:59:39.060 external rotation. Like I have a target to go towards external rotation. I can't here. With

01:59:43.180 the short rope, I can't. So by attaching the two ropes, now I have enough length in each hand.

01:59:49.360 And then what I try to do is, again, get a good stable base. I don't usually perform these out of

01:59:54.880 a split stance i usually do them out of a squared up feet even with each other's stance and the

02:00:00.480 reason why i do that is i think it's a good way to limit the amount of load that you're using there

02:00:06.620 so while i think you can go a little heavier here i don't think you should be loading these up so

02:00:11.340 heavy that you're relying on a split stance to get so much stability that you can pull that weight

02:00:15.060 back so it gives you a nice top end when you can't balance yourself anymore and you're being pulled

02:00:20.360 forward on the exercise because you're probably doing too much. Now we use the pulling of the

02:00:26.200 hands as the guidelines. I don't want to just pull the elbows back because I might let the hands

02:00:30.780 lag behind. To get external rotation at the shoulder, I need to drive with the back of my

02:00:35.240 hands. So if I can think about opening my elbows up or opening my chest up, squeezing those scapular

02:00:40.600 muscles together, and then pulling my hands back, that's how you want to perform the face pull. At

02:00:45.280 the end of it, you want to have, almost looks like you're doing a double bicep flex for someone who's

02:00:49.020 looking at you from the front or the back. You have those 90 degree angles and you're pulling

02:00:52.700 straight back. At that point, there's one other little tweak that I think is amazing if people

02:00:57.040 can handle it, is you then from this position, not only you increasing your tension and time

02:01:02.300 under tension in that spot, but you raise your arms up overhead. So what you're doing there is

02:01:06.420 in this peak contracted position, now you're raising your arms up and that starts to get

02:01:11.700 into the lower traps. So lower traps have a lot of control and function when you raise up overhead

02:01:17.160 and the shoulder blades are rotating.

02:01:19.000 They provide good stability there.

02:01:20.560 So you're adding one other element to the exercise

02:01:24.080 at a very little extra cost.

02:01:26.720 And it just simply requires a raising

02:01:28.820 and then a lowering of the hands back again

02:01:31.020 to where they started.

02:01:32.100 And then you let the weights go back

02:01:33.300 to the beginning position.

02:01:34.480 So you're just basically adding one additional raise

02:01:36.640 at the end position and then let the arm go back.

02:01:39.220 So it's basically a face pull and press.

02:01:41.240 And again, it's really,

02:01:42.140 you're really overlapping rear delt here as well, correct?

02:01:45.320 I mean, you're hitting that rear delt again.

02:01:47.160 Is that an argument for doing delts

02:01:49.160 on the same day you do back?

02:01:50.740 I do that a lot.

02:01:51.700 I look at upper back and delts

02:01:53.960 as having a lot of shared functions.

02:01:56.120 So I think that you can pair them up

02:01:57.700 if you're trying to do the agonist muscles

02:02:00.040 working together.

02:02:01.620 All right, let's talk about legs

02:02:03.860 in any way you see fit.

02:02:05.200 Do you want to talk about quads, hamsterings?

02:02:08.160 Or do you want to talk about everything

02:02:09.100 from the knee to the hips as one,

02:02:10.560 and let's just go through it?

02:02:11.660 No, I think you split them up.

02:02:13.000 I think of them sort of as anterior, posterior.

02:02:15.680 But even within that,

02:02:16.540 I think there's exercises that stress the hamstrings from a lengthened position and

02:02:22.620 those that stress them from a knee flexed position.

02:02:25.820 And anteriorly, I mean, I think when we're talking about the quads, we have a lot of

02:02:29.900 different options from squatting that will do a great job.

02:02:33.120 The squatting will hit the posterior chain too.

02:02:34.820 So let's start with anterior.

02:02:37.240 If you were to do the anterior and you wanted a more quad focused option, then there's a

02:02:41.540 couple of things that you could do.

02:02:42.720 Number one, you can carry the weight more anteriorly.

02:02:45.920 So that's why we have the front squat, cyclist squads, all these.

02:02:48.760 That gives us a chance to direct some of the load a little bit more effectively towards

02:02:53.400 the quads.

02:02:53.960 I love the front squat.

02:02:55.120 You have to be okay with the fact that you're not gonna be able to handle as much weight

02:02:58.660 there.

02:02:59.120 But again, that's almost irrelevant when we're talking about at the end of the day, it's

02:03:02.660 the tension the muscle feels.

02:03:03.860 It's not the actual weight that's on the side of the barbell or dumbbells.

02:03:07.580 So that gives you that chance.

02:03:08.980 A goblet squat would be another option for that.

02:03:10.940 The transition between the two is a belt squat because that weight gets directed more directly

02:03:16.360 downward.

02:03:17.320 I love the belt squat because it doesn't require the loading on the back for people

02:03:21.200 that don't have the strength to support that.

02:03:23.040 And I have an exercise that I like to do, which is a squat variation called the Spanish

02:03:28.760 squat.

02:03:29.740 And you basically take a band and you put it around the back of your knees, take your

02:03:34.580 pair of dumbbells, usually done with dumbbells, you back away from the band.

02:03:37.520 If you were to let the band pull you, it's already pulling your knees into flexion.

02:03:41.300 It's trying to drive you into flexion.

02:03:42.980 The only way to get that band to get into the proper position is to drive your knees

02:03:47.360 back against the resistance of that band.

02:03:49.360 So you're getting really resisted terminal knee extension.

02:03:52.340 Now you have your dumbbells at your sides.

02:03:54.520 You reach down to the ground, you pick them up.

02:03:56.000 Now you squat down.

02:03:57.720 As you squat down, obviously your knees are flexing.

02:04:00.200 You get down to the bottom of the squat and you can go pretty as heavy as you can hold

02:04:02.920 the dumbbells here.

02:04:03.700 So you can go 60s, 80s, 100s, whatever you can hold.

02:04:06.540 As you come back up to the top, you get toward that last 20 degrees or so.

02:04:10.940 You have to drive your knees up against the resistance of that band to get that fully

02:04:14.680 extended knee.

02:04:15.540 It's basically taking the elements of a leg extension, but because you're doing it in

02:04:19.600 a closed chain way with your feet in contact with the ground, it's brutal, but it's a great

02:04:23.980 combination of an exercise.

02:04:25.220 It takes a regular squat and it adds an element of resisted knee extension at the end that's

02:04:30.420 just amazing.

02:04:31.560 I like doing that.

02:04:32.540 If people are limited by their grip strength, they're not able to load heavy enough because

02:04:38.380 they can't hold that weight, then that may not be a great option for them. But a lot of times

02:04:42.640 they're overcoming that because of the added resistance of the band. That makes it so difficult.

02:04:47.620 I also have taken to Bulgarian split squats as a favorite of mine because I know that

02:04:53.060 I can effectively hit the quads more one leg at a time, which is another benefit.

02:04:59.000 So when you're doing a Bulgarian or rear foot elevated, you're fatiguing in the front of your

02:05:04.100 leg more than the back of your leg?

02:05:05.420 if you maintain your upright posture.

02:05:07.360 So the big cue there is to maintain

02:05:08.800 as tall of a chest position as you can.

02:05:11.040 A lot of times what we'll do is we'll go down

02:05:13.160 into the exercise and angle forward.

02:05:15.440 As we angle forward, that is gonna quickly

02:05:17.940 and significantly shift the load to your posterior chain,

02:05:21.600 to the glutes, and of course the quads too,

02:05:24.100 but more so to the glutes as you start to lean forward more.

02:05:27.220 If you maintain an exaggerated and not in a harmful way,

02:05:31.080 but an exaggerated way, your upright posture,

02:05:34.100 just don't allow yourself to sink forward, then you're going to hit the quads very strongly in

02:05:38.520 that. Same thing with a reverse lunge. Absolutely. One of my favorite exercises for posterior

02:05:43.480 anterior, depending upon how much angle of my torso I allow. Okay. It's funny cause we're kind

02:05:48.900 of talking legs in general anyway. Yeah. It's impossible for me to think about legs as anterior

02:05:53.760 posterior. I just think of legs as legs and the balance shifts a little bit between, am I lifting

02:05:59.460 my heels am I not lifting my heels and yeah you don't hear me talk much about if my exercise

02:06:04.620 favorites were the leg extension you might hear me speak a little bit more like that but

02:06:08.920 anteriorly I know I can shift the focus by positioning the body differently in space but I

02:06:16.060 don't have a lot of go-to specific hey quads I'm really focused on the quads here because I don't

02:06:21.560 do a lot of leg extensions they're not a great exercise personally for me for my knees given my

02:06:26.700 history of knee issues. And for a lot of people, they don't feel so great. If you can do the

02:06:30.560 exercise and there are no issues with pain, it's the equivalent of a concentration curl for the

02:06:35.660 biceps. If somebody is saying, you know, my legs are just so skinny. I really just want to put

02:06:40.640 some muscle mass on my legs. What are you saying? Is this where, hey, we got to go up to 16 sets

02:06:45.740 working in a day. I want you to focus just on the compound lifts or like what guiding principles do

02:06:51.340 you give that person who's trying to put some muscle on their legs? Definitely have to go

02:06:55.640 heavy enough. I think that a lot of times people don't go heavy enough with their leg training.

02:07:00.420 And I think that legs respond a little bit more to slightly higher volumes. So I think rather than

02:07:06.900 potentially doing more and more in one day, which you really start to, you know, how fast you can

02:07:11.800 tap out when it comes to leg training, it'd be better to probably just schedule a second session

02:07:16.160 in the week, volume-wise increasing the number of sessions that you're training legs. So that's

02:07:21.180 where these options of being able to shift the focus a little bit around anterior posterior

02:07:25.320 gives you some flexibility and not doing the same exact workout twice but it gives you a chance to

02:07:31.580 train your legs and stimulate them twice so you have more opportunity but being able to build

02:07:38.040 bigger legs I mean some of us are just never going to be able to build them as big as others

02:07:43.520 because it tends to be one of those areas like the calves that are just genetically I call them

02:07:48.380 calves are calf knots and i'm a calf knot for sure the leg growth and size and strength and power

02:07:53.960 even from the athletes like it's quite oftentimes something you're born with but not that you can't

02:07:59.180 improve at all but that's something that's heavily influenced by genetics so what we want to have is

02:08:04.940 a good rotation of movements and basically say look if i'm going to just try to do it all in

02:08:10.700 one day i'm going to get 12 to 14 16 sets working for legs on a given day i'm going to pick and

02:08:17.500 choose from these exercises and i'm not necessarily doing the same workout every time yeah definitely

02:08:22.160 not you don't have to do the same workout every time even just between if i had to choose between

02:08:26.720 reverse barbell or dumbbell lunges and bulgarian split squats both similar in that you wouldn't do

02:08:32.520 those two on the same day necessarily i don't need to because the positioning of the legs is similar

02:08:36.600 enough i don't necessarily need to do that one is more dynamic than the other so i factor that in

02:08:42.420 And when I think about programming, like the lunges is going to be more dynamic, whereas

02:08:46.720 you're more fixed in the Bulgarian split squat.

02:08:49.980 But I'd want to have something that I wasn't potentially being limited by balance or coordination

02:08:55.140 that every time I trained my legs, it was some sort of a squared up, balanced out squat,

02:09:01.960 two footed squat.

02:09:02.940 I mean, the problem I have with training legs, which I enjoy, I really, for whatever reason,

02:09:06.840 I've always enjoyed it since I was very young.

02:09:09.140 there's just too much to do because in addition to all of the exercises you just went through

02:09:16.020 which are important for strength hypertrophy there are all these sort of unsexy things that

02:09:21.540 we have to do as well we've got to get all that glued mead training in we've got to make sure we

02:09:25.200 get the adductors working and they're not really adding size but they are adding time to the

02:09:30.700 workout so how do you think about making sure people are doing a lot of the lateral movement

02:09:35.520 with the legs, like really dumb looking things, curtsy squats, things like you just got to kind

02:09:40.720 of do those things. The same way that we talked about the low back being the stuff that it can 0.70

02:09:46.240 be relegated towards the end of the workout requiring less of your energy, but it's still

02:09:50.460 part of the workout and it's no less important. As a matter of fact, it's just as important for

02:09:54.600 me. That is the glute med training. It is the fact that we don't get a lot of frontal plane

02:10:00.960 stimulus from the bigger, more popular exercise. All the ones we just mentioned, lunging,

02:10:06.340 split squatting and squatting, they're all sagittal plane exercises. So unless we are

02:10:11.300 lunging laterally or if we're doing- Like a caustic.

02:10:14.820 A caustic we could do. But that's not going to give you much hypertrophy, right?

02:10:17.600 It depends. I mean, it depends on how, on a caustic, I mean, if you're getting deep into

02:10:21.320 that squat and you're- Yeah, that's fair.

02:10:22.860 Yeah. I mean, again, it's that same tension equation. Like as long as the tension is high

02:10:26.400 enough and you're overcoming it and fatiguing because of it and reaching failure because of it,

02:10:30.200 then you're going to gain benefits in hypertrophy.

02:10:33.500 But the ones that I think about for glute medius,

02:10:36.660 like I have a series of exercises

02:10:38.400 where we do hip bumps against the wall.

02:10:41.200 All you're doing is letting yourself drop down

02:10:43.600 to, this one's a little bit hard to describe,

02:10:46.260 but you're essentially standing close to a wall.

02:10:48.320 You're standing on your outside leg,

02:10:49.920 so not the inside leg.

02:10:51.000 The inside leg is just lifted off the floor.

02:10:53.100 You're letting your hips get lazy, I say.

02:10:54.920 You're letting your hips drop out to the side,

02:10:56.800 straight in the frontal plane,

02:10:57.860 just letting it kind of bump out, away from the wall.

02:11:00.200 And then from there, all you're going to do is just drive yourself back to where you're,

02:11:04.220 because at that point, your pelvis is going to be tilted towards the wall.

02:11:06.920 You're going to drive yourself to a level pelvis.

02:11:09.180 That's coming strictly from the glute medius and abducting the hip in to get into that

02:11:14.620 position.

02:11:15.140 And sorry, what do you call that exercise?

02:11:16.700 I call it just a hip drop or a hip bump.

02:11:19.000 You'll feel that very quickly and you'll realize how weak you are in that plane, even if you

02:11:24.080 are a heavy squatter.

02:11:25.780 Because if you're not-

02:11:26.400 Yeah, totally different.

02:11:26.840 Right.

02:11:27.080 If you're not doing it, you're not doing it.

02:11:28.540 Those muscles aren't really as active,

02:11:31.120 nearly as active in that position as they are

02:11:33.040 when you're doing a regular squat.

02:11:34.640 These are humbling exercises,

02:11:36.320 but they're no less important to do.

02:11:38.360 You need to get over the fact that,

02:11:39.960 okay, I'm pretty weak here.

02:11:41.420 We had some of the best athletes in the world

02:11:43.440 I would have do these exercises,

02:11:44.960 or even we would test people

02:11:46.700 by having them get on their stomach

02:11:48.740 and essentially bend their knees, 0.60

02:11:51.820 and then I would rotate their leg in or out, right?

02:11:54.660 So from that, I'm using their leg as a fulcrum,

02:11:56.800 and I'm basically rotating it out.

02:11:58.540 The degree to which I can control that leg in space when I tell them, don't let me move it

02:12:03.420 is crazy. They just don't have the external rotation strength. No, none. I mean,

02:12:09.140 and we're talking about best athletes in the world. Yeah. Seriously powerful people

02:12:12.320 because they don't train that enough. You could actually train that motion specifically by

02:12:17.160 literally getting a band anchored to something stable and then putting yourself in that position

02:12:22.280 on your stomach and rotating against that resistance. You can work it. Is it goofy looking?

02:12:27.220 Yeah, I mean, if you're doing that in a gym, it would be goofy looking.

02:12:29.980 Would you feel self-conscious because it's hard to do and you can't even imagine why

02:12:34.000 you can't make your leg move like that?

02:12:36.280 Sure, but it doesn't negate how important it still is.

02:12:39.680 And when we're talking about people with low back issues or hip pain, these become a factor

02:12:46.060 because it matters.

02:12:47.660 It matters getting those weak muscles to become more imbalanced with the other dominant muscles

02:12:52.040 is going to provide more stability for that joint and then take some of the load and stress

02:12:56.080 off the muscles that are trying to do too much like the low back okay now again i'm keeping this

02:13:00.660 deliberately away from the recovery side because there's so much more we could talk about on how

02:13:05.680 to stabilize a knee and things like that but i'm trying to keep this to the aesthetic let's finish

02:13:09.860 it up with calves two big muscles what are the principles around training calves again we're

02:13:15.700 talking about those of us who are don't have these genetically perfect calves you see on uh the odd

02:13:22.040 specimen. So you mentioned two muscles. So there's the gastrocnemius and the soleus.

02:13:27.480 Gastroc is one that crosses the knee. Again, there's these muscles, right? We talked about

02:13:32.180 before the triceps, some of these that cross those joints. It crosses the knee and the soleus

02:13:38.040 does not. So how you train them is determined by the position of the body when you do it. So to

02:13:42.820 hit the gastroc most effectively, you're doing them from these straight knee positioned exercises

02:13:48.360 like a standing calf raise or toes in, toes out,

02:13:51.360 whatever that variation might be.

02:13:53.340 To do the soleus, you wouldn't necessarily need

02:13:55.540 to have that knee straight, you could have a knee bent.

02:13:57.520 So any of those seated calf raises are gonna do that.

02:13:59.980 The biggest thing that I think I've advocated for

02:14:02.640 when it comes to calf training is the removal

02:14:05.380 of the ballistic element of the exercise

02:14:10.040 because the calves, the Achilles is so accustomed

02:14:13.700 to handling the ballistic transition from foot on the ground, midfoot, absorbing those forces

02:14:21.220 and then locking up and propelling you into the next step. So good at handling those quick

02:14:26.440 transitions. By the way, I just want to pause on that for a second, Jeff, sorry to interrupt.

02:14:29.980 I just don't think from an anatomic perspective, we appreciate how remarkable that part of our body

02:14:37.220 is oh gosh the ability of the foot achilles calf complex to navigate us through the world

02:14:45.260 it is in many ways sort of heartbreaking when you come across somebody who's never taken advantage

02:14:51.420 of it they've never run they've never jumped and they're now in mid late life and they're shuffling

02:14:57.980 around and that achilles has atrophied away those muscles are not reactive anymore the tendon

02:15:05.940 doesn't have the supple nature to do all those things and yet you realize we were all born with

02:15:10.500 the capacity to do something as dramatic as a broad jump or sprint jump off a box the forces

02:15:17.340 that are required to me it's the timing too the timing is so precise you're basically asking your

02:15:23.960 foot from the moment it hits the ground the midfoot which is just a series of bones in there

02:15:29.300 right that are all sort of aligned to become adaptable to the surface so they loosen they

02:15:34.720 literally loosen they loosen through that active pronation of the ankle complex and the foot

02:15:39.260 complex so as it starts to hit the ground you're getting this loosening of those bones so that you

02:15:44.140 can adapt to the surface they call it a mobile adapter function of the foot so you can adapt

02:15:48.540 because maybe the ground's rocky or a hill you're running you can't just be rigid so it gets into

02:15:53.620 that position and then it has to be able to within a moment's notice if you're running especially

02:15:58.040 be able to as it's being brought back behind you again into extension quickly shift from being

02:16:04.440 mobile and loose from to be able to absorb the forces there and not just jolt your entire knee

02:16:09.880 and hip joint to then becoming rigid and locked up to become basically a propulsion maneuver like a

02:16:15.960 lever that's going to then drive you into the next step so it happens in microseconds to be able to

02:16:22.040 go from this to this to this to this completely opposite functions and if it doesn't handle it

02:16:26.960 well and it stays a mobile adapter for too long when you go to propel yourself you don't have

02:16:32.740 that rigidness to basically lever your body off the ground. Now you're going to rely too much on

02:16:37.960 the structures in there to try to do that. That's where you start to get plantar fasciitis. You

02:16:42.220 start to get Achilles tendonitis. All these things start to go wrong. Same thing if you don't have

02:16:47.000 a good enough adapter to the surface, then every step you take becomes too jolting to all those

02:16:54.580 joints up that kinetic chain. They're going to have to absorb the force that the foot couldn't.

02:16:58.700 It is definitely remarkable.

02:17:01.320 And so with all of that said,

02:17:03.560 we could do an entire podcast

02:17:04.760 on just how you do that.

02:17:05.960 Fortunately, we've done a bunch of content on that.

02:17:08.260 But now coming back to this main principle,

02:17:10.340 you're saying, look, if you want those muscles,

02:17:12.480 the soleus and the gastroc to get bigger,

02:17:14.800 you can't let the body cheat its way out

02:17:17.980 of doing what it's so good at,

02:17:19.480 which is what it was designed to do.

02:17:20.680 That's what it was designed for.

02:17:21.280 So I think there's a hack to calf training

02:17:24.020 is to try to turn off that responsibility

02:17:27.000 of the Achilles tendon

02:17:28.340 so that it's not trying to jump in

02:17:30.240 and ballistically do what it does,

02:17:31.800 but it forces the muscles to almost inefficiently,

02:17:34.740 temporarily, because that's what we're trying to do

02:17:36.180 is inefficiently stress them so they can grow,

02:17:39.020 is it makes them do more of the work.

02:17:40.760 So you go into a bottomed out position,

02:17:43.080 you stay there for four seconds,

02:17:44.620 and then you start to come out of that position.

02:17:46.380 You do it slow and controlled.

02:17:47.540 You don't try to explode that position

02:17:49.060 because you can quickly turn back

02:17:51.740 to that tendon and elasticity to do the job.

02:17:54.260 I'm talking about making the muscles inefficiently

02:17:56.600 have to slowly contract and drive your body out of that position. And doing it one leg at a time

02:18:01.380 tends to allow for the overload that people don't get when they're just doing these two-legged

02:18:06.380 exercises. So if you don't have external load from a machine or a calf raise or something like that,

02:18:11.820 you can do it more effectively one leg at a time. But the biggest key is to lower yourself slowly,

02:18:17.900 stay down in that position for four seconds, and then kind of drive yourself up out of that

02:18:22.320 ever slower graded pace than just explosively getting out of that position. And that's the

02:18:27.000 same thing, whether you're doing the seated calf raise, focus more on soleus or whether you're

02:18:30.720 doing the standing calf raise. There's so much literature on this and I've seen it. And it's

02:18:34.560 very interesting that shows that if you're just training for hypertrophy and strength and not

02:18:39.340 sort of injury recovery, I've seen different things that say range of motion doesn't matter

02:18:43.160 as much as people think it does, or it's the bottom half versus the top half of the range

02:18:46.620 emotion. Any thoughts on that? For hypertrophy? Yeah. I think that all of that content got like

02:18:52.060 a little wayward in the last year or so to the point where I was seeing recommendations of

02:18:57.000 avoiding the concentric on exercises, like working on the stretch position, that sort of terminal

02:19:03.000 position of the exercise and the contracted position didn't matter as much. First of all,

02:19:07.140 it didn't sound right to me back then. And I think research is starting to already prove that not to

02:19:10.980 be the case. None of that makes sense to me as a physical therapist. From a function perspective.

02:19:15.440 A hundred percent. And ultimately, even hypertrophy is going to still require normal

02:19:21.100 functioning to maximize that muscle. So I think that you want to apply, I think where that all

02:19:27.720 came from is that stretching a muscle is another form of stimulus. It's another form of tension.

02:19:33.940 The weight itself provides that tension. When you stretch the muscle, you're adding a second

02:19:37.480 form of tension. To believe that stretching positions of exercises cause better results

02:19:43.920 is not a surprise because it's providing more accumulated attention but to think that that

02:19:48.820 would mean okay let's just hang out in this position and let's not focus on this other

02:19:53.060 range of motion requirement certainly not for strength but even for hypertrophy i don't think

02:19:57.220 it really adds up or makes too much sense what about a volume perspective on the calves they're

02:20:02.200 kind of an unusual muscle in that they're being used a lot throughout the day every day is there

02:20:07.780 an argument that you can't just train them once a week if you want to make gains i actually think

02:20:12.440 that's true. I think that they're similar almost to the abs in a way and that the abs are also

02:20:17.260 highly responsible for postural stability and they're working very often, not under high loads,

02:20:23.500 but they're working very often. So I think that when it comes to the calves, they're used to

02:20:27.140 handling very high loads. They're carrying your own body weight around one leg at a time for many,

02:20:32.740 many steps in a day. Subjecting them to more of this focused, inefficient hypertrophy work

02:20:37.980 more than once a week is certainly worthwhile, probably two to three times a week, maybe even

02:20:43.660 four times a week. It's like, again, like abs, you don't have to do it for a long period of time.

02:20:47.540 Couple sets, just do it focused and get it done. I don't think for ab training, I don't spend more

02:20:52.540 than, I hate to say it, like six minute abs, five to 10 minutes, you're done. You don't need to do

02:20:56.700 a whole hell of a lot, but you need to do it consistently. Yeah. Okay. Not to create rage bait,

02:21:02.060 but can you give me some of the other graveyard exercises? We've talked about a couple. You've

02:21:06.460 actually got a great video on this, which we'll link to, but just to give people a precursor for

02:21:10.320 what goes on the, and again, we'll frame it as not that these are absolutes just for the people

02:21:16.020 who can't work in gray. These are things that for most people, you're not getting enough juice out

02:21:22.360 of the squeeze. Your risk of injury is going up disproportionate to the gains. And you might be

02:21:28.040 able to get somewhere between 90 and a hundred percent of these gains doing something at far

02:21:32.380 lower risk. That's what we're talking. That's the whole premise. And I believe that you're always

02:21:36.060 going to find the person who says, I've done these my whole life. And nothing happened to me.

02:21:41.320 Yep. And my grandmother smoked her entire life and didn't die of lung cancer. That doesn't mean

02:21:45.900 that everybody should smoke. That's the way to think about my, my answer. Sometimes if I want

02:21:49.820 to get them a little irritated, I said, yeah, we're doing it my whole life. Well, it hasn't

02:21:54.820 done it yet. Who knows? Because I'm pointing to the parts of the exercise that are just not

02:21:59.640 biomechanically ideal. And therefore, just like the exercise I described before, where especially

02:22:06.740 you start to add fatigue into the equation, they increase the risk that you're going to break form

02:22:11.580 enough to potentially cause issues. In that regard, I hate the upright row. I have no problem

02:22:17.380 expressing my hatred for that exercise. It is the dumbest single exercise that was ever created 1.00

02:22:23.320 simply because I can fix it by just changing one position of the elbow and the wrist. That's it. 0.98

02:22:28.880 And you can still have your upright row, but just let's call it something different.

02:22:32.940 Let's call it a high pull because the upright row is essentially relying on the fact that

02:22:37.540 you're going to pull this barbell or dumbbells as high as you can towards your chin, lead

02:22:42.020 with your elbows, get as high as you can, which I can't even do because of these shoulders

02:22:45.960 of mine, but get as high as you can with your elbows to the point where some people, you've

02:22:49.600 probably seen them, they look like their elbows are almost vertical, right?

02:22:52.020 Exactly.

02:22:52.400 You do a much better job than me of doing the wrong thing.

02:22:54.940 But I basically think not only are you getting into this extreme position, but you're loading

02:23:01.180 it.

02:23:01.640 What am I loading?

02:23:02.400 I'm loading internal rotation.

02:23:03.800 I'm driving this arm, this shoulder into internal rotation under load and elevation.

02:23:09.120 What all I have to do is just lead with the wrists rather and keep the elbows down.

02:23:15.060 And I'm still pulling high and I'm still getting up into this position.

02:23:18.040 I'm still getting abduction of the shoulder, which is why you feel in the shoulders.

02:23:20.860 I'm still getting trap work, which is what you're going to feel when you do the upright

02:23:23.720 row also.

02:23:24.300 and all I've done was just change one position

02:23:26.420 that doesn't sacrifice any of the benefit of the exercise.

02:23:29.700 Sacrifice is none of the benefit.

02:23:31.340 So if you ever wanted to heat me up

02:23:33.120 and talk about one exercise that belongs in the graveyard,

02:23:35.700 that's the one that will always be in the graveyard for me.

02:23:38.480 And there really is not a defense of it.

02:23:40.060 If you've done it and you like it

02:23:41.640 and you haven't gotten injured with it,

02:23:43.100 then keep doing it.

02:23:43.840 But why would you not at least consider

02:23:46.040 an alternative that sacrifices,

02:23:48.740 you said maybe 90% of the value.

02:23:50.420 This still has 100% of the value without the risk.

02:23:53.060 So why wouldn't you try that?

02:23:54.040 So that's one, these behind the neck positions that we talked about, the press, overhead

02:23:59.200 press, lat pull down, but there's leeway there.

02:24:02.940 Some people feel it more, I think, when they do it behind the neck for whatever reason.

02:24:06.940 Depends what it means though.

02:24:08.280 Yeah.

02:24:08.580 I mean, like, as you said earlier, you might feel it in terms of a stretch more when you're

02:24:13.500 doing a deep fly off the bench, but be careful what you're feeling.

02:24:16.980 Like, yes, of course you feel it more.

02:24:18.460 You're going to feel more of a stretch in the lower bicep, but that's not why we're

02:24:21.240 doing the exercise.

02:24:21.840 I always wonder when people say,

02:24:23.780 I feel it more if they feel it more

02:24:26.340 where they should feel it more.

02:24:27.960 Another guy, you mentioned Doreen Yates.

02:24:29.440 I used to watch Lee Haney a lot.

02:24:31.240 Remember Lee Haney?

02:24:31.880 So Lee Haney had a shrug that he did behind his back.

02:24:34.640 Oh, I remember this.

02:24:35.360 Right, and he called it Haney shrugs.

02:24:36.460 And he says, and they asked him,

02:24:37.980 why do you do it behind your back?

02:24:39.200 He says, where are the muscles?

02:24:40.120 They're back there, aren't they?

02:24:41.180 So it's like, okay.

02:24:43.000 But when you're an eight time Mr. Olympia

02:24:44.760 or whatever he is,

02:24:45.580 I think you can get away with saying anything.

02:24:47.520 Right, and along the same lines

02:24:48.880 of the barbell positioning 0.95

02:24:49.960 for front squat versus squat,

02:24:51.840 I understand what he's talking about, but I do think that there's this feel element that

02:24:55.540 comes into play there. So if you do the behind the neck pull down, you can

02:25:00.480 safen that up a little bit by just allowing the elbows to not flare back when you're doing it,

02:25:06.000 but let them drift a little bit more towards the front. I can still pull behind my head,

02:25:09.160 but have my elbows drifted more towards that scapular plane. So there's some modifications

02:25:13.360 I can make that would make that exercise better. It's not necessarily a horrible graveyard exercise

02:25:18.820 with this modification but again for many or for most why not pull to the front i think you're

02:25:24.480 going to get a better pull when you pull to the front anyway you're going to get a better

02:25:27.920 engagement of the muscles you're trying to build same thing with the overhead press you could press

02:25:32.340 more safely there you can actually get the elbows out in front of you even when doing that which

02:25:37.500 would allow you to do that but personally i feel like the press from the front just feels better

02:25:42.280 for me and for most what else i think i have this dumbbell side bends in my graveyard i mean that's

02:25:48.340 just a pointless exercise. It's just basically riding the seesaw by yourself up and down.

02:25:53.260 No additional benefit. You're going to more effectively train the obliques with rotational

02:25:56.700 work every day than you are with just straight side bending. They have a function of side bending,

02:26:01.420 but they're going to be way more effectively targeted and trained with rotational work than

02:26:05.060 they are with that. That one's in my graveyard. There's not many more. The fly we talked about

02:26:09.080 was in the graveyard. There's not many more, honestly. I might get the criticism from now

02:26:13.820 and again of creating this graveyard for certain exercises, but I think more than anything else,

02:26:17.940 I'm adaptable to most things because I think that, as we talked about earlier, my biggest

02:26:24.900 asset is my ability to take an exercise and figure out ways to adapt it to become something

02:26:30.480 someone can do even in the face of discomfort at that moment.

02:26:34.500 Because I know how important it is to continue to stress tissues and not immobilize them

02:26:39.900 or not completely get away from them.

02:26:42.120 The fastest way to slow recovery from an injury is to not do something for it.

02:26:49.080 You want to be able to still stress those tissues.

02:26:51.680 Time is not the only thing that heals injuries.

02:26:54.740 Time and the stress, the particular stresses of those tissue structures is what's really

02:27:00.300 important.

02:27:00.800 Mechanical stress is super important to that recovery process.

02:27:04.900 Well, Jeff, this was a super interesting conversation.

02:27:07.200 It's actually given me a lot of ideas for things I want to tweak and modify in my training.

02:27:12.120 I suspect it will be for others.

02:27:13.460 Like I said, we're going to put together in the show notes videos from your archives that

02:27:18.260 will actually demonstrate all these exercises.

02:27:20.660 So my hope is that people can go right to that and become their own trainers, basically,

02:27:25.540 right?

02:27:25.740 It's like, how do I formulate my own workouts here?

02:27:28.120 So anyway, as always, so much fun sitting down with you, Jeff.

02:27:30.920 Really appreciate it.

02:27:31.980 Appreciate you having me on.

02:27:33.640 Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Drive.

02:27:36.920 Head over to peteratiamd.com forward slash show notes.

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The Peter Attia Drive - November 02, 2026

#414 ‒ Resistance training as we age： optimizing exercise selection and training intensity for muscle growth, function, and injury risk management ｜ Jeff Cavaliere, M.S.P.T., C.S.C.S.

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