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A deep dive into the science of muscle growth. Hosted by Chris Beardsley and Jake Doleschal, this podcast explores hypertrophy training through the lens of pre-steroid era bodybuilding and modern muscle physiology.
Jake (00:00)
And welcome back to another episode of Hyperdrophy Past and Present. Thank you guys for joining us once again. Today we have, today we have the first time in our podcast where we've got a second workout from the same person. So I'm interested or I'm excited to share this with you guys so you can actually see how things have progressed along sort of like experience level when someone goes from beginner to a little bit more intermediate to a bit more advanced.
how that sort of changed over time. I'm not gonna get ahead of myself. I'm gonna introduce this in a moment, but before I do, Chris, welcome. How are you today?
Chris (00:32)
Yeah, I'm doing well thanks Jake. Yeah, not too bad at all.
Jake (00:35)
good to hear you're getting ready for some traveling soon so I can see.
Chris (00:39)
I am, yes, always a little bit stressful, yeah, we'll get through it.
Jake (00:43)
I can see suitcases in the background. Anyway, so the plan we're talking about today is another one of Reg Parks. So obviously Reg, you guys, I'm sure are familiar with him, Mr. Universe winner, multi-Mr. Universe winner in the 50s. Basically all of the 50s, was winning Mr. Universe's first man or first bodybuilder to bench 500 pounds. So very strong guy as well.
and obviously one of the most recognizable Sylvia Urielifters. Now, a few weeks ago, I think two weeks ago actually, we did a podcast where we looked at one of his bulking routines. Obviously, Reg is well known for this sort five by five routine, which isn't sort of a classic five by five. I could sound a little bit differently, but we talked about that. And we looked at what you would kind of call an abbreviated workout plan. So it had fewer exercises, had more sets, heavy loads.
And the exercise variation was relatively limited. And that was a fairly common thing for some of these silvic real lifters to do at certain periods where they would focus more on, I guess, more on compound lifts, more on weight gaining, more on strength gaining. And then they would talk about changing that routine to stuff that was gonna develop a little bit more shape and that would include more isolation exercises. So today, what I wanted to showcase is if your goal is to maximize
If you're we're not talking early beginner, we're not talking just trying to get a bit of weight on we're talking like really trying to develop the entirety of the body. That's gonna look very, very differently. And so the plan I've got today from Grudge, this was a fairly advanced plan. He had a more advanced plan than this. But this was like the, I guess he had like a progression that he wanted people to go through. And this was like the last stage of that progression. It was the fourth.
of that progression and then you have more like advanced specialization stuff like that. So this is a fairly full on phase. Like I just wanna be upfront and be like, hey, there's a lot here, okay? And he suggested people follow just for a short period of time. Again, this is a finite thing. You're not gonna do this indefinitely and then you're gonna, I think he did suggest like a de-load like a week off when you finish this before moving on to a new phase. So again, just reminder.
go back, check out our other episode and just see how things actually change from that sort of earlier beginner weight gaining stage to what he's suggesting here. So without further ado, today's workout. So this was what he called his Mr. Universe courses. So this was published in the early 50s. And like I said, this is the last phase of that sort of four phase kind of training block. So we start with one of my favorite Sylvia girl lifts behind the neck.
barbell overhead press. Three sets of eight. Basically everything here was three sets of eight except for calf raise, which we'll get to that in a moment. So behind the neck, then we moved into standing overhead dumbbell press. Now he did this in a more sagittal plane. So the behind the neck, obviously quite a wide frontal plane position. And now he's going to sagittal plane for dumbbell overhead.
Then he's gone into squat and he, in this plan, he recommended a front squat. He typically would alternate like plans, one phase front squat, one phase back squat. And he did this with heels elevated and he would superset the squat with the bent arm pull over, which they loved doing the silveira. They didn't go to failure with the pull over. They saw it more as a way of expanding the chest. wasn't like a, yeah, it wasn't a particularly, I guess, fatiguing exercise. They just sort of did it between, after the squat.
It was more to kind of get you breathing deeply and heavily. Then he went into a standing calf raise. Now with this, and this is the only phase of seeing him do this, but normally he would do eight to 10. Here he did five sets of 30 repetitions. mean, Chris, what do you think when I say that?
Chris (04:14)
So I think really everything that I could say about this car phrase is gonna be applicable to the rest of the program because as we're gonna see as we get through this, there's a lot of volume here. mean, these workouts, am I correct in thinking that these workouts are done exactly the same three times a week? So there's a lot here because obviously each exercise is three sets of a moderate load.
Jake (04:31)
Yes, yep.
Chris (04:38)
reps. it's not, you know, I mean on face value that would be like perfect, perfectly in line with everything else that we've seen. But as you're probably going to point out as we go through these exercises is that there's many cases where a muscle is being trained multiple times. So you end up with six sets. And you know, I think with the, with the gastroc here in the standing carve race, I don't think the gastroc is going to get trained anywhere else because you know, the soleus will be the prime
and coplanter flexor in the squat. So I don't think we're going to see anything else train gastroc. So actually, I don't think he's doing more sets here with the calves, with the gastroc, than he is with anything else. Or at least not many things. The strangeness is the rep range. So, you know, obviously, know, historically a lot of people have said, you know, I'll train calves with high rep ranges and simultaneously they've complained that their calves don't grow.
Jake (05:20)
Yes.
Chris (05:29)
But I think that's probably just.
What we're seeing here maybe is a little bit of history about where some of that mythology maybe came from. As I always say when we go through these routines together, I always say it'll be fascinating to be still doing this in six months time or a year's time with a totally different level of knowledge and understanding because we'll have seen so many of these programs and described them and analyzed them that maybe we'll get to a point where we can say,
Jake (05:37)
Hmm.
Chris (05:55)
yes, actually, we're starting to see this trend happening or, you know, maybe you'll have some reading that you've done elsewhere that you can bring light to some of these these tendencies. But, you know, at the moment, I don't really have anything insightful to say other than that. Yeah, it's high reps and I wouldn't have expected that.
Jake (06:12)
As you were speaking, one thing you were talking about like the history of it and maybe stuff will evolve and we'll work out maybe why they are doing some of this stuff. And one thing that did come to mind here and you've mentioned this in previous episodes is obviously the limitation with equipment. this is an example where there was different ways that he did the carterism. One way was with a partner, literally having someone on your back. And I was actually...
playing around with different calf exercise yesterday and I was doing donkey calf raises. And one thing that I noticed is I was doing it unloaded. I didn't have someone on my back, I had a machine and I was doing it unloaded and I did it and I was like, oh, this is actually fairly challenging just purely with nothing on me, right? And then I put on 80 kilos and I was like, oh, this doesn't feel any different.
and I think I ended up going 100 kilos or whatever. And it was just by like the position I was in, the stretch I was in, like that was the most challenging part. And the low didn't make a whole heap of difference there. And I wonder, like, and again, like I said, I put it in, put on 100 kilos or whatever, and I was still doing 12 reps or whatever it was with it. And if he's literally using someone's body weight for the resistance here, okay, I can see why you'd be doing 25, 30 repetitions.
Like maybe it's literally just coming back to the limitation here with load. So it is a interesting, I guess, question to ponder. Anyway, so then we had, so Stanley Kauffray, so then we did inclined dumbbell bench. And then from the inclined dumbbell bench, he went to a flat bench.
Now in this program he used dumbbells, often he used a wide grip barbell, but he was using dumbbells as well. So we've got an incline into a flat. Then he did overhead tricep extension into either, he gave the option of dips or what they call the line triceps curl, which was basically scar crushes. He was using an easy bar here. Then a vertical shrug, which he did with eights again.
You know, previously we'd seen him use high repetitions in the bulking phase. So he's gone back to eights. And then an upright row, a barbell curl. Now this is an odd exercise, seated dumbbell curl. And what he did is he actually had the dumbbells touching.
So they were like held together and he did a dumbbell curl that way. I haven't seen, I'm not familiar seeing any other silver era lifters do that. Maybe it was done, I'm not sure, but it certainly didn't seem to be a popular exercise and not one that I recall Reg doing elsewhere either. So I don't know if it was just for a little bit of novelty or what, but that's what he suggested here. And then he went into hanging leg raises, which we've seen in a couple of our other programs as well. So there's a lot there.
Chris (08:31)
What's not there?
Jake (08:32)
There's a couple things in art there, that's a good point.
Chris (08:34)
So.
I'm trying to, I can't remember what Reg Park's last program was like, but I seem to spend my life on these podcasts complaining about the lack of good back exercises. I'm not seeing any back exercises on here apart from the shrug.
I'm not seeing any wide grip pull downs. I'm not seeing any rows. There's literally just the pull over, which, as you pointed out, probably wasn't a exercise. This is really interesting. This for me is like extremely strange to see a lack of pulling exercises in a program like this.
Jake (08:57)
Mm.
Hmm. Yeah, the pullover. Upright row. Hmm, yeah, there's not a lot is there?
Chris (09:12)
A lot of pressing.
but very little pulling. And as we always say on these analyses, there's no deadlift variations. There's very little hamstrings work here.
Jake (09:15)
Yeah.
Well, the interesting
thing you may not remember in the last program we had from him, he did have both a bent over row and he had the deadlift from blocks.
Chris (09:32)
Yes, yes. It's possible that what we're seeing here is just what he perceived his own weaknesses to be.
Jake (09:40)
Yeah.
Chris (09:42)
You know, I mean that's always the interesting aspect of it. Because on the one hand, there's a lot of exercise variety that makes a lot of sense, you know. As you pointed out, with the pressing variations, he's moving between frontal and sagittal planes. We've got different inclines going on. You know, obviously, we've got the vertical and horizontal presses.
Jake (09:50)
Yeah.
Chris (10:04)
There's definitely some interesting stuff here. He's going between a seated curl, which I'm not sure how that looks, but maybe there's some differences there with the shoulder angle from the barbell curl, I don't know. And the triceps exercises are obviously different because they're using different muscle lengths for the, because of the shoulder angles, at least for the long head. So you can see that there's definitely some good attempts here to vary exercises in a way that
causes the exact thing that you were setting up this program with, which is that it was intended to provide better shape, which really means training muscle fibers that you weren't training previously. So.
On the one hand, it's very interesting that we've got this exercise variation that clearly is going to do a good job. On the other hand, it's interesting that we've got these clearly huge gaps, which we would regard as monumentally, you know, kind of deficient in a good training program. And then, of course, the only other thing I would mention is, you know, what's going on with this volume? I mean, it's absolutely crazy. You know, I've got 14 exercises I've counted while you've been describing it.
Jake (10:50)
Hmm.
Chris (11:07)
and that's 14 exercises with 3 sets per exercise. That's not going to work for many people I don't think.
Jake (11:14)
Yeah.
Yeah, it's interesting. The first point you're making about the exercise selection. If you work through most of the upper body stuff, it seems like you nailed it pretty well. Like from a shoulder perspective, behind the neck, frontal plane, that's pretty sweet. And then going into a sagittal plane overhead. So we've got good side delt, we've got front delt. If we look at chest, do a flat.
bench going into an inclined bench, we've got, you know, more sternal, we've got more
Clavicular, he's kind of done fairly well at varying the exercises sufficiently to get different regions from most of the upper body, the triceps, he's done it well as well. But then lower body.
Chris (11:53)
I would say that there's probably bit too much overlap on the two bench press variations unless they use different grip widths. And I can see ways of targeting certain parts of the muscle groups more efficiently, but I think I would largely agree with what you're saying there, that the majority of what's here is actually really good.
What becomes strange is the things that are missing. I'm a little bit unsure about how the upright row fits, you know, because I feel that that's overlapping with the curl variations that he's got and the delta exercises that he's already got. But so really, for me, if that upright row was swapped out for a Y group
Jake (12:18)
Hmm.
Chris (12:38)
or even a narrow road, I think that would be transformational for the program as it's written. ⁓
Jake (12:46)
Well, it's odd
even the placement of that, cause he's placed it vertical shrug, like. ⁓
Chris (12:49)
sure right next to the curls
because he sees it as a biceps exercise.
Jake (12:54)
Yeah.
or back, but clearly not as delts.
Chris (12:59)
Hmm.
Jake (12:59)
And he did, I don't know, know, the way they did the upstroke row back then, they did row very high up. It was kind of like a high pull up to the sort of chin heights. So, you know, it was a little bit different to how we do it nowadays, but still.
So exercise selection, a few things missing the mark here, some things he kind of did pretty well. And then volume. Now I always find this very interesting when we look at volume, when we look at splitting volume across different exercises. And it's interesting to wonder, would you say we've got good information on the effect of volume as far as muscle damage if you were to put those six sets in one exercise compared to those six sets in two different exercises?
Chris (13:37)
No, I wouldn't say that
we've got good data about that at all.
Jake (13:40)
So it's possible that the way he's splitting stuff up maybe would have potentially less of impact as possible than if he put it all in one exercise.
Chris (13:48)
So
from a physiological point of view, you can start from the ground and work upwards and say, what's happening? So if you have, say, for example, you did a squat variation and then you followed up with a knee extension. Really nice, clean example of how we might see something like this happening. So you do the squat, you're only going to get damage in the single joint quadriceps. You can't use the rec fan.
Jake (14:11)
Mm-hmm.
Chris (14:11)
you then add some knee extension sets on the end you are going to immediately access fewer motor units in the single joint quadriceps because the activation is going to move towards the rectifam which has better leverage and you're going to use that preferentially. So you're not... given that damage is exponentially worse in the highest threshold motor units with the fastest muscle fibers moving from the squat to the knee extension
dramatically reduces how much extra damage you're going to create on the muscle fibers that you've just been damaging in the squat. But it creates obviously completely fresh damage in an area that you previously weren't training. So if I were asked to kind of characterize what I think is going on here physiologically, I would say you're probably going to see...
Jake (14:47)
Mm-hmm.
Chris (14:57)
Similar total.
This is very, very, very difficult to characterize, I think, accurately, but I think you're going to see... I don't think you're going to see a huge increase in damage in the single joint quadriceps when you add the knee extension on the end. is kind of where I'm starting from. I don't think you're going to see a huge change because you're not... You've already kind of gone after the most vulnerable fibres. Now you're kind of, you know, not going after those anymore. So you're...
Your damage isn't going to be as bad on those. But you are now starting completely fresh on an entirely new muscle. obviously, they're going to start from the top and work your way downwards.
Jake (15:31)
So in the same way, we always say hypertrophy is muscle fiber specific, well, damage here is muscle fiber specific. And so those exercises that where those fibers are not actually active, well, obviously we're not getting more damage in those fibers.
Chris (15:37)
course.
We've actually got better data on regional damage after exercise than we have on regional hypertrophy.
So there's four or five really nice studies that have actually identified extremely specific locations of fibre damage inside muscles after various different types of exercise ranging from aerobic exercise through to strength training and even strength training of different exercises. And the squat and the knee extension is a perfect example of this one. We've actually got a study examining exactly this particular problem where people have said, OK, know, is the damage located in very different areas? Absolutely is.
Jake (16:09)
Hmm.
Chris (16:18)
located in extremely different areas as a result of the selection of those exercises, which is what we'd expect because activation and calcium ion accumulation from that activation is what drives damage. So if you don't activate the fibre as much or at all, you can't create damage in that fibre. So I think what we would expect is that if you were to say, OK, let's try and characterise what's going on, I think
The addition of the new extension after the squat wouldn't cause more damage in the same areas that the squat has caused damage in. I think it would be relatively limited in those areas. There would be some, but you're not going after the highest threshold motor units in those areas to the same degree. But it would create completely new damage in a totally separate location. So if you were to say, well, OK, let's just try and say, well, how many damaged fibres have we got? are they more damaged or less damaged? Well, I would say you've definitely got more damaged fibres.
as a result of doing that extra exercise. So you've kind of started using a different exercise, you've trained some new fibres from the top down, you know, you're going to create damage from the top down. So you're going to get more total fibres damaged and probably as a result overall, you're going to get some more damage on a total whole body level. So then you would expect to have a bit more CNS fatigue as a result of that inflammation from those damaged fibres getting into the bloodstream. And this is really where I think people are starting to
I think, so, very brief interlude. So one of the things that I actually enjoy seeing, and people probably think I get frustrated about this, but I don't, one of the things I enjoy seeing is when people take the model that I've explained and start drawing conclusions from it and then arguing about it. And so one of the things that people think I must find frustrating is when people argue against whole body, saying, yeah, but if you train the whole body, then you must create damage in all of these places, therefore you must have more post-workout CNS fatigue than you would do.
if you're training, upper lower splits and you're limiting the number of kind of muscle fibers in totality across all while you're damaged. I'm not frustrated by that. I'm pleased that people are actually thinking about physiology and making predictions on what they think a training program is going to do. Fantastic. Keep doing that. And, you know, maybe in, you know, a few months or years time, you'll get to a sort of place that actually explains something that I haven't explained. That's why I've done this, not because I'm trying to
Jake (18:16)
Mm-hmm.
Chris (18:32)
you know, do anything else. I'm trying to get people to use physiology to explain how training programs work. So, yeah, I think that we have got this risk of training a large number of muscle fibers as a result of using extra exercises and creating more total body damage, which then potentially would lead to a bigger post-workout central nervous system fatigue effect. So yeah, I think that's an interesting problem to address.
Jake (18:54)
which effectively would increase the, what, the impact of that post-workout CNS fatigue in a session where it was still present, but it wouldn't be increasing the timeline or duration for which it was present for, it?
Chris (19:06)
This is the interesting thing because if you have multiple muscles at different ends of the body, so if you've like, you know, done biceps curls and then calf raises, you know, potentially the sum total of that inflammation from both of those sources is going to lead you to have quite a big CNFT impact the following day. But as you correctly point out, those two muscles are on opposite sides of the body. They aren't going to be impacting on each other in terms of their recovery rates. So what you should find exactly as you just described is that, again,
you get more CNFT, but it dissipates in the same period of time. So really what it indicates is that training full body and then going back and trying to train full body the following day is likely to be extremely unsuccessful for that reason. But you should still find that your, you know, kind of every other day or your three days a week works OK for that, for that explanation. So again, you know, I think it's really cool when, you know,
people actually walk through this physiological framework and say, well, OK, if this is true, then that implies that that should then be true. And then that implies that that should be true. Because ultimately, what we've been struggling with for probably 30 or 40 years in hypertrophy science is hypertrophy researchers thinking that they can do hypertrophy research without paying any attention whatsoever to how physiology works. And so they start talking about training muscles, which is impossible. You don't train muscle fibers.
Jake (20:25)
You
Chris (20:26)
They
start talking about stretch, mediate, hypertrophy when it's impossible. You've only got sarcomeregenesis. They start talking about creating hypertrophy without, you know, with fatigue being present, even though you're literally switching muscle fibers off and stopping them being, you know, exposed to mechanical tension. And they kind of just come up with, you know, magical thinking of reasons why these things can be ignored. And it's fantastic to see people starting to push back on that, you know. And you've got people who've...
sort of been exposed to how the physiology works and have learned about it and they're now implementing that and saying, actually, no, that hypothesis that you're presenting can't possibly be true because, you know, size principle, because mechanical tension, because how fatigue works, because, and it's great that we can be in this situation where all we're arguing about now is how the physiology actually works in the context of a training program. You know, literally just a couple of years ago,
You know, people would be saying, well, we believe in metabolic stress. We believe that muscle damage causes hyperchromy. I'm like, I can't talk to you. You you're literally, you're literally making stuff up. I can't talk to you. You know, now the arguments are what I would regard as interesting. They're based on reality as it is rather than how hyperchromic researchers have been pretending it is, you know, which is just so exciting for me.
Jake (21:30)
Mmm.
Chris (21:41)
to see that change, it's fantastic. So I don't get frustrated at all about these various different arguments because I see them as necessary for us to figure out what's actually going on. yeah, so when I look at a full body program like this one that we've just been talking about, and I see this huge amount of volume across lots of different parts of the body, yeah, it has this interesting challenge whereby we're gonna see potentially a huge amount of CNFT the following day.
And he's not going to want to do very much, maybe walk on the beach or whatever. But potentially it could still more or less work for a short period of time, three days a week. But again, I think he is probably going to be doing a deload after four or five weeks and doing something different.
Jake (22:23)
This is, this is, I think the plan for me when, you know, we started talking a lot about some of the Sylvia guys and, obviously we've been talking about physiology for a long time. And this was the plan for me when I read it, I was like, this breaks what I believe. This doesn't make sense to me.
And that was maybe two years ago. And I remember going back to it a year ago or so. And I was like, ah, this might be how he's getting away with some of this. Like the fact that we've got the frontal plane versus the sagittal plane, I'm like, it might actually just be that we're getting different muscle fiber damage here. And yes, it's still high volume. And yes, it's gonna exceed at least what a lot of people can sufficiently do within a single session.
potentially exceeding their coverability in successive sessions as well. But it was that point for me, was like, that's how this could make sense.
Chris (23:15)
Yeah, and I think with...
With what we know now, we could do an even better job of really compartmentalizing stuff so that you could absolutely do your three sets and really push the activation away from certain muscles. You could change the resistance profile to make sure that you're, you literally just do a lateral raise instead of an overhead press in the front of plane, but you could do the overhead press in the front of plane with a resistance profile so the hardest part is definitively below shoulder height and really push the activation
Jake (23:45)
Hmm.
Chris (23:46)
across to the middle delta. Similarly, you could do your sedge to plane so that it's a partial range of motion. So you're working much more overhead and you're again really targeting the anterior delta. And those little changes, I think, just have come with the development of the moment arm research where you can actually see what's happening. So I think this is one of those areas where you can take a program that's been written 70 years ago and actually make it better.
Jake (24:03)
Mm.
Chris (24:11)
because of the data that we now have available to us. But fundamentally, it's still more or less the same.
Jake (24:13)
Yep.
Yeah, yeah. I don't think there's anything else I wanted to comment on this or any other questions I had. Is there anything else you thought was worth mentioning?
Chris (24:22)
No, think definitely people are going to exclaim how much work it is when they put the numbers together. mean, think 14 exercises, three sets per exercise is absolutely crazy for most situations. But, you know, coming back to the beginning, this was designed to be a short period of time, four or five weeks, whatever. So, you know, maybe that's how it worked.
Jake (24:46)
Yeah. So like I said at the start, I wanted to contrast this to previous plans where they were more abbreviated, where there wasn't as much direct work for different muscle regions and stuff like that. And the goal obviously of a plan like this is, well, you'd think to try to provide a stimulus for as much of the body as possible, even though there's some obvious shortcomings that you've pointed out. And I guess the question is, okay, he didn't quite get there.
But what might it look to get there? Is it even worth trying to pursue that? What does it even mean to maximize growth? What does it mean to write a plan that's actually gonna, people talk about gains maxing nowadays. Does it even matter? Do you need to do this? Could you, he's doing six sets per muscle, like you said, across two different exercises. Could he just have done one set and got to the same place in the end?
Chris (25:33)
Yeah, this is a really interesting question. So what I'd like to do and, you know, stop me if I start rambling. But what I'd like to do is just try and sort of define the question that has been raised in this in this area and explain the key training variables that would contribute to essentially arriving in the same place, but more slowly or
producing a qualitatively different result. Essentially, think what is being argued is that you can kind of do almost any sensible strength training program for hypertrophy. And after a couple of years, you'll kind of arrive in more or less the same place. Now, that's totally accepting the fact that you might get there quicker with some programs and more slowly with others, but you'll end up in the same place because, you know, as natural
bodybuilders, you've kind of got a hard limit on what you can get. So, you you just have to accept that and, you know, be done with it. Now, I'm surprisingly sympathetic to this point of view. People would go, you know, undermining your whole kind of, you know, philosophy. Well, not really. I'll explain why. But I'm sympathetic to this view because I do think that, you know,
The natural limit is a lot lower than most people in today's day and age believe it is. And the reason for that is because they're looking at what people are telling them today. And as we've just spent an hour or so before this conversation talking about, my faith in humanity is relatively low. And so I don't actually take anybody's word for anything. But if you look back to the photographs pre 1950, you you start to see people who look much more reasonable in terms of what is achievable. And again, remembering, though, that those people were
still genetically extremely gifted in the purposes of building muscle. So I think that there are going to be some training variables that do basically just mean that you get a place more quickly or more slowly. So for example, if you were to do a strength training program of the type that you construct, I would write, generally speaking, you could do one set.
for each muscle and you could do that a couple of times a week and you would take a certain number of years in getting to a certain level of muscle mass and you're going to probably struggle to get much past that point. You could get there a lot faster if you did two or three sets.
So volume for all of the fuss that people make about it is literally doing nothing other than getting you to the same place slightly more quickly. And I think that is the truism that I'm seeing in this debate at the moment, which is that, you know, yeah, you can do this or that or the next and you're to end up in the same place eventually. You know, and similarly, within reason, and I explain the reason why this is not always true in the moment, within reason, you could argue the same thing for frequency.
You could do an exercise twice a week or you could do it three times a week or you could do it every other day. You're going to end up in the same place more or less after a couple of years of training in that way. You're not going to change the outcome particularly. It's just going to be slower or quicker. So that's what I
Jake (28:19)
So in these
examples, you have the same plan, effectively got the same plan and you're saying, okay, you could do an extra set, you could do an extra two sets, you could do it twice a week, you could do it a third time a week. Okay, but it's basically the same effectively program and you're just changing the volume and the frequency.
Chris (28:32)
Essentially, if you are getting that hypertrophy across the week, then frequency is not going to matter in the long term for what you're doing. It's just going to get you there faster. Doing three workouts a week will get you there faster than two. Volume is the same thing.
Jake (28:46)
interested.
So obviously we're talking about do these training variables get you to the same outcome or different outcome. We haven't
Chris (28:52)
Now, I'm
prepared to concede at the very, very top end you're going to see some differences there, and I'll explain why that is in moment. But let me, before I go and argue the tiny, tiny, tiny details, let me argue the opposite side of the equation first. So what I've just argued is where I think the argument is correct insofar as if you modify work-out volume or...
frequency within certain parameters you're going to more or less end up in the same place after a couple of years. Alternatively, at the opposite end of the spectrum you've got things that absolutely 100 % do matter and the RegPART program we just talked about is a really nice illustration of this. So if you do only a small number of exercises, so pick powerlifting for example, you're just doing your squat bench dead maybe a couple of other bits and pieces around the edges.
You are never going to be training certain muscle fibers and indeed certain muscle groups are just not going to get switched on. You're not going to get much gastroc at all. You're not going to get any long head of the triceps. You know, you're to get very limited rec fem and maybe even some hamstrings development is going to lack. So there and then that that that's ignoring all of the little areas within muscles where new mechanical matching means that you're just not switching on those particular areas of the muscle because you don't need them.
If you contrast that with a program that has a much larger exercise variety, like the program we've just been talking about, and now suddenly you're getting much more complete development, that is qualitatively different. You could do the powerlifting program forever, and you would never get the hypertrophy in those muscle fibers that you're training with the wider exercise variety issue. So straight away, what I'm trying to illustrate here now to juxtapose with what we've just been talking about,
Jake (30:21)
You
Chris (30:32)
This is a exercise selection as a training variable that 100 % matters and if you don't get it right you will not get to your maximum muscular potential. There is no possible way of doing that. It is physiologically impossible to grow muscle fibers that are not being used in an exercise. Can't do it. Now adding on to that what we've now got to look at is the training frequency problem.
for the specific exercises. So for example, the example that we've used in conversation before now is where people are programming leg extens... Maybe they're doing an upper lower split. I'm not bagging on upper lower splits for the moment. I'm just using it as an illustration. If you're doing upper lower split and you're doing two lower body workouts a week and you do leg extension in one of those workouts and then the other workout you do a squat or a leg press or something like that. Okay, great. What's going on? The problem is that you're basically doing one...
times a week frequency for the unique muscle fibers that are being trained in each of those exercises. So in the case of the knee extension, Rec Femme literally is getting trained once a week. So you'd need to be doing maintenance volumes at three or four sets to even keep it static. Not many people are doing that really who are listening to this podcast. know, not many people are training with that kind of volume. Maybe they're hitting five sets if they're doing a lower split. But that's again, literally just over maintenance. That's toppy.
The same problem actually happens with the sarcomeregenesis, the stretch mediated hypertrophy from the leg press or the squat, which you're not getting really from the knee extension because it's much more contract to position exercise. So you've basically got these two chunks of muscle mass which are going to grow for a couple of days after each workout and then disappear by the time you get to the next one. Again, the frequency interacting with the exercise selection creates an issue for you. So we're not just saying here that, you know,
You've got to pick the right exercises. That's absolutely true. Yeah, you need a list of exercises that covers the whole body and make sure that you're not leaving anything out. Yes. Point number one. Point number two, you actually have to train those twice a week. You can't you can't train one exercise once a week and expect to get all the benefits of that exercise. It doesn't work like that. You know, there is a limit on how much central motor you can send to the muscle. And that means you can end up with a deficit. What deficit you're going to see. The deficit is going to be the fibers you don't need to use because they're not doing anything useful for that movement.
So frequency interacts with exercise selection very dramatically in those particular scenarios. Finally, we've then got the post-workout fatigue problem. or actually even... Yeah, go for
Jake (32:50)
Just before you jump into that, can
I just make a comment on the exercise selection piece? Because this is a conversation online all the time. Someone will be like, well, if that's the case, if you're into training exercise more than once a week, then how did someone grow any muscle doing this thing once a week?
Chris (33:02)
because they were doing more
than four sets a week.
Jake (33:05)
Or,
usually, so I had this conversation just before we jumped on our call today with someone sent me message like, but you know, this program only does what each exercise once a week. was like, okay, show me, I'd like to see it. And they show me and there was like, say one day had an incline one day had an overhead. And I'm like, okay, all this all that's happening here is a Venn diagram. Like simply the muscle fibers that active in both of those exercises, they're the ones that are gonna get bigger, right? And that is, to me,
Chris (33:29)
So it's the difference
between the rate of hypertrophy and the end result. So if you're basically doing two exercises that are overlapping, like incline press and overhead press, then what's going to happen is you get a fast rate of hypertrophy in the fibers you're training. That's going to look great from a beginner's perspective. It's going to look OK from an intermediate perspective. When you hit the advanced level, what you're going to find is that the fibers that you're trying to grow just aren't at what they're going to get a little bit of growth after each workout, and then they're going to just go back to normal by the time you get to the following week.
Jake (33:58)
Which in that case, exercise variation, it just makes no sense because you would actually be better off just doing the same exercise twice a week instead of one exercise once and the other exercise once. Because anything that's unique to that exercise, like you've just pointed out, you've grown and then you've lost again before you train it again.
Chris (34:11)
disappears absolutely absolutely
excellent selection is a platter plato is the wrong word is a is a maximum muscular potential modifier volume is not
So what we're saying here is that when you're talking about this problem, is, you know, do all programs more or less end up in the same place after a couple of years of hard training? No, they don't. Why don't they? They don't because ultimately there are certain training variables that don't matter for that, and there are certain training variables that do. Volume and within certain parameters, frequency, is not going to change where you end up. But...
exercise selection absolutely is going to change where you end up and frequency of that exercise selection is also going to change where you end up. Now, the third thing that's going to change where you end up is whether you're training with large amounts of CNS fatigue or not. So if you're doing a workout and you're hitting high levels of you're experiencing high levels of CNS fatigue, either because you're doing that as a matter of course, maybe
Maybe you've just got in a habit of taking short rest periods. I it doesn't have to be something about accumulated post-workout fatigue. Just training with short rest periods. So you don't hit the highest levels of recruitment. You can't train those fibers. Same thing happens if you are training in a state of constant accumulated fatigue. This is an interesting one because this is kind of where you say, well, will a bro split get me to the same place as one of your full body routines as long as I do the same exercise selection and but loads of volume? No, it won't.
Jake (35:25)
Mm-hmm.
Chris (35:32)
because you hit the exact same problem for a different reason. Yes, you've got your exercise selection. OK, yes, you're doing enough sets per workout to make sure you carry over from one workout to the next, but you are missing the top level of recruitment because you're constantly in a state of muscle damage. Therefore, you've got post-workout CNSD. Therefore, you're not actually training the top level of the muscle in those situations. So ultimately, the
There are variables that matter and there are variables that don't matter. And I think we've just got to divide those out.
Jake (36:00)
So that last point you just made with the CNS fatigue. am I correct in saying, this is gonna be so controversial to say, that any split where you have two consecutive days is likely going to be inferior in total ceiling of muscle mass to a split that has at least a rest day between sessions.
Chris (36:18)
Well.
I think generally that's going to be true, but you have to bear in mind that if somebody is doing an upper lower split and training on consecutive days, but they are training in a way that minimises the amount of post workout damage.
Jake (36:30)
Yeah, but almost no
one would be like that would be the exception.
Chris (36:34)
Well, I don't know that's necessarily true. I think there are people out there who have been, you know, looking at the physiology, they've been looking at the fatigue, they understand that fatigue is a problem and they've started to, you know, do maybe one or two sets.
Jake (36:47)
Yes, but that would be the only only exception to what I've just said then is if you do one or two sets.
Chris (36:52)
I think a lot
of people are starting to train like that. They're doing a couple of sets per muscle group and upper lower split and they're doing very little in the gym. know, they're going in, they're doing maybe, you know, sort of maybe they're doing a back exercise and then some sort of press and then they might do a biceps curl and maybe a triceps extension. They do a couple of sets of each of those. Then okay, maybe you could argue that triceps are not being, you know, sort of...
Jake (36:58)
Mm.
Chris (37:15)
avoiding the problem. We're not really interested in localized muscle damage issues at this point. We're more interested in is this going to create a problem for my lower body workout the following day. And I don't think it would do. You know, I think...
Jake (37:23)
a fun day.
That would have to be
an upper lower six times per week, probably to be feasible, wouldn't you say?
Chris (37:32)
No, you could still do that twice a week, absolutely, because you think about it, you only need to do one set, you need to do, yeah, if you're repeating, if you're doing A, if you're only doing the same upper body and same lower body workouts every time.
Jake (37:34)
with a small number of exercises.
Mm. Mm-hmm.
Chris (37:44)
You could do that.
I mean, you could absolutely do that. I mean, imagine, imagine just taking take, take a really, really solid full body program of, say, 12 or so exercises which covers the whole body, which you might look at and go, split it, split it into two halves of six exercises each and then do them on, you know, only four days a week. You're absolutely going to make progress. And this is a really, really nice example because
Jake (37:57)
Yeah, yeah, and then split it through one or two sets. Yep.
Hmm.
Chris (38:12)
A lot of people will look at that, six exercises of one set each twice a week and go, why would I do something that basic? Well, actually, that will get you that will get you to your maximum muscular potential. It will get you there slower, but it will get you further than a breastplate will and it will get you further than a lot of other programs will that change. mean, so many people will go, oh, I need to do a complicated upper lower split and I need to do different exercises on
Jake (38:26)
⁓ It'll get you further than the dry split will, yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Chris (38:39)
You know, my first upper body workout, my second upper body workout. Like you won't get as far by doing that. You might get inferior way of programming if you want to maximise where you're going, where you get to. The maximum level of hypertrophy you can get to is determined by the breadth of exercises that you're doing that still have net hypertrophy across all of those regions every single week. That's it. That's the answer.
Jake (38:42)
Mm-hmm.
No, that is an inferior way of programming it.
That is, like say that again, because that's everything summed up in a sentence.
Chris (39:11)
Where you're going to get to your ultimate hypertrophy destination is dependent on the number of exercises or different exercises, the exercise variety that you're doing and whether or not those exercises are each getting net hypertrophy across the week, which means basically you're going to need to train them twice a week at least. So
Jake (39:28)
Mm-hmm. And one
without the other does not matter. There's no point, like you said, no point having this extensive list of exercises, but half of them have been trained once a week with two sets.
Chris (39:38)
You do it.
You can't do it. Yeah, you absolutely have to have the frequency and the exercise selection thing nailed down together. If you get that, then your destination will be the same. So again, people are going to think, no, he's undermining everything he's saying because he used to say that full body three times a week is perfect or every other day. But no, I literally just tell you what the model says. So the physiological model will tell you that your hypertrophy rate will be faster if you do full body every other day. I was dragged kicking and screaming into that admission not too long ago.
I prefer three days a week, but you know, it doesn't matter. The point is that the physiology tells us where we're If you do three days a week full body or if you do two days a week full body with exactly the same, let's say we just pick a single workout and do it three times a week or we do it every other day or you do it twice a week, you will get to the same place eventually. You will just get there faster if you do the three day or the every other day. So there's some really cool validity in this argument. And I think hopefully
Jake (40:17)
Yes.
Chris (40:30)
some people will have to now readjust how they think about hypertrophy in general because I think most of the time, hypertrophy researchers are extremely guilty of this, most of the time people just think of hypertrophy as being like better or worse, more or less. That's it. There's no kind of like, you know, difference between how fast you're going and how far you can go.
You know, now what we're saying here is that this argument that's being, you know, kind of engaged in online at the moment is a brilliant insight into the fact that there is a difference between how fast you go and where you get to. So how far you can go, how fast you go. And exercise selection with appropriate frequency will get you to the maximum possible place you can go. Things like volume are going to do absolutely nothing for you. They're not going to get you
sorry, in terms of where you want to go, they're not going to get you there, you know, to a different location, just going to get you wherever you're going faster. So it's fascinating, again, that hypertrophy researchers do tend to focus on volume. And it's like, well, actually, you know, in the long term, it's not going to be that interesting as a training variable as exercise selection.
Jake (41:31)
Yeah, it comes back to that exercise selection. I think I said on a previous podcast, the way I program is I always start by writing out the list of what exercises do I need. And then I decide on volume and frequency and everything else. But if you don't start with that, like that's the variable. That's what you said here. That is the variable that's going to determine where you end up. And the other stuff will determine how quickly.
Chris (41:47)
Those are your boundary conditions.
They are absolutely your boundary conditions. Your boundary conditions are the exercise selection that covers the whole body as far as you want to. Then secondarily, you've got to go, I need to make sure these exercises are all being trained twice a week. After that, once you've nailed those two things down, your options now open out and you can go, these two things being true, you know, those are my conditions of continuing. Now I can say, well, you know, I can look at upper body.
sorry, upper lower, I can look at full body. I can, you know, choose how I want to structure. But what's really interesting is that this is how the programs that you've been presenting to us actually worked. So, for example, the Clancy Ross, where I like, you started out with a full body program, but then as it got too big, it got split out across two days. And it's like, well, the exercise selection was the driver, primary driver, the
Jake (42:38)
Yes.
Chris (42:39)
frequency in the volume are kind of just like once you've got that nail down you would then move on to those questions secondarily. So many questions I get are about what split should I use? Although those questions are going away now that I've got a... I said the weekly net stimulus model has been the most amazing thing for avoiding questions about dreams. If I did it literally for no other reason it would have been for that. so...
Yeah, everyone wants to ask about training splits and about volume and how many sets should I do? I'm like, you haven't answered the first question, which is which exercises should I do and how do I do those twice a week? Because if somebody has personal requirements or schedule based requirements that mean they can only go to the gym twice a week, they don't have any options. They have no options. It's like you want to go to the gym twice a week, then you are doing a full body program.
Jake (43:10)
Mm. Mm.
Exactly.
Chris (43:28)
identical workout every single time you go to the gym. No discussion, no argument, there's nothing you can do because anything else you do is going be massively inferior to that.
Jake (43:37)
But any two way split is the same. Again, upper lower four times a week is the exact same thing. Those upper and those lower sessions have to be the same.
Chris (43:42)
And that is exactly the same. You
have to do the same session every single time. You could literally push the upper lower split four days a week to the absolute limit where you're doing five sets per exercise. And you could literally just about make that work as a it would like function like a bro split in a way, because.
Jake (44:01)
Yes.
Chris (44:02)
you would end up with literally just getting to the next workout in a positive state and you'd be in a constant state of CNS TIG all the time. And because of your massive amounts of damage that you're creating. So you wouldn't get to your maximum potential, but you would just about make it work from an exercise selection and a frequency point of view, but you would be suffering from the top end of the motor unit pull point of
Jake (44:07)
Yep.
And it's not even just upper lower that suffers from this. I see this with full body programming. There needs to be a word for a full body or upper lower program, which is programmed like a bro split, where they have a full body plan ABC, and they'll be exactly, and they put a leg extension on B, and a hack squat and a barbell squat on A and C. And it's like, well, hang on, this is a bro split.
Chris (44:33)
ABC can't work. Same problem.
Well, yes it is. And again, full body AB repeating, as in ABA, BAB, is brilliant and I think it's a really, really enjoyable split that works long term because for me it has one of the most enjoyable aspects to it because you're grinding away every single time you go out to the gym, you're not trying to the same exercise for the same numbers.
Jake (44:53)
It's most flexible split you can do.
Chris (45:05)
So from a psychological point of view, I've been training several years and you're getting old like I am, it's really nice to go in the gym and not do exactly the same thing every single time. You have an alternating split. yeah, ABC cannot work because you're limited to three sets. And that isn't going to get you from one week to the next. Now, an interesting debate to move this onwards a little bit will be to say, well,
What if somebody is doing two different squat variations? know, I mean, can we can we just alternate between front squat and back squat, for example? I mean, with that, that I think that's getting very close to being able to say, well, that's basically the same exercise, more or less.
Jake (45:33)
Hmm.
Yeah, effectively, I think we said this in the past, so all we're talking about is an exercise which has effectively the same motor, well, I guess muscle fibers that are active. And if that happens to be two exercises that have a different name, but they're effectively the same exercise, well, that's still gonna be sufficient.
Chris (46:00)
like a lateral raise and I overhead press in the frontal plane with peak forces below shoulder. I mean essentially it's going to give you for the muscle you're training the same thing. So I think there's this this kind of and I guess really if you want to take it to the absolute extreme level it's like having a couple of different gyms that you go to and they've all got different branded machines and you know you're basically doing the same movement pattern on every single machine. You can kind of take things to an extreme level but I think
Jake (46:20)
Yeah.
Chris (46:24)
We probably sort of encapsulated that problem relatively well at this point. And hopefully that's given some clarity around this argument that we're seeing at the moment, which is that, you know, just do a good training program and you'll end up in the same place eventually. Well, no, you won't. You might, but you don't necessarily, you might not necessarily end up there. It really depends on what category of training program your particular program falls into. You know, does it suffer from a
lack of exercise variety, is it doing exercises too infrequently or does it have too much volume so you're getting too much CNSD or any other thing that might give you too much CNSD like you know sort of excessive advanced training techniques or know drop sets and that kind of thing or maybe you're doing short rest periods as I say whatever it might be you end up with a lack of routine at crewman you don't train all the muscle fibers if you're falling into any of those traps then you won't get to the same place as somebody else who's doing the program that
you know, kind of allows them to maximize their muscular potential. But if you're listening to this podcast and you're doing kind of some sort of full body program that repeats an exercise twice a week for you doing an upper lower split, doing the same workout, same upper lower workouts, same upper workouts, same lower workouts, then chances are then you will end up essentially in the same place. So yes, you can all stop asking me about how many sets you should do. ⁓
Jake (47:42)
Well, you
you made an interesting point actually on that and the conversation has shifted because the question was always what's the best split? Should I do this split or this split? And then the question evolved to how many sets? Do I just then do one set? Should I two? How many sets can I recover from? And the question that you said, and I'm seeing this all the time now is, X exercise enough? And there's two variants of that question. Is leg extension enough for my quads?
Or the other variant of that question is, is leg extension enough to maximize growth in my quads? And those are two different questions. And it's kind of this whole topic question of, it get me to the same place or will it get me moving forwards at the same pace? And it all comes back to exercise selection. is our leg extension enough? Yeah, sure. If you're doing them with more than five sets once a week, you're doing them twice a week, yes. Is it enough to maximize growth?
Chris (48:15)
now.
Jake (48:33)
No, as you've just pointed out before. So this is really this conversation in a nutshell, it's like, well, will all programs get me to the same point? Will a leg extension get me to the same point? Will a leg extension and a leg crest get me to the same point? It depends on exercise selection. That is a foundational piece in this entire conversation.
Chris (48:51)
And it's so interesting that we do see a huge amount of exercise variety in many of these Silver Era programs. There's a lot of variety in most of them. Very large amount of exercise variety, generally very small number of sets. As you pointed out when we started out on this little project, when we looked at some of the oldest programs, they didn't even have a set system. No.
Jake (49:13)
Yes, exactly. Didn't even
know what the word meant. Yeah.
Chris (49:15)
exercise selection
is the thing. It's like you just have this list of exercises that you did and you just did a single set for every single one, because the point is exercise selection. It's not about and yet now we've got people that, you know, kind of just doing a couple of exercises in a session or they're trying to do multiple sets. And I think maybe as the set, you know, obsession, the volume obsession has grown, the exercise selection has necessarily shrunk as people have, you know, kind of lost exercise variety in order to add volume.
Jake (49:39)
Mmm. Mmm.
Chris (49:43)
And it's quite clear that if you want to maximise your ultimate muscular potential, then you can't do that without a wide variety of exercise, you know, in your programme. And ultimately, that may mean that you see slightly slower progress, especially as you're seeking that specific goal, simply because you have to spread out your energy across a wider number of places.
I think it's a really interesting question, a really interesting debate. think it's hopefully changed the way that people see things, but I do fear now that my entire kind of feed is gonna be full of people asking me exactly which exercises to do.
Jake (50:17)
Mm, mm.
Which should be fair, think, is people asking better questions. Like, that's kind of what we said is, hey, if you wanna program well.
Chris (50:25)
Sure.
Jake (50:27)
I would always say to my mentoring clients, the most important thing for you to understand in all this, once you understand fatigue and limitations to volume, although arguably that probably comes second anyway, but the most important thing for you to actually learn here is simply, whether that's neuro-mechanical matching or exercise selection, whatever you want to call it, it's just understanding what exercises are actually gonna train what I want to train. Once you've learned that, like your ability to program well, like that's the most important skill for you.
Chris (50:52)
Yeah, I think that's probably right. You know, I think and then really once people have a foundation of, you know, what we know about various different movement patterns and how they use different muscles, that's when you can start to see a little bit of experimentation coming in, people trying different things. And just as a kind of observation on this.
It's very easy because of the huge amount of equipment that's available to us in today's day and age to, you, I think you posted a video recently on Instagram actually of you messing around with a new exercise and inventing it as a kind of a new influencer project. that's such a great example because you can go to a gym and you can kind of turn around in a different direction, wave a cable over your head and suddenly you've got a new exercise. I'm not criticizing people for doing this by the way, I'm just, you kind of, you can.
You can, you can go to a gym and you can play around with equipment and you can find something. Now.
I'm not going to discourage that. I'm absolutely not going to discourage that. That's a thing that we see going back to, you we literally had one today where he's doing that weird biceps curl with his hands together. mean, like, fine, you know, experiment, have fun, play around with stuff, see if you can make some work. That's cool. The two things I would say is if you want to actually make a breakthrough and find something that works, then look at the physiological data that we've got. Look at the moment, Look at what's going on. Look at how you can reduce muscle mass in an exercise to try and focus on another specific area of the body. Look at ways of doing that and work with physiology rather than working against it. Secondly, tied onto this, bear in mind that almost every
Creative or inventive way of training a muscle is probably going to have a low degree of stability Unless you work really hard to fix that problem So what I'm saying there is that because of the way cables work and because of the way the equipment setups work It's easier to get a weird cable angle or a you know different way of doing something if you reduce stability because you can just Move in a different direction stand somewhere else, you know have the cable and you're to massively reduce stability
As a result, you're not going to really be doing anything for that muscle, even if you find a way to, you know, target a particular area of the body, which is perhaps previously not been targeted very effectively. You're not going to get the maximum effect from the muscle that you're training in that way. So it's a two step process. Yes, find the thing based on physiology that you're interested in training. Fantastic. Now figure out a way to make that stable. Most people.
just want to bank when they get to the first thing they go I found this new thing that trains this and I can feel it's different and I'm really excited about it and I share this with the world and I'm gonna name it after myself you know because everybody names it after me I haven't even named anything after myself and I you know I find that really funny because you know I've kind of created an entire model of how hyperchip work you know and I haven't named anything after myself but these people you know play around with a cable and suddenly they've named after themselves cool go to the next level and stabilize it
Jake (53:19)
Mm-hmm.
Chris (53:43)
you know, get the bench in the right place, get the cable pointing in the right direction, get your physically set up so that you maximize. You get those two things right. You can actually start to get to an interesting exercise selection, you know, and again, get to that point. Fantastic. You know, do a victory lap. Brilliant. Well done. You know, you've added something. But I think those those two steps are important because, as I say, it's really easy to create an exercise that is different.
if you just mess around with cables and have no stability. Pair that with stability and now I'm paying attention to what you're doing because you've actually done something that is fundamentally interesting at that point is adding rather than just being a distraction. Hopefully, I'm being a little bit flippant here, but hopefully people will understand that I'm not being critical and I'm not discouraging this practice. I really think experimentation is cool.
Jake (54:13)
Yeah. No, I mean, I've done this a dozen times and brought it to you and asked you what you thought about it. And the way I would go about exercise tweaks and, know, ultimately that's the way I view these things is most things are not new. Yeah, like most exercises are not new. All you've done generally, or when I've tried to play around with an exercise is I've looked at how do I take an exercise and knock off the bit of that exercise, which is not actually training the part of the muscle I want to train. And then how do I make it?
Chris (54:57)
which is ultimately where the whole calf, yeah, it's ultimately where the whole calf raise thing came from, where people went from doing normal standing calf raises or toe presses and leg press, suddenly just cut the top half of the range of motion off and it's transformational. You know, that was fantastic. And that's actually really simple when you think about it. No cables required. mean, it's a fantastic adjustment.
Jake (55:09)
Exactly. Precisely, yeah.
And then the second bit that I would normally look at is how do I just make this more stable? I think if we just ask those questions, yeah.
Chris (55:20)
That's it. It's a two step process. It's a two step
process. And I think a lot of people, as I say, rush to share with the world their new discovery and they don't take the necessary time to get the stability nailed down. And I think ultimately where we see, know, like, you know, just pick the hip thrust, you know, I mean, OK, you could argue that there are sort of glute bridge type exercises going back into the, you know, sort of.
maybe hundreds of years ago, obviously Brett Contreras popularised the hip thrust and like it or not, he's now associated with that. And I think he's done an amazing job in popularising a really, really valuable exercise that solves a very clear problem, which is that glute training was focused almost exclusively on stretch position instead of contract position, where the muscle has best leverage.
If you want like the perfect example of somebody who created an exercise using physiological principles and actually I would say neurochemical matching before it was cool, before it even had a name in fact, creating an exercise which is also very, very stable as you can see by the monstrous amounts of weight that people can lift with that exercise even on a bench, even before you get to the machines that have been made.
Jake (56:28)
Mm.
Chris (56:32)
You can lift monstrous amounts of weight on those machines on the bench with a barbell. That is a perfect example of a really like the perhaps most creative exercise invention creation that we've seen in the modern era, really. When I see when I compare that with, you know, the cable exercises done standing, it's different. ⁓
Jake (56:52)
Hmm. Have you seen,
I forget what the name is for this exercise, but it was meant to be like the perfect curl. And it was like a cable curl where you kind of change and swing your body position as you're performing the curl. So you kind of start from like back facing.
Chris (57:06)
That's a perfect
example of what I would be trying to avoid happening. you know, that stabilization requirement from the full body is the disadvantage that we're seeing. you what we're trying to do in these situations is find a way to, yes, physiologically identify the muscle that we're trying to target and then build on that by, you know, sort of stabilizing things as much as we possibly can. And I think the...
You know, yes, the amount of weight you're going to lift is going to vary between muscle groups, obviously, but it's a really good litmus test. You know, if somebody like Brett invents an exercise and you've got people hip thrusting 700 pounds, that's a pretty good indicator, really, that it's a very stable exercise. You're not you're not going to move that kind of weight if the exercise is not stable. So. If on the other hand, if you've got a cable and you're struggling to control.
a small amount of weight to get the exercise movement pattern you want, that's the opposite problem. Now, I'm not bagging on cables. They just suffer from this problem more than any other implement. Yes, you can have cable exercises that work brilliantly. You have to put the work in to get the stability. And there are people doing that. I've seen a couple of examples where people have set benches up, they've set the equipment up, they've got the angles right, and they've worked hard to get an exercise that works. I'm not criticizing them at all.
You know, I'm illustrating the point that, you know, we need that stability to maximize motor unit crew. So hopefully people now have a road map that when they're, you know, messing around in the gym and they want to play around with this stuff, they do take that two step process and produce something that we can use.
Jake (58:37)
Yeah. So guys, hopefully you've enjoyed this conversation and it's given you a bit to think about as to how to get to your final destination and will all programs get you there and potentially the answer is no, but there's some specific variables here that matter more than others. To conclude, can you repeat?
I got you to repeat it twice before, but if this can be the one takeaway, I would be so happy because this is like the crux of how to program well.
Chris (59:06)
So the destination that you get to, so your muscular destination, if we want to terminology, your muscular destination, your ultimate muscular destination, is going to depend on the exercise selection that you have in your program and the frequency of those exercises. So you're not going to get to your maximum muscular potential by doing a small variety of exercises and doing those exercises less frequently. You need the combination of the exercise variety and doing those exercises individually at least twice a week.
Jake (59:36)
Thank you. Thank you everyone for joining in and we hope you'll join us for another episode next week.