Nick Gloff – Training considerations for making reliable physique progression

0:07 hello everyone and welcome to the master engineer podcast I am as always your host of the country and you're listening to episode 36 now I know there has been some delay between these episodes no one apologized for that at the beginning of the year I set out a goal for myself to proud an episode each week which unfortunately did not happen I'm not really trying to make excuses but here I am making one so

0:38 basically this August and September have been very very busy for me our gym has been closed for renovations I had I had to work a lot I had to commute the other part of the city to work in a different gym where this one was closed and a lot of other things have happened so that sort of took up my schedule and I wasn't able to record new and I did new episodes unfortunately but that's in the

1:02 real clear view thankfully our gym is open and I plan on getting back to a more regular schedule more consistent schedule so with that out of the way let's get into this week's episode and our cast which is Nick Clough now as I mentioned the intro Nick is a relatively new acquaintance sir speak I haven't known him for a long time but in the time that I didn't know him he's made a very deep impression of me and that's

1:33 why I invited him on my podcast and I am proud in a sense to say that mine is the first podcast he ever appeared and sown when his famous you know I can I can brag about that achievement this episode is going to be a very good one we talk about a lot of practical stuff which thinking lifters like yourselves are going to appreciate talk about how to find the balance between progressing in

2:06 weights versus keeping form rivalry streak we talk about momentum we talk about certain exercises we rent here and there it's just a fun episode the conversation was a bit free-flowing we didn't have a very very strict schedule sir speak to stick to but that's how I like it to be so I hope you enjoyed the episode and without further ado let's get into episode 36 of the muscle engineer podcast with Nick Groff Nick welcome to the muscle engineer

2:37 podcast no thanks for having me man my pleasure you know I was thinking that you're an unusual guest for me why do I say that because most of my guests I have known them for years and I have been you know following them before I had this whole podcasting going on and now I'm basically just catching up with the people I've known in quotation marks for a while but you're one of those people who I just recently came across I

3:05 think it was Valentin Tom Bosley who shared you know that too easy Dumbo row that you did with what was like 118 kilos something like that I'm not too good with the kilo de pound conversion off my head but the best I've done you know I have a video of it on Instagram if anybody wants to go and verify but at my gym back home there's a dumbbell that I can load up with 25 pound plates so I ended up getting up to

3:33 a 260-pound 410 one-armed dumbbell row yeah and it was Rictor than most people hundreds so that's what that's what caught my interest and then I saw that hey this is an interesting guy because he seems to have some formal education in this stuff he's smart but also he lives and he trains with some ridiculous weights and he also doesn't just swing them around so those kind of people are

4:04 very rare to have all those criteria ticked off usually it's one or the other maybe two of the three so that's what I wanted to have you on because I think you can afford some very interesting insights well I appreciate that and before we get started I want to give that shout out right back to Valentin so I don't know him exactly - well we haven't had too many lengthy conversations but I have a lot of

4:28 respect for that guy and I mean I hope at some point in the future I get to do something along the lines with him and all the boys from over there across the pond I am I am a guy based out of the US so I'm kind of disconnected from all of you guys in the scene that's quickly developing over there looks pretty exciting so yeah one day you can visit the stream and you can actually try out some proper

4:54 equipment because like we were discussing the equipment we you have available it's not the best and I certainly have tried plenty of shitty ones in my MIT in my years so yeah so we've talked that's pretty much every conversation we've had up to this point it's just kind of taking it out on every single piece of equipment we have available to us I mean for me I know in the gyms that I have access to the the

5:24 one that I have here at the school that I attend and the one back home for me it's just it's so minimal that in some ways it's been a good thing in some ways it's really not been a good thing for me where I've been pretty much forced to get really good at free weights barbell dumbbell exercises and you know the derivations thereof because I don't have access to really good machine equipment so for since I've

5:51 started actually lifting things and putting them back down I have really not had much of an option but to go with the the free weight compound moves that most people tend to avoid when they have a lot of equipment at their hands from the start so I can I can credit a bit of my my exercise selection and what I tend to gravitate to based on just where I've had to grow up and what I've had to do

6:16 to keep training properly yeah of course some every every blessing is a curse and every curse is a blessing in a sort of way so that's just how things work out so let's start with your background because you mentioned to me that you also like sort of followed mi40 for a while I'm curious to your training history experience how your thoughts have developed in high or you said that you know you transitioned away from it but still implement as someone with that

6:46 principles you you learn from that system or whatever I should call it a method of training so what I guess where did you so how did you start lifting and what were your first exposures and how did you get into my 40 and how have you transitioned away since then well at the very start of things it kind of started with my first introduction to real formal sport so when I was about 12 years old I got myself involved with the

7:20 the school football team the American football team out here where I where I grew up and that was my first introduction actually pushing myself and finding out what my body could do and to supplement with the actual practicing and the scale based practice that I had to go through on a day-to-day basis I wanted to do a little bit more to get myself an edge so I started to look at the resources that were easily available to me and the

7:51 things that were most available to me and that I could digest the information of was a infographic or not infographic wrong word infomercial fitness so I ended up going through the Beachbody programs as the first things that I ever saw so first things I had ever done was p90x and I'm not exactly proud to to say that but I can I can now use that as an experience and say yeah I've been there

8:21 I've done that and I went through the whole program multiple times I've done the other resistance training based programs that they had through Beachbody and I've done the Insanity workouts they had and then shortly thereafter I got a little bit more competitive in my wrestling that I did also in middle school in high school and that pulled me away from doing those sort of in in home video workouts because I couldn't really push myself too far after a certain

8:51 point moved on to go into a real gym the gym that I have been training out of since that time so it's been about 10 years and I just started going in and I've started lifting stuff basic compound movements in just a couple of moves that I had picked up from the Beachbody stuff that I very quickly learned we're not very effective so I started just moving things around and not really knowing what I was doing so I kept on looking

9:22 for more information and one of the next things that I ended up stumbling across was b-pack ben pakulski who was at the time he was one of the more dominant pro figures so he had you know really huge physique at the time that's where he he was kind of hitting his peak he was putting out a lot of content a lot of paid content so and he made a really interesting case and everything that he would talk about about how just moving a

9:51 weight through spaces and actually doing you very much in the grand scheme if you don't have control over it you don't know what the muscles are doing you're not actually targeting their action so I kind of dove into that with the premise that I mean just like it was marketed as you start doing this program and you're gonna get three times is huge in a quarter of the time a third of the time so the usual the usual draw got me just

10:18 like it would the normal layman is at the time I was so moving on through that kind of started to learn and give some reverence to having real control over loads really understanding the actual ranges of motion that joints are capable of and the ranges of motion that muscles around those joints are able to support actively that was one of the things that really stuck with me that's probably the main tenant of what I use today now in

10:48 my training the things that I had gotten most out of ben pakulski mi40x internal or external trying to control all the extraneous movement try to direct all of the load into the place that you're trying to put it to keeping control through tempo which within itself isn't

11:19 actually you know a very specific thing that you need to be doing other than the fact that if you don't know how to do a movement already if you're moving too quickly there's a very high likelihood that you're not actually using the target muscle to move that way so I've taken that along and that's still something that I use a lot today and third really just taking advantage of forced curves and strength curves that are present and you know

11:48 avoiding things that completely disalignment I mean that's pretty much it that I got through mi40 and I took that program and I buried it for a good two or three years and then after that point kind of felt like I was maximizing what I could get out of the written programs that he was putting out so beyond then I had to kind of expand my horizons and figure out the actual mechanisms behind all the things that he was preaching kind of

12:20 find where there could be possible holes or where it's not applicable to me where I was at the current time and that's helped me to actually develop my own kind of training system where it's not unlike a lot of other peoples that have gone about this by themselves you just kind of pick and choose the things that are actually going to be applicable and try to exploit all the variables that you have available until you figure out

12:48 exactly what's going to work the best and that's kind of where I've gotten to moving as heavy things as you possibly can for as much volume as you can tolerate at that current time and keep on trying to progress over period of time through load total volume through the load total volume through the volume itself through sets and reps and then cycling that as your recovery systemically over time will change so if

13:20 that all makes sense I hope it does it makes for me and I hope it will make for the business too you know it's funny because I came across ben pakulski like like yourself pretty early I mean I think it was already in 2011 or 12 so it was early on but but then somehow transition away from him I also started or I came across some articles saying that you know you you have to get bigger

13:47 or have to be I have to get stronger and then you will get bigger and then I somehow got away from it and then I came across Joe on Instagram again and I saw him and that you know he was working in Ben's gym and that's when I I guess I was mature enough or I guess I knew enough to appreciate the content he was putting out so that's when I I guess went back to Joe because I don't know it

14:17 was something about like I said it was Ben's stuff was it seemed too gimmicky to cringey in the sense that it was a lot of you know when you see an ivory-bill guy promoting something it's I wasn't so naive to think that they were natural so it just seemed like maybe worse for him but you know he's on all kinds of special supplements so I'm not that didn't really give it too much attention but Joe's stuff was very very

14:49 interesting and like you said yourself it no it wasn't just that he was big he was big but he wasn't huge or like monster looking he was using heavy weights but he was also controlling them well and that's what really stuck to me that was reopen my eyes that hey it's not just one or the other it's not just using heavy weights or or doing them well it's his boat like you know I'm sure you get this question often that

15:15 was more important using more weights or better execution and you will be like well Jojo is like yes yeah that is the answer it's just yes awesome and I'm really glad that towards the end you also highlighted the importance of volume that is not just you know strength strength shrink then you can also get into some other mistakes that you only focus on like I see this all the time people will come to me and be

15:44 like so can you give me a spot in my sure and I see guys like they'll do I don't know they'll put 80 kilos on the bar and they struggle to do two reps and I what are you doing and they'll be like well you know we'll have to lift heavy to get big well yeah you have to lift heavy for eight reps not two reps you know and they just don't get it and that's what's really

16:09 frustrating because this has happened many times you know that I tried to give an advice to someone and they they say that they listen but they don't listen and then six months passed by and still have no results but they still don't listen and that point I'm like listen you can do whatever the you want because it's obvious it's obvious you're just an like you're just asking advice for the sake of asking it so it's not really worth wasting my time I do

16:36 want to return to something that I did mention about be packs things and what's something that you said spurred a thought for me and one I want to say this right out that I have a lot of respect for ben pakulski and a lot of respect for Joe Bennett they're both awesome and I've followed them pretty much since the first time I ever saw their content I thought there was some value in it and obviously I paid for

17:00 their content both of them and gone through the programs and I really appreciate everything that they do for the industry so I don't want anything that I say to be misconstrued as me bad-mouthing anything that they've taught or anything that I've gained from them cuz I gained a tremendous amount of information out of you know what they've been able to provide but one of the major downfalls that I found through both of those training methods which are

17:25 pretty similar to each other that the point that I came to after so long using that method was that even though ben pakulski using his method himself and the people that he trains in person they have their bearings of whether or not they can go heavier and keep all of the same like all of the cues all of the bracing perfect control like there's no way for the normal person buying their program to exactly know what the

17:56 threshold of good and acceptable is and what is too far so I ended up getting to the point where I was so over analytical over form and execution and tempo control just for the sake of doing them because I thought that I mean obviously it is still true that for you to get the actual volume that you're trying to get out of the exercises and get the benefit that you're trying to get out of them you have to be able to isolate or Target

18:25 or use whichever word you want to use for whatever context it is the muscle and the movement you're doing but you meet a pure self continuously if you just keep on fighting forevermore perfect execution and you never ever push the load which is what ended up happening happening to me and that's happened to a couple of other guys that I've came across in the gym that have actually just stumbled upon their their programs and thought it was a great idea

18:55 to Train that way and although it is if you don't have the wherewithal and the information at your hands and the maturity to know that like there is a threshold to the point where your execution is kind of asymptotic where you can make it better and better and better ensure that that's great but you're never going to be a hundred percent perfect and that last 5% that you're trying to get from between 95 to

19:26 100% perfect on that execution you might be sacrificing half of the load that you're actually capable of with still 90% perfect form and so that's just not a trade-off that's worth it in the end and just by trying to isolate and target those muscles so completely by controlling it that far you're taking away from your total capacity to load which is going to end up being the primary progressive method that you're gonna use for the majority of your

19:57 muscle growth so I just wanted to make sure that that was said no it was perfect then I didn't send you these over because I figured we would just go or talk to them on the fly but it's funny because my my second bullet point here in my notes is execution versus loads so the effective that the attacker that question perfectly it's awesome and yeah I agree I agree it's funny cuz I was thinking recently about the same

20:25 stuff or I'm preparing a talk for an online thing I'm giving and I was thinking about the same thing that you know you sort of gotta have a range of execution let's say you subjectively in analyzing yourself you might give yourself permission to get down to a seven in your own scale so then would be if if God came on earth and God started doing exercises and perfection in in his through worse form that would be a ten

20:55 and let's see you you allow yourself to get down to a seven in your own whatever subjective rating you you set for yourself or bar yourself or you service standard you set for yourself and you say okay I will increase the load if I can still get an eight or a nine then it's good if it's a seven that is borderline is still okay but I have to keep watching this because it might next time I might just stick with it and try

21:22 to improve it to an eight or a nine but if it then becomes a five then it's like okay sorry too heavy let's drop the weight back a bit let's let's focus on perfecting the load we were using before so I'm very much with you on the same page on this issue so you brought up the the normal person that asks you a question about whether or not it is execution or if it's load or if it's

21:48 volume or load that matters in total free actually make progress I was just I was just thinking about people asking advice in general and and you perhaps telling them what you also said previously that you know you have to use heavy weights and they you also have to be done for a sufficient amount of volume with a sufficiently high quality execution so you're also targeting the musketry are trying to target and perhaps this advice will fall on deaf

22:18 ears so something that I was thinking about is that person that you were talking about the general bro that decides that progressive overload is the only thing that matters so they end up doing two rap sets on the bench and just keep on doing two rep sets on the bench and then they kinda they they lose all their ability to load for the rest of the session one because they've done a two rep max and it

22:45 probably didn't look that great because over time that capacity will go down if you keep on repetitively trying to hit it but that whole thought process of progressive overload being the major thing that matters and you're just chasing more load is going to be the only method that's going to get you the most result is kind of based on a little bit of a misconception of what progressive overload actually is and that can also tie into what we just

23:12 talked about with you know the the execution of whether or not you know a seven out of ten we pull it back a little bit get a little bit better stay there until you can get your form up to an 8 out of 10 9 out of 10 and then you can move the a higher load that whole the whole idea of progressive overload is it's more a reactive thing than it is a causative thing where you being able

23:37 to lift more load at a certain exercise with the same amount of execution the the same qualitative execution that is a result of having more tissue or more neuromuscular neuromuscular deficiency at that movement so as long as you're within a couple of percentages and I'm not super up-to-date on exactly the percentages that the papers that have come out in the anecdotal research from

24:08 people that have done more personal training and programming than I have but within a range of loading about I give it a number of around ten percent of the actual loading that you actually need to in a certain rep range with that execution as long as you're within there you're still in a progressive overload sort of circumstance you don't have to go to a hundred and two percent of the load that you use last time every time

24:38 to get progressive overload that is you trying to progress the load from session to session which isn't the same as you achieving progressive over by continuing to keep on training in a relative rep range or loading zone for appropriate volume that is around the adaptive range that you need at that time I don't know if you have any comments on that oh yeah I have I have actually two so the first part is something I assume you

25:07 have so based on the way you laid it out I think you have listened to Brian minors episode with Eric Helms and the guys yes I don't cause your episodes so I would recommend a link in the descriptions people can listen I actually listen to it too it was interesting I just you know my holy my whole argument with that is in a practical sense like I get the theoretical differentiation but in a practical sense cuz they also I think

25:32 mentioned is that it's not really going to change what you're going to do in the gym so whether progressive overload is an after effect or is D cause overtime you still have to progress in the gym so doesn't really change too much what it does change is when like I said yourself when you fall into that paradigm that hey I have to get lift more weight every single time and that's when you get from sets of eight to ten sets of two to four

26:02 and you end up spinning your wheels and and that's what I saw first with me because I see these guys who we're not listen to me who will ask for a spot from someone else and they will do the same weights for like a year and I see them every single week same stuff they bench 60 kilos they've been 70 they ask for someone to spot them for that 80 kilos and they do three reps and fail

26:28 the fortum whatever and it's the same Monday after Monday after Monday and they don't progress anywhere their physique doesn't change and I'm there looking like how much time are you going to waste before real this is this is not working like if you do it for three months is not working okay but if you do it for three years then you're just an idiot and the second part I wanted to mention is about this overload range and I agree and you know that is

26:55 one of the things I disagree with Mike is that her for example like Mike you know he has this thing that you know every single your ma V or maximum adaptive volume sort of changes and you have to change it every single week or you have to do more because the volume you did last week is now not maximally adaptive and I don't think so I mean like you said yourself if let's say you did three sets

27:21 of ten with my presets of eight with I don't know 100 pounds to given is an example next time if you do three sets of eight with hundred pounds it's still going to be probably effective not if you did the same thing for a month or three months then it might be too easy but if you improve just execution a slight little bit you know maybe if you got a wrap so you did three sets of eight on the first but

27:48 then you did nine on the last one that's still a minor progression that they're still going to be sufficiently challenging to elicit some adaptive response that you're looking for in my opinion I would have to agree with you just based on the fact that they're also within talks that mike has given any information that is out there he doesn't tend to have a problem with training programs that would just have you sitting in a certain volume range

28:16 that is within your you know the range that would be adaptive for you and just kind of coasting there he doesn't prefer to program that way he prefers to have that escalating volume kind of paradigm for the purpose of what you just said but there is still merit to those those programs that keep on pushing other parameters in one way or another where they keep on grinding out the same set volume over time but it'll still be

28:44 stimulative of more muscle growth and strength strength increases that just may not be his ideal way there have been way too many people have gotten resource with way too many approaches to to get bogged down in in such a - yeah you know it's it's like the in the diet realm which I don't want to get to dive into but just use it as an example like if if people have gone low-carb and got a resort people have gone

29:15 gun resource then it has to be something else than the exact car bomb from their diets right I mean it would be fairly self obvious but some people really don't don't want to get don't want to see the forest for the trees so speaking of perfect execution and getting too idealistic with it let's talk about momentum a bit because you and I had a bit of discussion about barbell rows and where momentum fits

29:45 into this I'm curious what are your thoughts of momentum how much is acceptable how should it be implemented strategically because I used to think a while ago what I didn't really think too much of it and then and then I sort of went into the hole you know no momentum is perfect and like on retro raises I did them for a while like with my scapula just depressed completely and just straight pure abduction no scapular movement now I also let it move a bit

30:17 now I also try to use momentum towards the little reps and exercises where perhaps the resistance profile isn't ideal like I don't know if it's right for example a high row or something like the hammer strength stuff usually tells a shitty profile so it might be better to because maybe we can get into the manufacturing stuff towards the end the fifth time but simply let's get into momentum and how how do you think about

30:49 it okay so for the first exercise you brought up bent over barbell rows so where I see momentum being helpful is it's a tool that you can use but in all cases it's not going to be the best thing for you to use I don't believe so for you to get continually stronger and to keep on progressing loads on a bent over row so that you can actually load in the mid-range which is going to be

31:19 the place where you get the most benefit out of an exercise like that there's you have the best ability to produce force from the lap which is going to be your primary mover at the bottom of that barbell row but it's also really really hard for you to initiate movement from a complete dead stop with your elbows completely locked out like that where you will be at the very bottom of that row there's also the problem of what

31:51 your stance is like where your knees are so the bar path and where that has to go where your elbow path is and the relativity of where the bar is going to travel to your torso whether you have to move it around yourself or you're in a perfect straight up-and-down line and your upper body is completely parallel to the floor all those things will matter so for the majority of bent-over rowing I would have to say that if you

32:20 can tolerate going through most of the motion without using any momentum or letting your torso hop that'll do more for you than if you were to you to utilize it predominantly to move that load is we're actually trying to load our back muscles in that range of motion not just to isometrically contract so that we can stay bent over well our hips do all the work of actually moving the weight that's typically what ends up happening on that movement where if

32:51 you're bent over like that the first thing that's going to initiate the momentum isn't going to be you pulling through your lap really really hard really fast and then trying to get the bar close to you the first thing that's gonna happen is you're going to bend your knees like a counter movement like to do a vertical jump if you've ever seen or know the example and try and make mmhmm yeah you're gonna make a counter movement through your hips and

33:18 then you're gonna catch the load on the drop and that's going to give you the stretch reflex you're going to start to actually kick your hips forward and that's going to pull your torso up and your arms connected to the bar which is connected to your lap you're you're not really getting anything out of them you're just doing something at your hip to the bar so that you can start to bend your elbows to get it closer to your

33:43 body and typically you end up pulling your body to the bar rather than the bar to your body which isn't going to do you actually any good for lat development or upper back development what have you other than just the isometric contraction of holding the bar out in front of you and being bent over so to take it to its extremes having momentum be the primary method of how you move the bar is obviously not going to do

34:08 what you want that movement to do for you you're not going to load your lass with the amount of load that's on the bar for that entire range of motion which should be the goal within reason and on the other side if you are a complete dead stop and you don't move at all and you only pull like the first thing that happens and the only thing that happens to move that bar is your elbows starting

34:33 to flex and the bar comes up that might be ideal for a lower weight you can isolate a little bit better but then you'd also have to beg the question of whether or not you want to use that movement as an isolation type or you want to use it as a compound movement and wherever you place that is gonna be based on you and what you want to do with it my personal belief would be that

34:56 you'd rather use that as a compound movement and cut it in between those two extremes you want to control it as much as you can possibly control it but you don't want to let it go to the point where it's just it's not giving you any usefulness for the muscles you're trying to train I hope that didn't run into far of a circle to follow but that should get them I find it a bit interesting you

35:22 would consider a barber or lat exercise I just always thought of it as an upper back exercise due to the strength profile advocates of the lats and simply the nature of the exercise so I obviously viewed it as more of a upper back compound exercise well you're going to head I mean if you actually use it as a compound movement more than anything you're going to hit everything and then wherever the bar actually moves

35:54 in what degree the elbow is abducted from your body that's going to determine pretty much where the load is going to be placed and how you're actually getting it there so so if you're in a position where you're completely bent over and your torso is parallel to the floor and your elbows are traveling out away from your body rather than closer to your ribcage you're going to get much more involvement of your upper back musculature than you are your lats but

36:23 if the bar travel is coming more forward out in front of your face and then closer towards your hip and the elbow is close to your ribs you're going to get more lat than you would have otherwise but even still you very well could be right with that then it's more of an upper back exercise but that's not really something that I'd I'd really have to argue with because it's I view it as more of a

36:49 compound exercise anyways and trying to load it as an isolation would kind of be an effort in futility I think the second version would be much better suited to do with the underhand Easy Bar or something like that where you can actually keep your upper arm closer to you the straight bar doesn't really lend itself to do that but the circuit back to the concept of momentum in general and which you agree that can be used strategically to arthrosis

37:16 profiles for example yeah so if there's a position that you really like mmm for a better example rather than the bent over barbell row for like the lateral raise if you're coming towards failure on a lateral raise and the dumbbells are straight down at your sides that position of having your arms straight down there's really essentially no actual loading occurring at the side delt because the force is completely

37:49 aligned with the force of gravity is aligned with the joints of your arm to your shoulder where the axis of rotation is so there's gonna be no moment arm there's no horizontal distance between the axis of rotation and where the load actually is and because there is no moment arm there as soon as you're pushing out to get the dumbbell up you're going to get hit with a lot more loading really quickly in a very short radial distance from the

38:18 starting position so that quick increase of forces that you have to produce is going to be really hard for you to overcome especially when you're towards fatigue so the idea of using a little bit of momentum to get you through the very bottom portion of a movement like that so that you can get to a point where you're a little bit stronger so you can finish the lift and actually get some benefit out of it that is

38:44 potentially useful you'll get a little bit more volume out of it anyway able to get a couple more reps get a little bit more effective time under tension especially if you're not going for just mechanical loading on a movement such as that I was thinking you know that I'm sure you've seen this there's a study that has been like over referenced at this point there has been some sort of graph computer modeling and basically they calculated like they made like it

39:15 was so it wasn't an actual study in humans that it was some sort of computer design and basically they concluded that if you if you accelerate from the bottom thirty percent thirty degrees of abduction basically you can basically stimulate suicide that's more than if you like you said yourself if you were simply very strictly reach out to your sides what I do is just do my glute squeeze basically do as many reps as I

39:45 can strictly then take three to five breaths and then do another five to ten reps with a bit of hip momentum from the bottom so I think that that that basically satisfies both criteria I also do my fruit drops then I also do my my less so strict but still effective reps and obviously it's not this concept of momentum can be applied to all exercises

40:18 there are some where the risk of injury is not really worth it and others well you cannot simply pause safely like during the squat like you can try bouncing from the bottom but I don't think that's going to be too effective you can adjust deep dive bomb and hope that that momentum is going to drive you back up from the hole so it is obviously

40:49 have to be applied very critically but I think it's like with most things you know we don't have to be black and white about it and we can just use our brains and try to use it strategically to come back to the point that you you made about that paper that first 30 degrees of movement the reason at least I think they hypothesized in the paper or otherwise somebody that was more in depth with the biomechanics of it they

41:16 analyzed it and came through the first 30 degrees of that lateral raise is going to be predominantly executed through by contracting muscles more deep to the shoulder than the delt itself so the muscles that are going to act are gonna be more your rotator cuff muscles for layman's terms so that they can actually visualize a note we're talking about but once you pass that 30 degree you'll get more out of the side delt

41:47 because there's actually going to be an internal moment on that muscle at that point so that would be the reason for that being the case it's also usually dependent on let's us like you know some people like pro bodybuilders wrestling use when you see them there let's are so big that they never really the dumper doesn't really get close to them yeah you can still get some actual loading on that side though when there's enough tissue around it that your humerus can

42:11 never actually come all the way down next to your side where that would be if you were you know normal-sized so for those individuals you you can pretty much get all side delt out of those lateral raises coming down to your air quoted bottom position so let's talk about alignment and sort of joint stress or joint prevention I guess a long-term or joint prevention of Jordan degradation whatever you want to phrase it because

42:41 I've seen use some very heavy weights on school crushes for example and that's been one exercise I or one of the exercises I pretty much never do anymore I I abandoned pretty much everything straight bar like my I have tiny baby wrists so they don't they're not really suited for for loading them in that in that plane of motion I guess I'm I also don't really seem to have a complete 90

43:12 degrees or supination to do bar workers so I just I just do most of my stuff with cables and dumbbells so again where do you think the sweet spot is because you also lead has some very good points about people perhaps emphasizing this in certain movements and not on others for my own training I do want to clear up for anybody that doesn't know me and I'd have to assume most of you guys that are listening don't know me the skull

43:40 Crusher's that I do aren't really like the typical Easy Bar free-weight overhead tricep extension skull crusher I end up doing that on a cable stack too and I do end up using an EZ bar attachment so the reason why it would be you know not the greatest movement for joint integrity is because of that like having to fit yourself onto an arbitrarily fixed position and then the extension of the elbow is pretty much

44:12 the only thing that you're worried about for actually using your tricep the rotation of your radial bone in your forearm isn't actually doing anything for your tricep so you rotating your wrist isn't giving you anymore tricep activation and it may actually be worse because you have to also rotate at the humerus to accommodate the change in angle at your forearm so the reason I'm able to do that and I can justify that

44:44 to myself at this point on the cable instead of having the load coming straight down with the force of gravity like a freeway it would be in that loading dropping off and coming on it's such a rapid rate having it at that that angle doing it with a freeway it just hurts getting getting that weight at the very bottom at that stretched position it hurts there immediately when you start to contract into the load it hurts again

45:13 and then all the way up until the weight is all the way above your face it still hurts and it hurts even worse so that movement I really wouldn't recommend to anybody unless you are the extreme anomaly that just for some reason has the perfect joint structure to allow yourself to do that with no pain and no long-term foreseeable problems from movement compensations now that is like I said an extreme anomaly and I would have to assume that

45:44 most of you if not any of you are not able to do that so using the cable and changing the angle that the force is applied it can kind of give a little bit of the benefit of having that force to be a little bit more evenly distributed across the entire range of motion so you don't have that really rapid turn on and turn off of how much force you have to put in so you can maintain the position

46:08 and progress through the range so that gives a little bit of the benefit of you being able to stay in control of it and your joints aren't taking you know they aren't getting the beat out of them just by doing a single rep and you having to do that also for me the way that I grip the EZ bar the attachment I don't grip it all the way over hand and put my thumbs over it and do a full

46:34 wrap and have the entire inside of my palm on that bar so I allow myself a little bit more freedom at that and pretty much the outside of my hand you know the side the pinky side I pretty much press all the way through that so I can get my hands my forearms and my upper arm shoulder as aligned as I can so that there's rotation any one of those points so I can keep on just focusing on extending

47:04 at my elbow rather than worrying about just moving the weight and then rotating at all of the joints that really aren't supposed to be rotating out of place in the first place no there is admittedly there is a downfall to that I can't completely stop that rotation from happening and that will cause some joint wear and tear that that's gonna happen but there's also a little bit of a give-and-take that you have to decide if you're willing to handle it over time

47:34 can you find enough exercises and can you find anything that's going to load you properly and give you variation over time that you can completely avoid something like that where it kind of fits most of the parameters that you you need to be hitting and you can get around some of its downsides so it can be useful to you although there is going to be some wear and tear damage if you're not doing it on a consistent

47:58 basis every year all year round every push session or every time you have it programmed then the amount of damage per unit volume may be the same but you're not going to be accumulating it throughout your entire lifting career which is where most of the problems tend to happen and even if you have perfect execution on things I mean this is disregarding that exercise entirely on any movement you could have the perfect execution everything could be completely

48:27 sound from the outside and from the inside from your you know your own subjective analysis but regardless of that we are still putting excessive loading through joints on extreme ranges of motion so the amount of loading that your bones can tolerate you may not snap them you may not crack them there may not be any serious destruction of those tissues and those structures while you're doing them and they will actually grow to be stronger and more resilient

48:58 over time through repetitive loading but structures that are going to get damaged through your lifting are still going to get damaged you could have really really horrible four and they're gonna get damaged quicker but over years you know decades there's gonna be some point that you're not gonna be able to load those things like that and everybody seems to have found that point it's up at some point in their career they hit 30s 40s 50s and

49:28 they're gone these movements used to work for me and I mean I trained forever and I never got hurt while I was a young guy but now just these basic bicep curls are killing me these squats are killing me these deadlifts are killing me it's you can only modify for sumup so far and get things perfect for so long they still gonna hurt you were kind of playing a game where if we want to take this to

49:55 the extreme and be really really good at this we're not exactly built as humans to be able to tolerate the kind of loading that we're putting ourselves under for the goal of muscle gain and getting as strong as possible we're built to be resilient but we're built to just survive in the most minimal and limited of circumstances we can be in so we're better at living in surviving in conditions where we're threatened by famine and being

50:23 dehydrated or being extremely cold or being extremely hot and things of that nature environmental factors and we have the ability to survive and do things other than that so that we can keep surviving fighting for food being able to get out of situations that threaten our lives you know fight off an animal whatever it is now this is gonna keepin this is gonna keep going down a rabbit hole if I don't pull myself out here quick but the point is there is that

50:53 point where we're we're just doing something that's not natural for us and as dr. your Scott Stevenson would say we're repetitively moving things in space in a very limited range of motion that we're arbitrarily controlling so that we can create a muscular callus that's what that's what it is so it's not something that we're built to do or something that were necessarily built to be very good at but we keep on pushing for it because it's a goal that we've

51:22 made for ourselves now to a point strength training and hypertrophy training is a good thing and they cause a lot of positive metabolic adaptations to help with you know our basic neuro chemistry and just basic biology pretty much just all points to the fact that some level of is its resistance training and physical activity is going to be good but you take it too far and take anything to their extreme and there's going to be negatives and for us specifically when

51:54 the name of the game is loading things under extreme amounts of load progressively over years and is continuing to increase that over time the price that we pay is just our joint structures that aren't built to recover as fast as our muscles are they're going to degenerate and there's pretty much nothing you can do to stop that other than trying to be as good as you can at preventing not actually preventing injury but managing the risk

52:22 factors involved with getting unnecessary injury rather than preventing it all together so many good points were raised and I used to do that variation actually a couple of years ago now I would have to go back and try it again see how it feels this time around you know what what I didn't like about it was that I always had to ask someone to raise the bar up for me because you can't grab the cable and set yourself to

52:47 the bench and it was annoying I'm sure you know the struggle yeah that's why I do it on the ground to be honest with you I mean I probably get more out of that tricep extension exercise if I was on a bench and I was setting up the angle for that but I just I can't pull I mean what the last time I was able to do that it was at my other gym and it was

53:11 the full stack plus a 45 plate and a 25 plate on it so like there's no way I'm just gonna pull that off the stack walk it over turn myself over to lay on a bench and like start Lee and I tend to have to I train on my own and I've trained on my own for my entire career pretty much so I just I have to do things that I know that I can do on my own without

53:36 anybody being there so sometimes there's a little bit of a you know I wish I had somebody that could help me out with those movements because there's a lot of benefit to having a spotter there having somebody that can help you out get set up and you know get you out of scary positions when things start to go awry but for the sake of actual Hong Gemma tea and being able to come back the next day I kind of have to choose things that

54:02 I'm gonna be able to load by myself and figure out you know the best way with the limitations that are currently there and don't like exercises where I have to rely on someone being there to help me because you know what happens if I know it there's no one around a knife then I cannot exercise and it's annoying so I just I just don't include them I think that's actually one of the best or the greatest advantages of machines and

54:28 having good fancier stuff available to you simply launch of it you know like we only have a cable station at our gym that's up and down you know you don't we don't have the adjustable height but I was training at that gym may I show you some pictures of and it had a do- cable with adjustable cable station that's so good you can line up your your elbow the resistance can come in a perfect angle you know so you don't it

54:56 so you just basically extending in a straight line parallel with the floor you don't have to extend it up and down it's just mixed in so much easier so yeah I would imagine if you had an adjustable cable station and the bench and you could load the so you can set up the cable so you also get a good profile there then it can be very very efficient and effective but in the situation like

55:27 you are where you're limited by equipment you sort of have to make the best of what you have and I also agree on long-term you we cannot really avoid it and that's actually what I've been saying to people that they have been saying to me that for example why I don't do bicep with the bar like I said that all school courses the coming listen ask anyone who has been lifting 20 plus years I haven't heard anyone who said that they haven't

55:55 got elbow pain from school crushers and if every single guy says the same thing I don't have to experiment it on myself I mean I don't have to try it out on myself you know and see if I also get elbow tendonitis six months or a year or two years down the line or five years down the line I take their word for it and I'll just stick to something that's on paper better but I can still load I

56:19 completely agree with that and even without taking it so far as like just taking the general population anecdote of all the people that have done it before I mean he'll you take a straight bar and start curling with it if you don't immediately feel a stabbing pain in the insides of your elbows and your shoulders that you are an anomaly like I don't I don't remember a time that I've ever picked up a straight bar to do a

56:44 bicep curl and it didn't immediately hurt to even just supinate my hands that far so that might just be me but if you're like me and you have that immediate pain as soon as you try to pick up the bar just stop then that's with every other movement too if the position itself for you to do the exercise is already painful don't do it and if that if that problem is from you just being in that position that's not a

57:16 place to be if you have current mobility issues and abilities getting into positions and it's causing you pain because of those then you have some other things to address before you come back to it so don't immediately discount all exercises that hurt you immediately because you may have other things that you can work on before you can exclude their utility if you have a barbell squat a back squat and you're getting down to I don't know 90 degrees just

57:47 arbitrary number here where most people see things take a turn for the worst you get down there and everything's fine all the way up to there and then you just curl over at the spine though your lumbar spine just curls in half and you're looking like a question mark don't all automatically assume that I don't know your leverages are bad or your femurs are too long or something like that that you just have this any issue about you that you're unable to do

58:15 this movement you have to look at I don't know do you have any degree of active dorsiflexion at your ankle any at all can you travel there do you have a pre-existing problem of I don't know an imbalance tightness of your adductor muscles or your medial calf that brings your your knees in tracking so you can't actually get any lower do you have a problem with your glutes not actually doing what they're supposed to and unilaterally stabilizing you to

58:47 externally rotate your hip as you get further into a squat do you have those problems then you have other things to address before you can say yeah squats just don't work for me I'm just gonna leg press the okay sure leg press for now and it's a good tool but if you never ever take the time to address those weak points that you're just incapable of hitting because you're your mechanics suck and your mechanics have brought you to create some

59:14 tightness and other compensations around all the joints involved they're only gonna get worse the less you train into them if you don't address any of those mobility stability issues they're just gonna compound over time and that limited range of motion that you felt on your squat is going to become more and more limiting the less you train into it you go to the leg press and you're going to I don't know a quarter of the range

59:38 of motion that you were doing on that garbage squat in the first place eventually your mobility and ability to hit your range of motion is going to start becoming more and more tightly restricted to the range of motion that you're habitually hitting on your leg press until that is the maximum distance that you're able to travel at all those joints and then where are you you're come you're pretty much crippled yourself out of being able to use any

60:03 exercises at that point because you can't actually put any of those joints through any appreciable range of motion to load them in the first place so long rant short don't exclude exercises just because you've seen on Instagram somewhere somebody talked about your active range of motion and then you just can't hit it and I don't know you have some structural problem that precludes you from using it I think this has been happening a lot around squats specifically which is why I said

60:32 it everybody is on this wave of saying no you don't have to squat to get big I mean sure that's that's true you don't have to that is a true statement but if you're just going about this and squats are hard and you have issues that you have to address for you to be a good squatter then you're just not doing anything to help yourself is only shooting yourself in the foot you don't know if you haven't exhausted

61:01 all other possibilities that you're incapable of doing it so if you're a 16 year old kid 18 year old kid I don't know 22 and you've been training for a year and you just never got good at squats and you saw somebody on Instagram say you don't have to squat to be you know a good body builder or whatever strength athlete because you can do leg presses you can do bulgarians you can do whatever else it is it's true but is it

61:31 really true for you you don't know that until you've exhausted the possibility that you're able to do it but you're just currently not able because the problems that you've gone and left unaddressed saying that an exercise is not necessary is fine but excluding entire movement patterns is not so saying that a particular so high bar or low bar because that's one of my pet peeves low bar back squats are not necessary to get bigger legs

62:02 I agree but any squats at all not high bar not front squat not safety bar not heck was not Bulgarian nothing you know like something there is you sort of have to have something to load the quads in that fully lengthen range I guess you can just do the mid range on the leg press and I mean I guess you could but arguably you would get better results if you trained their cost through their entire contractor range so recipe that's a

62:33 really good example to make and if you wanted to take that even a step further so you can make this a little bit more applicable and we're not just pointing fingers and picking on people that decide they can't squat because they saw a post on Instagram if you take any other movements or any other exercise and you use the same scrutiny I mean look a squat considering really only your lower body from your hips down the squad is pretty much just on the

63:03 eccentric you're going to be dorsi flexing at the ankle flexing at the knee and flexing at the hip and then it's going to be the opposite on the concentric so if you just take the actions of what's happening at the major moving joints and you take that movement and say okay I can't squat so therefore if I can't squat is it because I just can't squat because the mobility is not there or is it that I just don't see any

63:35 utility in doing movements that load those actions at those joints so if you take another movement I don't know the tricep extension again if you want to do a skull crusher and you decide that there's no utility in that exercise why is that maybe it causes you pain okay that's one thing why is it causing you pain if you don't know why it's causing you pain explore that if you figure out that you can do it if you have adequate

64:07 mobility and you're able to do that exercise properly then sure go at it but if you start to exclude something like that and you start to make this mental connection with I can't do skull crushers so I can't do tricep extension so I can't do anything that extends my elbow what are you limiting to yourself you really can't do anything with that muscle group anymore you're pretty much limiting you every possible movement at those joints that are involved in

64:38 doing that that's essentially what ends up happening with people that exclude entire exercises because of some innate problem with their Anatomy that they perceived somebody that thinks that they can't squat a lot of the time I hear I'm tall so my leverages are bad it's like okay sure maybe you're not gonna be as innately good at squatting is somebody that has a four inch long femur that's like you know four and a half feet tall like

65:08 they're gonna be they're gonna be pretty good and but that's not you you have to work with what you're given but what you're given doesn't have to fit some other arbitrary scale that somebody else set out with their own personal scale about they're capable of very often it's just or it's not always but most often it you just want a lack of technique and lack of strength and once you start strengthening yourself and once you start getting good technique then all of

65:37 a sudden you're your imbalance in Scenario structure issues mostly sort out themselves you know I have I have longer than average femurs and I have to bend over to squat but I'm not that extreme I was I was working out with a girl recently and she she also does globe or and she has to bend over very very much so what if she goes high bar and she elevates her here then starts looking much more like a squat and much

66:06 less like a good morning so those are very easy things to to consider buying some weightlifting shoes to use the squat example putting some extra heel elevation using a safety bar if you have it or something that can put and can allow you to keep a more vertical torso all of those things are tools you can use to be able to see a squat while adopting the exercise to a structure and not completely abandoning it and then

66:35 simply getting better and again is stronger like I used to do like the 30 minute foam rolling this drill that stretch this and that nowadays I just do bodyweight squats and Dembo squaws first and then just warm up and start squatting and that's it I wish my my warm-ups could do that yeah so there's something in there that I'd like to address a little bit I'd have to say that for a lot of people that is all

67:07 you're gonna need for your warmup and you're getting into an actual movement if you're coming into it you already you don't have any chronic issues otherwise then you can probably just do your warm-up sets do something like feel out the movements get into it and start increasing the load time after time you know have set after set for your warm-ups and then just get afternoon so that is one method and that's something that a lot of people do end up doing but

67:33 there is something to be said for that other method that you were talking about though I mean the 30 minute foam rolling and doing all these activations or stretches and all that stuff they're still married to that especially for people that actually do need it so for me I wish I could do you know just walk in on my leg day set up a bar and just do a set of 135 at front squat and then

68:01 just do it slow do some tempo do 10 reps and then put on a play purse I'd do it for 5 reps same tempo control it figure it out three plates four plates then they start getting at the work but if you have something walking in that's already a problem and you know it's a problem and it will cause issues to your movement then those need to be addressed first so not necessarily doing a full foam rolling technique like doing your

68:31 entire body and spending an hour laying on a rumble roller your lacrosse ball hitting everything you're using a faragon and hitting every muscle that you know is gonna be working that day because that's not gonna be helpful it's gonna be counterproductive more than anything but if you like me for as an example I have had an injury through my right knee for a while that was just something that was happening over overuse of using the same exact

69:01 pattern and not addressing my mobility properly for too long and now before I do any sort of deep hip and knee flexion so squats and leg presses for my right knee to stay tracking properly and for me to not feel pain and for my actual hips to get to the the very bottom position of a squat without me curling over we're getting kicked out I need to do some rolling on my medial calf I need

69:32 to do a little bit of lacrosse ball work on the insertion of my adductor on the medial side of my knee I have to do a little bit of release on my VMO so like I don't hit my entire quad I don't sit on a lacrosse ball on my entire hamstring and try to fix that that doesn't work you're just you're giving the wrong signal to those muscles and your entire nervous system to kind of say yeah we're

70:02 gonna turn off now that's not something you need what you need is for those muscles that have a chronic level of tightness that's beyond what is necessary for you to go through normal range of motion at the joint you address those specific muscles that are directly limiting your ability you hit those and get them to be relaxed to a degree that is almost nearing the same relative tightness of the other muscles that aren't already a problem then you're at

70:31 a more level playing field for everything and you don't have something that's overly tight and pulling you out of position and causing you pain so no no that's just my take on the actual capability of using SMR or anything of that type as a warm-up technique it's apart and it's a tool but you have to know how to use it where to use it and when to use it if you do have pre-existing conditions and do need it

70:55 then it's not something you should shy away from because it's not totally founded in the research thus far or I have two issues or rather two a condition when it comes to these things one is to simply do the minimum well necessary like if you can get the job done in five minute there's no point in doing 60 so I with we're doing it or like you said yourself you simply have a very justified reason for doing them and

71:22 that's awesome if I don't need it I won't use them and the second worry for me is that people become sort of over reliant or over dependent on them or they sort of have these this mindset and not to true been under the bus again I'm sure he has since changed his opinion but at one point he had this code that was very much famous he said at one point that if I forgot my my protein shake or my

71:52 post-workout shake at winter workout shake at home I would just I would just turn around and leave the gym or something like that you know like really you know this is one of those things like if I forgot my phone bottle at home I won't even bother training or oh my goodness I don't have my boys with me my lacrosse was not the other boys then then I cannot do my workout right now because I don't have them you know that's the

72:22 whole issue and I see this mindset developed around the whole physio stuff and chiropractic and manual therapy and that sort of stuff that's something that plays into an idea that I end up talking about a lot and it virt about the chase you have never-ending chase for optimality in you know the field that we're in it it ends up being a problem when the chase for optimality ends up

72:53 making you do things like that and makes you completely unadapted to unforeseen circumstances the example of I don't know I don't want to throw been under the bus at all so random person a decides okay if I don't have my intro workout shake when I show up to the gym that and I forgot it it's just training isn't worth it I'm getting no benefit let me just leave that's it there's there's no you know utility in

73:21 continuing we just go home but that's that is completely missing out on really the entire benefit of you're training in the first place because you're missing on I don't know a 2% benefit on the overall because he didn't have your intra like that's just not it's not worth it the balance isn't there you have to be able to approach these these sorts of things these situations with some wherewithal of what's actually important and to what degree it is for you to make those

73:53 decisions so if if you're a type-a kind of person then you need everything to be perfect then you are I mean you're in good company because most of us are in this industry but we have to be very cognizant of the fact that we can't have it always perfect all the time and if you're unable to function or deal or just keep on adapting to things that come your way because it's not quote-unquote optimal conditions you're

74:21 gonna make it nowhere in the grand scheme it's just not gonna work so that's a question that I've I've gotten recently after I talked about it on Instagram that I think the question to paraphrase cuz I don't I don't have it up right now and I'm not going to but do you believe that it's still worth training hard even if you are in less than optimal conditions for recovery via having less sleep than normal having less sleep that's optimal and

74:52 shifted sleep cycle or not getting enough food in before the session or I mean et CET see the list goes on but honestly that that conversation and that question came up because I'm fairly vocal about it because it's something that I deal with on a day-to-day basis I almost never have the optimal conditions that would be I mean best practice right now if I could for me to optimize my performance and recovery it literally

75:22 never happens I mean just last night I was working between the hours of 8 p.m. into an I got to sleep at 3 I got up at 8 in the morning to do my cardio like that's not optimal sleep timing that's not I mean I had my last meal at midnight I mean as far as what the chrono typing nutrition things that are coming out now if you're an evidence-based practitioner like people are these days they like to put that

75:50 into their Instagram BIOS a lot if you're that person that goes oh there's emerging research on it like this is the only thing that matters you have to stop eating you know at 10 o'clock at night or else your your chronotype your your time he's gonna be off all your body clocks are gonna be off things aren't gonna work you're never gonna grow you're never gonna get stronger you can't progress in the gym good luck training the next day they if

76:14 your mindset is that if you don't have the perfect conditions to train that you're just not going to or you're gonna half-ass it good luck man just good luck because you you're gonna gonna go down the endless abyss of trying to create optimal conditions for every possible thing and then we'll start leaching away from the actual things that matter you just getting your training done you getting adequate stimulus on a day to day use sleeping at all drinking enough

76:46 water eating enough food those those are the basic things and it might just end up getting me muff eyed that like the only thing that matters from quote-unquote body builder you just got to eat food and sleep and that's it don't worry about anything else there's truth to that if you're trying to just be perfect with everything and you don't have your antioxidants for like two hours after your workout because it stops inflammatory processes like okay to what degree does that

77:19 actually practically matter you don't know because it's mechanistic research and not practical that gave you that assumption and then you had somebody that don't took too deep of a dive into the research once and didn't look at the actual practical applicability of it and goes yeah this is best practice and everybody that has I don't know evidence evidence based practition encoder bio that medially hops on and goes yep no berries post-workout anymore Bri eating only white rice and only chicken and

77:51 that's it and there's nothing else or even further we're only having way Pro post-workout because it's been shown to be the best and most quickly absorbed protein source that there is so any other protein sources is automatically inferior and whole protein sources are useless so now you're you're having six protein shake today and you're not getting the macros in and you're not getting the micro nutrient profile when you rabbit hole after rabbit hole all go down with this so to end the point of

78:20 that whole long rant that I just went on without you stopping me just keep continuing to do the basic things if you don't have the feasibility in your day-to-day life and just things circumstantially don't work out for you to get things perfect do the best you can that's it just do the best you can and you will progress use some amount of good best general practices to get things done stay consistent on it and

78:53 you will move forward you may not move forward at the pace that you possibly could if you could just stop your entire life and pursue bodybuilding on its own but you're still gonna make it further than if you just decided to quit because you didn't have perfect circumstances I think you hacked into my computer and you're right in your reading of my notes my last bullet point is and I'm reading it right now chasing optimality and

79:17 overthinking everything so there you go you anticipated my my last question so that's awesome and that's a great way to bring this whole discussion to a closure of course I agree I'm I was laughing when you when you someone has that question like if I only see fire why is it even worth what retraining no I mean you should just stop training because hey that's how it works like you either live like a monk and you either revolve

79:46 your life from training or you it's might as well just that not worth bothering at all I mean it's of course it's it's that way it's there's no in-between there's no shades of grey it's only black and white like come on now yep if if you can't do every single detail of all of this down to the exact most up-to-date research paper then you're exactly doing nothing and you should give up go home new hobby something that ideally doesn't

80:12 involve you doing any physical activity and just give up that's it that's just--that's yep that's as far as it has to go if you can't be optimal then what are you even doing alright so that was episode 36 autobus engineer podcast with Nick love I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you find it valuable now before I get into my usual copper takeaways from this episode I would have a request so and this isn't something I usually mention but you know

80:45 every now and again I listen to an episode from someone else and I'm reminded of it if you enjoyed these episodes please leave a review on iTunes or wherever you get these from please share it with a friend send it to someone who might find this helpful or valuable share it on social media tag me in your stories all that good stuff it's really appreciated and it would really help me grow this podcast be able to

81:13 reach more people help more people and be able to have better and better episodes coming out as often as possible because as you know I do this alone it's not something I get any sort of financial return out of just you know aside passion of mine and as I've said many times before it doesn't pay the bills so you know something as small as sharing it on your stories or something like that would be very very appreciated

81:44 so thank you in advance now with that out of the way let's get into my takeaways which is going to be one key idea I guess and that is the concept of balance and sort of avoiding the extremes what do I mean by this like pretty much every topic we addressed execution versus loads momentum you know how should you do an exercise however should you be about stressing your

82:15 joints whether you should try to progress despite your circumstance is not being ideal it all comes down to balance you know having a balanced point of view is moment in good or bad it's probably somewhere in between right should you just focus 100% on execution or 100% on roads probably both is joint stress something should you worry about yes but you shouldn't dramatize it you shouldn't

82:45 nocebo yourself you shouldn't tell yourself things that make you weak the code Jordan Peterson like torque comes down to the idea of penance and basically trying to do your best like I think that's another thing that I could add here that try doing your best because ultimately the best is all you can do and if we keep any given day that means dip in five hours it is what it is if that's the best you can manage that's

83:15 the best you can manage another day you might find you are able to sleep 10 hours and that's awesome but you shouldn't be too attached to this arbitrary notion of optimality like I see so many people fall into this trap like when they start reading about training or diet concepts and they do then they suddenly feel like oh my goodness there are so many things I'm not doing like we try to hyper optimize everything and basically they just they

83:46 get worse results because they simply forget about taking care of the big picture first and they simply stress themselves into the ground so try doing your best day in and day out and try to live earlier as well as I said in that outro obviously I was kidding like you shouldn't your life shouldn't revolve around training your training should fit around your life because chances are if you're listening to this you're not making a living from your training it's

84:16 just a hobby of yours so there's that that's my message for you for this week thanks for listening again and I will talk to you all very soon