100k Q&A: Training Tips, My Workouts & Personal Life

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:06 My training program

02:38 Myo reps

03:54 Pre-bed meal

04:56 New channel

06:56 Elderly individuals

08:43 Conor McGregor duck fight

09:21 Multi-articular exercise set counting

10:18 Menstrual cycle influence on performance

11:45 Beyond failure exercises, underrated growth potential, health purpose exercises

13:21 What’s optimal?

14:42 Higher vs. lower reps recovery

15:31 Tracking progress in different gyms

16:04 Hairline

16:49 Finasteride

17:44 Nomad life

18:32 Time under tension vs. reps in reserve

19:42 Modeling

20:30 Bi-articulate muscles

21:22 Fixed points cable machine

22:26 Optimal technique, exercise selection

25:46 Outro

Transcript:

Question number one from Samuel: What does my own training program look like? I train full body every day. So I train every single muscle group every day with two sets seven days a week, meaning I get about 14 sets per muscle group per week. I’m currently slightly cutting and I’m slightly injured, so normally I would have kickboxing in here. Now I still have a lot of cardio in there, and when I do have kickboxing I basically remove one full body workout and I just add a kickboxing session. That works pretty well in terms of recovery. I make sure that, while I train every muscle group every day, I vary the stimulus significantly. So I rotate through different rep ranges, and I also rotate through different stimuli for different muscle groups. So for example, for the hamstrings, I might have a leg curl variant and then a hip hinge movement the next day. But I try not to have the same rep targets and the same exercises and movement patterns on consecutive days.

So I think that’s something where people struggle a lot with full body routines. They think either I’m going to do squats every day or they squat only once per week, and then they do their leg presses and all the other exercises on that same day. And you can get what I think is the best of both worlds, where you split up the different exercises and movement patterns, but you still train every muscle group with a very high frequency. So the frequency per exercise is not that high and not that monotonous, but the frequency per muscle group is very high, because in the research we can see that in every single study, essentially with one very tentative exception – training a muscle group, especially with higher volumes and for more advanced trainees with higher frequencies, results in the same or better gains. There is essentially no downside, and there’s also evidence of positive effects on recovery capacity, in contrast to what many people intuitively would believe.

It seems that you can get a higher volume when you train with higher frequency, and also it’s a little bit easier to recover despite training with a slightly higher volume, which should drive at least slightly better gains, definitely for strength and likely also long term for muscle growth. Again, especially when you’re looking at advanced trainees with high training volumes. Note that my total training volume of 14 sets per week per muscle group is moderate by my standards, of someone attempting to maximize muscle hypertrophy. That is because much of my focus currently is on kickboxing. I do a substantial amount of cardio, and maintaining my physique is basically as good as it gets for me at this point at my level of advancement, plus the amount of kickboxing and cardio I do. So I’m focusing more on not being injured, which is very difficult with kickboxing and on longevity and health outcomes at this point.

And a follow up question from Samuel: Do I incorporate myo reps? Generally I don’t use myo reps a lot. They’re more of a niche area. The main reason I dislike them is not because I think theoretically they’re bad, it’s just that there’s no direct research on them. So it’s a little hard to incorporate them in an optimized evidence based training program without knowing exactly how much training stimulus you’re getting. Based on the current best evidence it’s likely that you need to equate total tonnage. So basically sets x reps x weights, just like with drop sets in most of the research, and then you’ll probably get an equivalent training stimulus. But it’s easier to just count hard sets for exercises that you take very close to failure because we have more research on that. One scenario where I do currently use myo reps myself is with high repetition leg presses.

High repetition of leg presses essentially turn into cardio. And even though my cardio is pretty good at this point it does become an absolute grind to try to get really close to failure. So what I do is I get reasonably close to failure, and then I crank out like five more repetitions after catching my breath. And I do that a couple times, which is essentially myo reps. And then at the end I try to go to failure. This is a strategy that I like a lot for these types of exercises, because you can do a compound exercise in a very joint friendly manner, and you can still get relatively close to failure without feeling like it’s just complete cardio.

Next question is from Helmut: If I already eat 3 or 4 meals a day, and I spread my protein out across the day, and I’m not training fasted and I do have a meal after my workout, is there still a benefits to having a pre-bed meal or a protein feeding to maximize muscle protein synthesis? I think there is no need to have an additional protein serving pre-bed. The old idea of cottage cheese or casein pre-bed made sense in light of some studies showing that an additional protein feeding pre-bed increased muscle protein synthesis throughout the night.

But subsequent research has shown that the effects are mostly attributable to the higher protein intake, and the timing of the protein intake is not that important, especially when you are not training fasted, you already have a post-workout meal, and your protein is already distributed across 3 or 4 meals a day. In this scenario I don’t think you need to have an additional casein shake or cottage cheese or anything pre-bed to make sure that you’re covering the whole night. It’s perfectly normal to have an overnight fast, and that doesn’t seem to compromise muscle growth, especially if your last meal of the day was reasonably sized and your first meal in the morning is also before your workout.

Next question is from multiple people: Will I keep making content for the new channel? I see that you haven’t been posting a while. That is correct, and unfortunately I probably won’t post a lot for the coming months because I simply do not have the time. I knew that business wise it was a bad move to have two channels. It’s a classic case of diversification, but I liked making content for behavioral economics, which was my original field of study and something I’m still very much interested in. However, now with the app taking off and the PT Course doing a lot better, most of my time is going into the fitness business, and I know that business wise, it’s a classic case of diversification to even entertain having a new channel. Moreover, my Instagram account for the new channel got banned for “impersonation” of all things – classic Meta. Yeah, even though the accounts are on the same channel with me being in the same channel, so I don’t know how Meta could possibly conceive of the idea that I’m impersonating myself on my own channel… but yeah, that’s Meta for you.

Also I relatively recently broke up with my long term partner, and I’ll be spending a lot more time in the Netherlands to grow my social network and find a new partner. So that’s also going to take some time. So combined with the business, I simply do not have the time to also run another channel. Most of my time at this point goes to scientific research – doing it, reading it, incorporating it into the PT Course and making content about it. That’s really the main thing. And then my app to do physique coaching at a larger scale, because I simply cannot hire nearly all the clients that want to do coaching with me. And my PT Course, of course, is still basically the main educational product where I teach people how to develop their physique and become better personal trainers. Although 50% of people at this point are actually just doing it for self improvement, just like I personally started some ten years ago when I switched from being a business consultant to going into fitness and working for myself. Which, by the way, is probably the best decision I’ve ever made in my life. So yeah, a new channel is indefinitely on hold and instead I’ll be doubling down on my fitness channel.

Next question by Eric: I have more of a video request because it’s probably too complicated for Q&A. How should elderly individuals like 65 plus approach their training? That’s a great question. And yes, in my PT Course this is a whole module, but I can give you one tip that really is the main thing, because most things for elderly individuals are the same as for younger individuals. All the same principles still apply. The main thing I generally change with my older clients is that I do a lot more high repetition work. High repetition work can be very easy on the connective tissues, and there’s also research that elderly individuals don’t benefit as much from doing lower repetition work because they don’t have the coordination, and there is some sprouting in the neuromuscular coordination that takes place, which essentially reduces the benefits of higher muscle activity levels and more strength type training. Because the reward is lower and the risk is higher in terms of connective tissue damage.

If you still keep running into connective tissue injuries while you’re doing a lot of high repetition work already, you might also have to dial down the volume in terms of sets per week per muscle group, but this should be a last resort, and there are actually multiple meta-analyses showing that elderly individuals still benefit greatly from very high training volumes. If anything, it seems in the literature that people that have more difficulty growing (this includes hard gainers) have more to gain from doing higher training volumes. Basically, it seems that they have a level of anabolic resistance. And we also see this with protein feeding, for example, so the stimulus for anabolism just needs to cross a certain threshold, and this threshold is higher when someone is elderly or when someone is a hard gainer. So these individuals need bigger protein servings per meal, and they also seem to need higher training volumes to get that robust anabolic stimulus and kick start the whole process of muscle growth.

Next question is from StraitJacketFitness: Would you rather fight 30 Conor McGregors each the size of a duck, or 1 duck the size of Conor McGregor? Both of these sounds absolutely horrifying. I do not want to fight Conor McGregor in any way or shape. So 30 of them, 30 Conor McGregors, even if they are tiny sounds horrifying. And I think the duck, even if it’s human sized, it has a very vulnerable neck, and I don’t think a duck is very good at grappling. I’m also not good at grappling, but I feel like the neck is very vulnerable and I feel like I’d have a pretty good chance fighting a very large duck. So I’m going to go with the big ass duck.

Next question by Nessuno: Do we count a set of a multi-articular exercise as a set for auxiliary muscle groups too? This depends. Basically in research we see that it doesn’t matter if the set or the volume comes from a compound exercise or an isolation exercise. What matters is the biomechanics of the movement and how much that muscle is trained with the exercise. So for example, with dumbbell rows we see that the stimulus for the biceps – there is some, but it’s half or less than half of the stimulus as from a set of, say, Bayesian curls, or, in the research at least dumbbell curls. So that volume you would count approximately half if you want to use very accurate volume counting, which is what I recommend. This is called fractional set counting, and that is ideally how you count your sets. So you have to determine for every exercise how much each muscle group that is involved is trained, and then you count that as a certain fraction of total volume, with 100% volume being a full stimulus for that muscle group.

Next question is from Lindert Bauweraerts: I am interested in how the menstrual cycle influences weightlifting performance and how athletes should periodize their training accordingly? There is at this point a consensus that training performance, physically speaking, is not impacted by the menstrual cycle. So while individuals do often self-report that there is a certain phase in which they feel weaker or stronger, objectively, when you test them, they are actually not stronger or weaker in any particular phase, at least not consistently, predictably, or reliably. Despite this, a lack of difference in performance across menstrual cycles, possibly due to the hormonal changes that occur in the follicular versus the luteal phase, there are multiple studies that suggest it’s better to do more of your training volume in the follicular phase of the program.

Now, in these studies they do that by exercising more in the follicular phase and exercising less in the luteal phase, and then comparing that to with equal volume over time in both phases or the opposite distribution. That is not very practical. I recommend that you keep your training frequency the same, but I do like to shift some of the volume more toward the follicular phase. Just one set extra, for example, and then one set less during the luteal phase. Something like that can work well and might be advantageous if that’s not a pain in the ass to program for the individual, because of course this adds a lot of complexity and that’s not for everyone. However, if someone does have a regular menstrual cycle, then I recommend that you implement this if the cost benefit is deemed worthwhile.

Next question is by MindfulMovementPractice: What exercises are best done beyond failure? Which exercises are underrated for having a lot of muscle growth potential for muscles like the hip flexors, tibialis or serratus anterior? And are there any exercises you would do purely for health purposes? Okay, let’s do these one by one. Which exercises are best done beyond failure? These are exercises that do not cause a massive amount of fatigue when you take them to failure. Often this means that in terms of the resistance curve, there is peak resistance in the contract position. You see this with for example, dumbbell lateral raises, dumbbell biceps curls, and especially rowing and pulling type movements where the end of the range of motion is by far the most difficult part of the movement and therefore the sticking point.

So when you do rows and at some point you cannot fully get the elbow behind the body anymore, you can still do a lot of repetitions in which the elbow doesn’t quite get behind the body, and after that, there are still a lot of repetitions in which every repetition just gets progressively shorter. But the stimulus is still there. So for many of these exercises, where the fatigue is not very high and you’re not overloading muscles at longer muscle lengths, because I think the risk reward in terms of the extra stimulus versus the extra fatigue for these exercises is quite favorable, whereas, for example, for a squat or a bench press it’s not so favorable. You already taxed pretty much the entire range of motion when the sticking point is not at the top position. And the fatigue is very real, we see in research. So I do actually differentiate greatly between exercises that I think are fine to take to failure, and exercises where the stimulus to fatigue ratio is not worth it.

Next question is by John. If training time directly subtracts from sleep time, how do you evaluate what’s optimal? That’s a good question. In most cases, I think it is best to train unless you’re already at a very high training volume and your recovery capacity is genuinely the limiting factor. Based on the available research, for most individuals, at least in the neuromuscular sense, recovery capacity is actually not a big limiting factor. Mental effort and simply time are bigger efforts for the average individual than actually neuromuscular capacity to recover from the given training volume.

And this also reminds me of a conversation that one of my friends had with the teacher at college. The teacher said that we have to sleep well before the exam because during sleep there is consolidation of what you’ve learned. And my friend retorted that you cannot consolidate what’s out there, so you still have to study. And with training it’s kind of like that where you have to make sure that you get enough total training stimulus in.

Sleep is very, very important. Absolutely underrated. But if you’re not getting a certain amount of training volume in there’s simply no stimulus at all for muscle growth. So first you have to get the stimulus in, and then you have to make sure that you recover from that. So basically for most individuals, I think: get the workout in, only when you’re already pushing the volume up to like MRV levels, very high volumes, and recovery capacity is a genuinely limiting factor – at that point are you probably better off just getting more sleep.

Next question is by Andrew: Is there anything to the idea that higher reps may be harder to recover from than relatively lower reps? Yes. In the neuromuscular sense, this is absolutely true. Higher reps induce more total work per set, higher reps take you closer to failure objectively, so it makes sense that higher reps actually cause more fatigue. And we see this in many, many studies. If you think about it, after a set of 15 rep max you cannot even lift your 15 rep max any more, so let alone say your 5 rep max, which means that the 5 RM is clearly not as fatiguing as the 15 RM. However, the big caveat is that lower reps generally seem to be harder for the connective tissues and in fact are necessary to make connective tissues grow, according to some research on tendon adaptations. So it really depends on whether you are being limited by your connective tissues and injuries or actual neuromuscular recovery.

Next question is by Max: How would someone accurately track their progress when training in two different gyms? In this scenario I like to use color coding. So I have some of my clients that do this, and then you make in your log: you turn some of the workouts green and some of them blue for example, and then when you’re in gym A you try to follow the green progression track, and then when you’re in workout, or in gym B then you try to follow the blue progression track. This is, I think, a very convenient way to still track progress over time when you have, say, two gyms or two different machines that you use in the same gym. The same principle applies.

The next question is by SuperDragonSunshine: It’s actually a series of questions, so I’m going to answer the first two to make room for everyone else’s questions as well. First one is: Is your hairline natty? Yes, this is my natural hairline. I probably will go with a transplant at some point, but I am using minoxidil, that’s a caveat, so if you don’t consider that natural then it’s not natural, but it is actually in the exact spot in which it’s always been. So it’s mostly preventive at this point. But I do know that I’m going to be very prone to hair loss, and I’m basically the only guy on my dad’s side of the family in particular, that still has any hair at my age. So I am taking preventive measures and I’m thinking of starting finasteride, which actually I saw is, I think, your next question:

What do you think about the effects of finasteride on testosterone, strength and muscle mass? These have been studied in multiple studies, and there is no effect of finasteride on muscle growth or strength development. Because what happens is essentially that you’re blocking the 5α-r, aromatization of testosterone to DHT – dihydrotestosterone, and what happens during that process is that you get less DHT but more testosterone, because less of it is being converted. So in terms of anabolic response, you have the testosterone that compensates for the lower levels of DHT, and the end result seems to be no effect on body composition or muscle growth or strength development. Especially when you take low dosages, which is what I highly recommend for most individuals, because when you go over about one milligram per day for the average individual that doesn’t have something like prostate issues, you get a dramatic increase in side effects for very, very little additional DHT suppression and very little additional effect on hair growth.

Next question is by user- … long string of numbers and digits: Are you comfortable talking about your nomad life? Mentioning the places you have lived in, for how long and how roughly you rank them or pointing out the pros and cons? Well, that would be a very long process. I have been a digital nomad for most of the past decade, and I’ve lived in over 50 countries. So for a long time I used to do one month – one country. Most of the time it was probably more like two months – one country, but I did that for a long time and I’ve lived all over the world – Asia and South America, Europe, United States, everywhere. So yeah, if you have specifics, I’ll be happy to point you out. I can say, though, that of all the places I’ve been to, ultimately I ended up buying a house in Portugal. So by that nature, you could say that I really like Portugal a lot.

All right, next question is by Don Janse or Janse, depending on if you’re Spanish or Dutch, I guess: There used to be a lot of talk about the time under tension. Now it’s mostly reps in reserve, with rep ranges between 5 to 30ish yielding the same results. Is there a science regarding the difference when you slow down reps considerably, or is mainly the only factor reps in reserve and hitting close to failure? Yes, it’s the latter. And the paradigm is shifted for a good reason because when you take sets close to failure in the range of 5 to 30 repetitions, it’s quite clear that’s on average you get the same muscle growth and the tempo doesn’t really matter.

There have been multiple new meta analyses on this as well, 2 new meta analyses, which showed that the tempo is mostly irrelevant for muscle growth. Even though I generally recommend that you do control the eccentric a little bit. You logically just need some control to make sure that you do get an eccentric muscle action, because research does clearly show that eccentric muscle actions are beneficial for muscle growth. Other than that, though, it doesn’t matter much for strength development. It does matter if you use an explosive concentric, so you basically push the weight up explosively and then you lower it under control. But you don’t have to actively slow it down.

Next question by NeverFinishedGoggins: Did you ever consider doing modeling? I did do some modeling, very amateur stuff. Never really got paid for it, but basically I was in agency for hair modeling when I was a student and also almost got hired by Storm, which would have been great, but the short version is that I was too bulky to be a normal model, but not muscular enough to be a fitness model. So after that, I did do a little bit of fitness modeling, but ultimately I don’t really fall into the category of being either a great normal model or a great fitness model. So yeah, wasn’t much of a career there. And also not really something that I wanted as a career, but it would have been nice, especially as a student, to make relatively easy money from that. But alas, it was not meant to be.

And the next question is by Stephen Carnevale: Many muscles are bi-articulate. Does it matter if you train them with only one of the joints that they cross? No, that is fine. Muscles only register tension and it doesn’t matter at which joint they are contracting. In fact, the muscle is just contracting or it’s not contracting, so it’s either producing force or it’s not producing force, and that will produce force at both ends of the muscle, both the insertion and the origin. So it logically doesn’t matter with which joint you are moving. The muscle only registers the tension and the length that it’s at. So those are the factors that you should be thinking about, and it doesn’t matter if you, for example, look at the biceps: It’s technically a tri-articulate muscle. You don’t have to train it at the shoulder, nobody does that, and you don’t have to train it at the forearm so much either. If you just trained it at the elbow, which is what most people do, right? They just do elbow flexion, then you’re probably getting full results already.

And the next question by chris_does_not_insta – on Instagram. The cable at my gym has fixed points – highest and lowest. Please recommend a chest workout using only these two settings. So as I pointed out in my recent video, I’m not a big fan of these higher to lower or lower to higher chest flys because you’re not targeting the lower or the upper chest more, you’re just targeting the other half less. And also a lot of people have muscular imbalances where they have their lower chest that’s overdeveloped relative to the upper chest. And when they try to do upper chest, they’re basically turning it into a front delt exercise, which is a muscle group that’s usually overtrained anyway.

So I generally like to have my chest training very, very chest focused and focusing on the entire pec muscle. Most of the exercises at least. If you only have high and low pulley what you can do then is using the low pulleys, putting a bench in between them, lying on the bench and then doing flys while you’re lying on the bench. That works super well. Technically, what you can also do is just bend over 90 degrees and use the high pulleys to do a fly that way, but it’s pretty awkward.

And then the last question that you upvoted is by Andrew Webster: Learning and pursuing optimal technique is fun, but how much does it really matter? How much does exercise selection really matter? Okay, there are two different considerations here. The first is technique and the other is exercise selection. I agree that YouTube is full of information about these topics, but one of these is a lot more important than the other.

There was a recent study that looked specifically at the effects of training technique in the sense of how most people think about it, that the technique is more clean and pretty and doesn’t involve other muscle groups, and the result was actually that it didn’t really significantly influence muscle growth. When you’re doing a push down, for example, and you use a little bit of body movement – that is fine. It doesn’t really alter the stimulus for the triceps. You are involving needless effort and involving other muscle groups that are doing some work, but probably not growing from it. So it’s not efficient. And it might also be injurious in the sense that you are lifting more weight to get the same growth stimulus.

However, it’s not important that the technique is like clean or slow or very textbook. Things that really matter are the things that influence muscle length and tension, because mechanical tension is the primary driver of muscle growth. So what matters is if you are completing your desired full range of motion, for example, and if you are getting good tension on the muscle groups. Because there is also another study in which they looked at biceps curls and they found that when you’re doing biceps curls, when you’re just thinking about moving to weight up, and they didn’t really check how they moved the weight up, but what usually happens in this case is that you get like this Arnold swing where you, you know, do a half power clean – that resulted in only about half the muscle growth of a group that was instructed to really focus on just doing a curl with their biceps. So in that scenario, it does seem to matter. But in the scenario of like the technique “looking perfect” that doesn’t really matter. You just need to make sure that you are targeting the actual muscle groups and moving them through the range of motion that you desire.

Now, exercise selection is much, much more important because exercise selection is also essentially a safeguard against poor technique. If you have a really good exercise, like a Bayesian curl for example, and especially if it’s an exercise like a leg extension that doesn’t have much freedom in that movement anyway, then that compensates for a lot of technique problems already, because you’re always going to get tension throughout the entire range of motion, essentially. So good exercise selection is very important because it really affects how much stimulus you’re getting on the target muscle groups. And secondly, it’s also a safeguard often against poor technique. So if your exercise selection is really good – technique also matters less. Whereas if your exercise selection is meh – you could probably make that work if your technique is really good and you really focus on the desired ranges of motion.

For example, if an exercise inherently has poor tension at long muscle lengths, but you emphasize that part more with your technique, maybe lengthened partials and yeah, your repetition tempo, these things can compensate for poor exercise selection to a degree, but with good exercise selection you just don’t need to worry about these things very much. Overall – exercise selection: usually important, exercise technique: probably a little bit overrated, at least in the way that most people think about it. In practice though, a lot of people do mess up on the simple basics with range of motion and actually targeting their target muscle groups, and not involving a whole bunch of other muscle groups and turning it into some bastardized compound movement.

So that’s it for today. Let me know if you like this type of content and then I can do more Q&As. And if you like evidence based fitness in general, I’d be honored if you like and subscribe. And if you made it this far into the video then you are probably a serious lifter that is very much into evidence based fitness. In that case, I can highly recommend my PT Course because I made it, and I think it’s the best research on the web to teach you everything you need to know to take your physique to the next level, maximize strength development, and reach your maximum muscular potential at your lowest desirable body fat level. The link is in the description. Check it out.