How To Build Muscle Superhumanly Fast – Mike Israetel

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:42 Supplements

01:22 Multivitamis/Multiminerals

02:14 Creatine

03:12 Whey

05:27 Caffeine

05:49 Omega 3

06:09 Other supplements

07:31 Beta-alanine

08:13 Citrulline malate

09:44 Supplement research volume

12:13 What works best for intermediate lifters?

22:31 Calves

23:23 Hamstrings

25:05 Quads

26:36 Abs

29:18 Glutes

33:22 Erector spinae

35:43 Lats

37:17 Rear delts

40:03 Traps

43:59 My Online PT Certification Course

44:54 Pecs

47:40 Triceps

52:46 Biceps

55:34 Progressive overload vs good technique

1:02:14 Technique doesn’t matter?

1:07:27 Lengthened bias

1:10:59 Interpreting studies

1:15:09 Outro

Transcript:

-Increase force output.

-Sometimes you gonna have a few mid strokes in there, sometimes some long strokes, but make sure it’s still in!

-It’s a group of untrained individuals… So that’s a limitation…

-I thought you’ll never…

-The other arm used a lot of body movement.

-You just gotta be able to milk more out with that other one. Do you wanna do full range?

-Just the elbow motion.

-Do you wanna squeeze at the top?

-Amplitude…

-Eh, you know… If we could do this, like, outside my apartment 5 minutes away at a cafe – sure! Do I swing my sword around like this? Or do I do like…

-What are the first 3 supplements that you would recommend the average intermediate trainee to look at. Or formulated otherwise, what are the 3 supplements that you recommend the most often?

-Man, that’s tough because I’m now sponsored by a new company that has “the ultimate 6 supplements”. They explicitly told me never ever mention 1 without mentioning the other 5. So I’m actually contractually obligated not to answer this question. Is there another question I can answer?

-Right. Go with creatine then.

-So this is just creatine 123. Yeah. So I think it depends on how we talk about supplements, because I typically don’t talk about multivitamins as a supplement, even though it is. It’s not something they considered like for health and fitness. And I think it’s like way more for health than it is for fitness. It’s not going to get you more jacked. But I think that if you’re serious enough to be taking supplements, I think that you should consider multivitamin, multimineral in any of the many, many ways that you can take such a thing, including some of the better kind of greens, powders type situations. I think sometimes they have some merit to more or less just round out your intake of micronutrients to make sure that, like, you’re not just missing like entire swathes of, you know, the D vitamins or something, which can make a difference. And so I would say like some, you know, counter consideration can be made for multivitamin multimineral. Though the, the literature on that is not super clear. And there are lots of caveats and contextual things. Creatine is hugely in consideration at the top three. It’s probably one of the most empirically well-supported supplements. It’s empirically supported and also supported in a few different ways that are worth mentioning. One way it’s supported is, it’s just direct scientific investigations show that it almost always works to gain muscle and strength. It’s also, very, very importantly, well understood in the, in the trenches, so to speak, in the fitness world, to be like something that actually works. You know, there’s a few things that have a good empirical support, but the effect magnitude is so small that nobody really uses it. And people who tried it, they’re like, I don’t know if it does anything. Creatine does stuff, which is sweet. It’s also the physiological rationale, the chemical rationale makes perfect sense. And, all those aligning is a pretty damn good. And also creatine is like a few interesting potential cognitive benefits and health benefits, which is at some point creating kind of seems like essential almost to take if you want to optimize and so creatine is good. And, you know, slot number 3 would be kind of a mix and match of what sorts of challenges are you running into in your life? If you are in a situation where you find the literature on intro workout, post-workout nutrition compelling, and worth your time, and then you have everything else sorted in your nutrition, I would say getting a high quality whey or whey like protein with a rapidly digesting carbohydrate, like Powerade or Gatorade powder or something, consuming that during and after your workout might be something that makes it things go better, especially if you’re workouts are very hard or very long. And if you can throw some electrolytes in there, then, if your workouts have you sweating a lot and stuff, then that can really quite, make a decent impact. Very marginal effect in total, but it’s one of those things, like… it makes such good theoretical sense and experientially so many people who have tried it they’re like: “The last half an hour of my workout just goes way better if I do this.” then great. It also sets you up for if you finish your whey protein, your carbs after training, you have time to shower, you have time to drive without needing to be paranoid about instantly, you know, guzzling down as much protein as possible. So that can be quite nice and convenient. It’s also very, has a very good price performance. A lot of people will illusorily say, I’m sure you get this all the time, like, I can’t afford supplements. Like you understand, whey protein is cheaper than meat in almost every context. So… and higher quality. So… it’s just very, very difficult to say it’s bad. But if you’re a person who struggles to get daily protein in, up to high enough levels, then I would say yes, whey protein is a consideration for supplementation, but also so is casein protein. And so it’s like egg protein. And a variety of vegan proteins can do a great job like soy protein if you are a vegan. And so just any kind of protein supplement to get you up to your daily standard of multiple meals throughout the day, roughly even protein, I think, is a really excellent thing. Is it technically a supplement? Oh, yeah, we can argue all day. It’s really kind of just a food. But I think so. Basically. If you’re not taking some kind of multivitamin-multimineral, if your diet is a very well rounded, you don’t have to and then you’re totally good. If you’re not taking creatine and if you’re not taking some kind of protein on an as needed basis, then, I would say though, those are probably the first supplements to look at. A couple of… can I talk about some ones that didn’t make the list?

-Sure. Yeah.

-Yeah, like… So, you know, if you need energy and focus and stuff, I think caffeine based stimulant product pre-workout can have an utility function that’s positive for you. Not everyone needs that sort of thing. I don’t. A lot of people think, like, you know, they train at 6 p.m., and so, like, it’s just intractable because they would just never fall asleep or the sleep quality sucks, but a lot of people like that sort of thing. And there are, you know, a few other supplements that have kind of sort of contextual situation. Sometimes literature on omega 3 looks pretty good, sometimes it doesn’t look so good. Generally it’s fine, so maybe that’s something to consider, a healthy fat supplement. But, you know, I think those are probably in the conversation for me for things to consider. And the last thing I’ll say is, you know, outside of creatine just probably being better to take than not to take and making sure that, you know, your vitamin mineral levels are good. And if not, feel free to supplement. There are ways to just never have to eat supplements and get all the protein you need. And after that all of the supplements that you could take that really make a difference, at least today, don’t have a lot of convincing evidence that you even need to take them. And so it’s kind of, a thing where I think a lot of people get to the intermediate stage and think, okay, like time for supplements. And they open the door metaphorically to supplements, and that room is like, like one dustbin falls over and a spider crawls across the floor… The fuck? It’s nothing in here, really. Creatine is in there by itself. Like “I thought you’d never come rescue me.” And so, you know, like, it’s just, supplements just aren’t that big of a deal to begin with. So I just want to make sure people get that information. Because I think a lot of people, you tell them, like “When you’re in intermediate, man, get creatine, and protein will jack you up…” and then… is just not true that these make such a huge effect that you even need to be taking them.

-Yeah, it’s one of the things where people micromanage the most about the things that actually matter the least… probably. And I would agree that most of the supplements that I recommend to clients or people, there are things that you could get from your diet, but people don’t, whether that’s magnesium or vitamin D, vitamin D you can also get from the sun not so much diet in the first place. And then there’s creatine, basically… Do you put any stock in anything beyond creatine or that you wouldn’t get from your diet like citrulline, beta-alanine?

-So beta-alanine is a fun supplement. I don’t like how it makes my skin feel. It’s not. A lot of people think that feels nice. I hate it.

-The tingling…

-Yes. Is it just not convincing to me that it causes muscle growth and since muscle growth is kind of the only thing I optimize on, if I was interested in sport performance maximally, I would probably have phases of beta-alanine administration because it is quite a decent buffer and it can let you get a few more reps or a few more steps or a few more rolls.

-Not for jiu jitsu?

-So, I don’t optimize for jiu jitsu. If I was, I’d may very well take it. And, so that’s a fun supplement, Citrulline malate, it does some things, but, it just hasn’t stood the test of time in a way that we can say, like, this is for sure the things it does, and they’re really good and they’re really meaningful. I wanted, you know, in the 2010 citrulline was something that everyone was looking at very closely at, and it just kind of was like, you know, like it’s like your friend goes on a couple dates with a guy and she’s like “I think he’s great.” And a couple weeks later, like, “How’s Frank?” She’s like “.%##&% Frank…”, you know… And you’re like: “Oh shit, you know, it’s just some guy.” So citrulline, it just doesn’t seem to have that kind of real raw, like, wow effect magnitude that makes it malleable for me.

-Yeah. What you very often seen with supplements and especially with citrulline is that people get very excited about a proxy for the results that they’re looking for. So citrulline makes you do more reps and then they’re like, more gains. But actually there’s no study finding statistically significantly greater muscle growth with citrulline supplementation than without it. Now, the supplements… the research is a little bit limited, but with supplements I think the bar can be pretty high because there’s so much stuff that goes on. So many publication bias, false positives… So if there’s not very compelling research showing it actually does improve the outcome that you’re looking for, like muscle growth, I think it’s indeed very fair to say you can have a very skeptical outlook towards that something.

-Yeah. And it doesn’t mean a cynical outlook because you can say… look like, five studies later, we might all be taking citrulline malate. Five very good studies, replicated by different labs… But for now, there’s no doubt, I think like, from a kind of grander perspective on truth value, there are probably at least a few supplements currently in use and sold somewhere in small health food stores that are actually bangers, like they fuck and they work. We just don’t have the research volume to say for sure. And because humans have limited money, and the number of supplements you can buy is actually so… kind of unlimited. Like there are hundreds of them. And they each cost $20-$60 per month. Man. You know, you just don’t want to take them all. If you’re Brian Johnson, then you’re, you know, trillionaire or whatever, you can take all of them. But he’s really systematic, too, about taking a lot of supplements for a long time, trying to figure out which ones work, which ones don’t. And then he, like, puts a bunch of them away after another. Yep. That didn’t work. That didn’t work. If you want to do something like that, that’s cool. The ROI on that for him is awesome, for you and me and everyone else is going to be a gigantic fucking waste of time. Better he does it and we find out what works by him. But yeah, no doubt there there are supplements because what I don’t want people to get the perception of. And I used to commit this fallacy all the time is the like “Keep it simple stupid” fallacy. You know, can you imagine, like, telling someone who works at a video who designed a GPU cores to keep it simple? He’s like, get out of my face. You have no idea how complicated this is. The human body is quite complex, and there are no doubt supplements out there that absolutely work, we just don’t know about in a real confirmatory way. And so in the future, we have to be open minded that some supplements really do work, because a lot of people get this idea when we speak that, oh, just like 2 or 3 things that work, everything else doesn’t work. It’s like, no, that doesn’t work. It’s some of them don’t work because we’ve studied like, you know, ten times and it just comes up zero every time – probably doesn’t work. But a lot of them were just like, I’m just… I’m just not sure if they work, you know. And so because they cost money, you know… A very terrible analogy I always give is like, would you drive three hours one way and three hours back to, like, hook up with a hook up buddy who, like, just does it every time, like, she’s got it like, yeah, maybe. Right? But if it was like, hey, would you drive three hours for someone that may or may not even show up to the date? You’re like, man, three hours, bro… You know, if you could do this, like outside my apartment five minutes away at a cafe, sure. But like three hours, no. That cost, you know, if someone was willing to ship you free supplements every month and try new supplements all the time, I’d say yes. Try them all. You know, not gonna kill you. But because they cost money and because you put your hopes and dreams into them working I would say for the most part, stick to the ones that probably work.

-Speaking of things that actually work, what do you think… What do you think the things are that really move the needle the most for an intermediate level trainee? So they’re doing the basics. You know, they’re doing strength training. They are consuming enough protein. They’re tracking the macros. They have a at least some decent volume of training and decent effort. They got their newbie gains and then they get kind of stuck. What do you think are the things that, for those types of individuals, have the most effect, things they could do, like invest more time in to get better gains?

-One is… …so the intermediates, right? They’re early intermediates or late intermediates?

-Let’s say early intermediates.

-So it’s a… try to analyze whether or not you are pushing yourself hard in the gym on an objective standard.

-How do you know that?

-So you set yourself a goal of getting roughly 3 RIR in the first week of your mesocycle, and you write down all your sets and reps, and then every single week after until you have to deload you make it your fucking mission as a grown adult to match or exceed every single… exceed every time. So if it’s the same weight, one more rep every set, if it’s, a little bit more weight, same reps. Don’t let your reps fall until you hit failure, and not failure like you gave up. Failure like somebody is there to make sure you don’t die and really learn what that feels like. You may just be training either exactly as hard as you thought and you’re like, okay, that’s not a limiting factor. Great. I can move on to the next thing, or you will be like, oh yeah, I can try harder because a lot of people will do independent RIR estimates, which are totally cool way to train. And that means like every time you come to the gym, whatever you’re RIR is, it doesn’t matter if it’s failure or if it’s 2 RIR, they’ll just sort of organically get to it and every time, independently of what happened last session, independently of the next session. And that’s cool. And if you have, a really hard training drive, it’s an excellent way to train. It’s also very liberating. You just fucking send it, you know, you don’t have to worry about numbers, or anything like that. But if you suspect you might not be training hard enough, which I find that a lot of folks who are intermediates can train harder, than the easiest way to do it, in my opinion, the most straightforward and more systematic is to set yourself a nice, easy goal in the first week and just keep beating it by a little. And at some point it’s going get really tough, and then you’re going to find out how tough is it, because some people will say, oh man, I got ten reps and I couldn’t have gotten 11. But if last week you got 11 and this week it’s just 2.5 more pounds on the bar, you need to get 11, then… …seeing it from that mentality, you might get 11. And then next week you get 11 again. And the week after you’re like, there’s no way I’m going to do it. But you believe in yourself and you get 11 again. Then you find out what really hard training is, and then you find out if it was limiting you or not. Because sometimes hard training like is roughly the same and sometimes hard training is a big, big unlock. So I’d say that’s something worth exploring. Once you’ve done that… So…

-Progressive overload, very important.

-Yes, yes.

-Reps in reserve and testing that you’re actually getting to that desired level of proximity to failure by occasionally going to failure.

-Yes. But not, not just going to failure. Trying to meet an objective standard you don’t know if you can meet, but really putting your ego behind it, because what you may think is your failure point is your failure point, but it’s much more psychological and physiological. But if you unlock your psychology to say, I don’t give a fuck what happens, I’m going to go all the way and let’s see if I can get 11 reps and maybe you’ll get 9, And you look like: I really did try absolutely as hard as I could, but whatever. If you think you’re really, really, really, really trying and you’re not making the gains you want, that’s probably not where you’re going to get more, more gains. But if you’ve never objectively put up a standard… Why am I saying this? Personal trainer for a long time, coaching people for a long time, coaching myself for a long time… You’d be really, really surprised in many cases when you put an objective standard to someone’s performance week after week how much their performance elevates, because usually, you know, especially when you’re highly fatigued after a few weeks, you need like, what do you call them? Reactive deload. Your biceps are kind of cooked. You’re like, I deload time. But really, like, you really were three RIR and you know, your girlfriend kind of was bitching at you that week, school kind of got hard, your psychology drained a little bit and you’re like…. And it’s like, nah nah nah nah nah nah nah. And I go, well, how many reps were you trying to get? And they’re like, well, I wasn’t trying to get the number of reps, I was just trying to go to failure. Like your mind can trick you, man. Your mind can fucking trick you and can say, oh, this is failure. Like, no, no, no, no, no. Like we don’t have a marathon race or 500 or a 100 meter or a 200 meter race that race isn’t just go really fast until you get tired. Like it’s… the line ends here. You’re expected to go as hard as you can until that line. And so with weights and reps, you just keep extending that line a little bit. Look what you can’t do it. Hey, you know you tried, but there’s always an objective standard you could raise yourself to. And sometimes your body will take you there. And for me personally, like this is really true, especially as you get stronger because like when you’re squatting 400 4 sets of 10 your warm up with 400 for a double. Feels like, dude, I can get 3 and then I fucking break in half. Like there’s no way I can do those. How the hell… And then if it was just a standalone workout, I mean, you might feel your swag a little bit. You might do 400 for a set of 5 next time, pretty hard. You’re gonna… pretty good. Might do a set of 8, then a back off, set of 6. But if you go and look at your notebook and you’re like, last week I did 390 for 3 by 10, I’m gonna do 400 for 3 by fucking 10. I’m going to goddamn try. And then ten, ten, ten and you did it. But like, it took a lot and somehow you got it out of your muscles. Now, you know, you’re training hard and you just don’t have to worry about it anymore if that’s limiting factor. Another thing I would say is an interesting potential unlock for folks of that experience level is to do specialization phases, because you might have gotten away with 5 to 15 working sets per muscle per week, of for all your muscles up to that point, that’s probably the best way to go about it, because you’ll get a huge return on investment. Probably optimal there. But then at some point you’re going to be like, okay, I can crank my volume higher because the literature is crystal clear that cranking your volume, as long as you can recover is probably a good idea. And so you say, okay, there are probably two ways I can crank my volume. One way is I can do more sessions per week, like some people will train three times a week and then go: “My gains are stalled.” and I’m like, hey, there’s nobody on the IFB Pro stage trains three times a week, my friend. The five is probably the average, so try five or try to go to four and then see how four is, go to five. see how five is. So I’d say that’s a good idea. And also specialization by saying, okay, I can’t train everything with 30 sets a week. That’s crazy. I’m human. I’m going to break into pieces. I don’t have that kind of time. And I say, okay, well, most of my muscles I’ll train from 5 to 15 sets. Normally they get the normal gains, and as an intermediate I’ll take, 2 or 3 muscles per mesocycle or per block, a few mesos in a row and really, like, start at ten and just keep cranking the volume up until I get really fatigued and can’t do it any more. And sometimes, you know, for forearms it’ll be 35 sets a week. For biceps that’ll be 30, and for pecs, that’ll be 25. But you get up to pec training 25 sets a week for a few weeks, and your usual is like 10 to 15, you’re going to almost certainly see gains. And so that cranking that volume is something that we almost never tell beginners to do, because it’s just a good way to burn them out. And the return on investment is so marginal for them to make any sense. But the margins change when your intermediate because your regular gains are so small that even slightly bigger gains on an absolute level are at relative level much bigger gains for you, especially the difference between 0 and anything else is infinitely better gains if you think about it. So it starts to be worth it. So I’d say that’s another thing that you could try, really pouring more work effort into it. And then usually… So for intermediates, I wouldn’t say this, but if you’re a more advanced intermediate, I would say it’s probably time to start to work through more exercises in the gym to try different movements. And we have so many movements to try. You’re putting out content to different movements. Milo pack. All the stronger by science people, Jeff Nipper, myself, etc. there’s tons of great people. There’s no shortage of different exercises you can try, and exercises are often very individually specific. Like you like leg extensions? Yeah. Like they really screw you up. My friend, James Hoffman, doctor James… Leg extensions just totally wipe him out. I was like, I can do, like, 5 sets of leg extensions to a pure failure and just smoke a cigarette after and do 5 more, this doesn’t matter. I barely get a pump. Almost nothing happens. But if I do like a high rep set of belt squats or leg presses I can like with one set get sore for three days and some people are like my knees just hurt, I don’t know what the hell you’re doing on there. There’s so much variation and so many ways to move your body in space. So the not only should you be trying different exercises, but slightly different techniques. Do you put the bench bar here on the incline? Do you put it here? Do you put a here? Do you do a guillotine press? Experimenting with that can allow you with a mind muscle connection not only do I feel my muscle moving, but like how much tension do I feel through my muscle? Is it the proper muscle that I’m feeling in this? Is it my feeling triceps in my presses or my pecs, am I getting sore after? So on and so forth. Are the muscles really fatigue? Is the rep drop off really high? Like if you do some kind of new hamstring curl and you rep drop off as insane, you’re like, I cooked my hamstrings. Something happened. And so experimenting like that over a long term can clue you in on what exercises… and also you can do this with the rep ranges and all this other stuff, exercises, technique variants, rep ranges, different split designs to try to see, like, what’s the thing that fits me the best? Because for a lot of individuals, some splits and reps and exercises are just going to be like, oh, oh, this is perfect. Over the course of my career, I’ve had this hundreds of times where I tried something new and I was like, that sucks. What I was doing earlier was better. And also hundreds of times where I tried it and I was like, what the hell was I doing before I figured out how to do this? And I would say that exploratory thing, like, again, it’s not going to be like the difference between night and day, but per individual, some people get some good gains from hack squats, but put them on leg press and they’ll blow up and not only blow up, they like the exercise and it doesn’t hurt their joints as much. They’re axial and systemic fatigue is lower and they can progress on it for longer. And all of a sudden, like even though unit per unit time gives you the same hypertrophy, you’re just going to be able to milk more out with that other one. You know what I mean? It’s like, like, comfortable versus uncomfortable sex positions. Like, oh, they all technically do the job, but you’re going to like some more than others. Try a bunch, see what you like. And if you’re at home alone, like me, then don’t try anything and just look at adult films.

-Speaking of specifics… Which exercise do you think… For body parts, let’s start with… Start on the bottom – calves, exercises that people should definitely try or exercise that you recommend most often. Calves are not the most exciting, I guess.

-Calves are not the most exciting. Any kind of straight leg calf raise that unloads your spine is probably pretty good. So get on the belt squat, if you have one, go step off the ledge unrack the weight, get the belt going and go down really low off the ledge, hold for two seconds, come up about halfway until it feels easier, and then go back down. And I would do that like mile rep style or a very short rest breaks. I did that yesterday and like I’m not gonna be able to walk most of the rest of the day. It’s just like insane soreness for calves. So I say that’s a good idea. If you’ve been doing seated calf races with a bent leg, I think you just you’re going to get the first calf gains of your life doing this sort of thing. What’s next? Hamstrings? A properly executed stiff legged deadlift is a very rare thing. And, a good morning as well. Same movement really. It’s just is the bar here or here. Because a lot of people will do them and they round their back which unlocks the hips, takes the tension off the hamstrings, they don’t go sufficiently low. So I would say a very good well executed stiff legged deadlift can basically mean that were 2 or 3 sets per hamstring workout. You can get all the stimulus you need, which is really cool. For quadriceps…

-Let’s talk… what about the leg curl? Do you think it’s necessary to keep a leg curl movement in there for the short head of the biceps femoris for example?

-So like, for beginners and intermediates absolutely not because no one’s going to be able to tell. Neither are you. And you can always start leg curling later in your career and just get, like, awesome gains for the first time ever. If you want complete muscular development and someone who would be stepping on stage, and time is a thing you can afford, I would say like, yes, it’s a very good idea to do some kind of leg curl. What I typically do is if I train hamstrings twice a week, I will do one day where I do hinges and one day where I do curls. And I think it just checks both boxes really well. I would say it’s not the best idea to miss out on either one of those, unless you’re time constrained. And then just do whichever one fits all of your other goals and preferences better. So if you’re like a strength trainer and you want big deadlift and stuff… It’s probably not important for you to be doing many leg curls. But if you’re a person who just only cares about esthetics but you don’t have a ton of time, then I would say mostly leg curls versus hinges are better because they’re a better stimulus to fatigue ratio in many cases. At least, the total systemic and axial fatigue is quite low, they don’t take as much time to do, and they technically probably contribute to a more complete development of your hamstring, especially if you do them in a lengthened position, like a seated like curl with your chest propped forward like that.

-For quads you earlier, you already mentioned typically higher rep, very deep type squat movements?

-Yeah.

-That’s your fave?

-Yea, a fave. I would say one of my all time faves nowadays is a really good belt squat. A good belt squat where you come down all the way and sit for like 2 seconds at the bottom, and you come up 2/3rds of the way and come right back down slowly, do a mile rep style, so you get very close to failure, lock out your knees, breathe for 3 or 4 seconds, maybe 5 or 10, and then hit it again and again and again. Do like three rounds of that. Like, it’s actually possible to get a very good workout for many people with 1 set like that. And I think it’s, the axial fatigue is non-existent because the weight attaches at your hips. The systemic fatigue is quite low because it really just kind of is almost only quads at that point, especially if you sit in such a way that…. glutes, but if you sit with your knees going way over your toes, it also doesn’t do your glutes much. A little bit, but not a ton. Also, your glutes leverage against your hips, which leverage to your spine. So if there’s a part of your squat, where are you going like this, glutes are involved, but if the belt is low on your hips, like, glutes don’t even really do much for that. It could be all quads or most quads, definitely some glutes. So, I would say belt squats are like a huge unlock that… I didn’t used to do them because I kind of thought they sucked. But when I, a friend of mine recommended that I do them a certain way, I tried, it was really good, I iterated on that, and I improved it in my own way, and I was like, okay, this is the best quad exercise pound for pound stimulus to fatigue ratio that I found for myself in a long, long time.

-What about ABS? Is there even an exercise that you think most people should do for their abs?

-I don’t even know if most people should be training their abs. It really just depends on what they want. I like abdominal exercises. Like I like my women: hard, painful, long…

-So which exercise would that be?

-I like my ab exercises to be based on the same principles as all other exercises. I want them to be a relatively full range of motion with a very long lengthened component. I want them to be loadable, and I want them to be progressable, and I want them to be repeatable in a certain fashion. So I think actually a well-designed abdominal crunch machine with a select rise stack is probably one of the best ab exercises you could do. You could also hold weights and do like an inverted bench, 45 degree invert bench, those are quite good. V-ups are decent. Roll outs, ab wheel roll outs are phenomenal, though they do tax your tricep long head and your lats significantly. Not a big deal, but like if you’re sore everywhere you’re like… It’s just, like, it’s a difficult exercise systemically. But, that ability to have the longest length concomitantly present the biggest tension is huge. Ab rollouts are a little bit difficult to progress. Though I will say, if you can do with what I consider very good technique, 20 ab rollouts, you’re like… I don’t know, we can run you over with a truck and your abs would be fine. But, so there you don’t really need external load in most cases, but I’d say a good resistance profile crunch machine where you really open up and you really crunch down, you really control eccentric and you really crunch down, I mean, I think that’s really, really hard to beat. I just, like, planks and all this fucking shit, I just think it’s such a goddamn waste of time for physique and strength people in most cases.

-Yeah, I like the… having the cable attachments with the rope putting it over your shoulders, and then, like a Bosu ball or any type of ball that you can really crunch over to get the range of motion, then use the cable stack, because you can do that in almost any gym. And good ab machines are quite a rarity in the gyms.

-What do you do with your feet?

-Just put them on the ground. If you get… if you get the right angles it usually works up to pretty high weights.

-Okay.

-But after body weights you would need some, something to put your feet firmly in place.

-Yeah. I have, quite strong abs, and I have very short legs, so I just flip backwards.

-Right.

-But if you get a bench you put your feet under or a couple of plates, then that can be an excellent exercise for pretty much everybody.

-Yeah. For most people, I think, if you dip yourself way to the front of the, the ball, the leverage, it’s usually all right up to around body weight. After that you do start flipping over a lot.

-Sure.

-Moving to glutes.

-Oh, yeah.

-Best booty builder.

-I mean, front foot elevated smith machine lunges are just really difficult to beat from an experiential perspective. When, like, you can get IOMS from them. Instantaneous Onset Muscle Soreness. When you do one set per leg, you’re like: “Oh, I got a cramp if I move. I got a lay down or some shit.” So it just…

-What you think is up with that, by the way, the insane level of soreness that you get in the glute ham tie-in with those types of exercises. I think it’s because most people just don’t do them with a high enough volume and frequency to get used to them. I think it’s just a repeat bout effect.

-But specifically the location, right? It’s like very, like, glute ham tie-in.

-Is that the case? I don’t know, for me it’s just a whole glute.

-I got like the insane… That’s also like the standard bodybuilding law, there’s not really a glute ham tie-in muscle, right? There’s just the glutes…

-No. Yeah. Correct. Well, I will say, you know, we do have some data to support the idea of that longer length tension does hypertrophy you distally more and that’s distal part of the glute. And that’s, that’s kind of what it is, I’d say that’s probably something to do with it, but… You know like hip thrust are fine. Hip thrust suffer from a few theoretical problems, a few practical problems. So, you know, like one is that you have to load a fuck load of weight onto a bar. Another one is that, you, the force curve is just backwards. It’s also an isolation exercise, so you just like training glutes by themselves, which is fine if that’s what you want. But a lot of times, like, why not train other stuff too. Front foot elevated Smith machine lunges train your quads quite well, they trainer adductors really well, and they train your glutes into the moon. And train your cardio and your ballsack really well too, because fuck that exercise sucks. And it’s embarrassing because you’re on the Smith machine with like 10s on each side and everyone’s like: “What the hell’s wrong with that guy? His legs are huge, right? He’s so weak!” and you’re like: “You try this, motherfucker!” And I usually do it after quads, so my quads are cooked anyway. So it really is just 10s on a side. It’s kind of embarrassing.

-What do you think is wrong with the force curve on a hip thrust?

-It is very difficult at the top and at the bottom anyone can lift like 8,000 pounds.

-Yeah, true…

-And so…

-I mean, Bret Contreras might argue that you get probably the highest active mechanical tension in the glutes at the top. So maybe it’s a good thing? You argue it’s too much probably?

-I mean like if a force curve was half as extreme, that might be the thing. Also like active mechanical tension is nice. Passive mechanical tension also grows muscle also lengthened tension is so dominant now that it’s difficult to say like how much active tension at the top can counter that? Some. But is it not balance a thing? I’ll say this is where I’m like just currently pretty much by myself in the evidence base community with my bullshit proxies like pump and soreness and fucking shit like that. I do think I still going to win that debate in the end sometime. The pump literature has been very good to me recently. It correlates quite well with growth, we’ll see how that ends up. But I say, like if I do 5 sets of hip thrusts, I get a decent pump, I get a little bit sore, and it’s novel, I haven’t done it before. I’m like, okay, this exercise works. Like, Menno, imagine doing five sets per leg of front foot elevated lunges for first time. Like you won’t come back to the gym. The raw stimulus magnitude is just incomparable. And so I’d say hip thrusts are very, very excellent by the best isolation exercises for glutes or near isolation exercise. And a lot of people like, yeah, the competitive aspirations or they already did enough squats, They don’t want their legs any bigger but they want bigger glutes, man, hip thrusts are… They’re just very difficult to beat. The variety of ways to rig them… Whoever makes the following machine first is going to make a substantial amount of money: Just make a cam leveraged hip thrust machine that makes it very difficult at the bottom, very easy at the top, I will fucking buy one and I will talk about it on the internet and you will sell lots of them. It’s just obvious at this point and no one’s done it yet. So I would say that is a very, very good way to go. And you don’t even have to have some kind of magical construction design. You just have a lever system that’s angled properly at the beginning and that’s it. So the barbell hip thrust is just… it just leaves so much to be desired. And if I have to put six plates onto something that’s on the ground and it’s not a deadlift, I’m just not doing it.

-Yeah, a lot of people have that, it’s not time efficient.

-Oh my God!

-What about, erector spinae? You think squats and deadlifts? That’s all you need? Do you do isolation work for them?

-I mean, like, depends on for what? If you want to do, you know

-Bodybuilding

-Yeah, absolutely. Like, there’s probably no reason to train your erectors for bodybuilding. I would say for overall health I’m increasingly more and more led to believe that dynamic movements for almost every joint are a good idea for preventative measures and for injury prevention, for overall robustness. So I love to do flexion rows of various forms. Cable flexion row, dumbbell, barbell… And that’s where you actually bend at the spine. Ever since I started doing that, like my spinal health, back health has just been like amazing. And I do like combat sport and so my back is always in very precarious positions. The thing is, if you’re very, very strong, just with a locked in posture and someone unlocks you or you bend down to pick up a cup and you pull something in your back because you’re never in spinal flexion. That used to happen to me all the time. I was a decent powerlifter and it still happened to me all the time. So I think some spinal flexion and extension is just a good thing. And for hypertrophy, for physique like rarely. I have really cool like gnarly gigantic spinal erector so I kind of don’t want to lose them and sometimes want to make them bigger just because it’s sweet look. So for vibes yeah, you can do those. But I think having a spinal erector dedicated like…

-Like back extensions.

-Yeah, back extensions are just like just not a good exercise for so many fucking reasons. They’re not loadable very heavily unless you get the barbell out, then you end up hitting the supports. Fuck this. The force curve’s all wrong because it’s very easy at the bottom, very tough at the top. So on and so forth. So I think, and also like, why not train the rest of your back while doing it? So I just say just do a row with the back extension and there is a flexion row. I do love the way cable rows feel, with the full flexion, because actually, when you’re fully flexed at the bottom of a cable row, the angle of pull for your lats is even better. And so it ends up being just like one of the best all around back exercises that you can do. So I would say this is not very important if you’re doing bent rows and you’re doing stiff legged deadlifts and stuff, I think you’re totally good to go. With squats. your erectors are going to be big and strong. If you have struggle with some back stuff before, I would say starting very light high rep and moving up slowly in weight for flexion rows of various kinds or just like… or Jefferson curls… It’s just like one of the best things you can do for your back.

-All right. What about lats?

-One arm crossed… I’m kidding. So for lats, man, I just every single time I get away from it, every single time I come back to it, just good old pull ups with any grip… So good, man, they’re so goddamn good. Whether do you want to do them body weight, whether you want to do them weighted… I would say get your chin to the bar, roughly, and then, especially in the bottom two thirds, really milk that eccentric. And you’re not going to able to do that many reps, it’s kind of embarrassing. But you like every time I just cannot beat the DOMS I get and the pumps I get from pull ups with any other back exercise. I’ve tried them all. Nothing compares. Assisted pull ups are awesome, but regular pull ups, man. There’s something special about them. And like, that’s just for me. Some people do them…

-You mean pull ups or chin ups? Any grip.

-I do not, as I never use the word chin up, ever. I’m not upset that you used it. I’m a little upset.

-Convention is like it’s a chin up this way, pull up this way…

-Yeah. It’s just like… The exercise to me is called pull up…

-You pull yourself up.

-Correct. I could even say it’s just called a chin up and then it’s various grips. Cause there’s neutral grip, overhand grip, wide grip, underhand and so on and so forth. There’s also like 45 angle grip which feels quite nice for many people. So I would say like there’s just no wrong answer on grips. It’s whatever feels nice to you. And a lot of them, the right answer is variation. You know, like if someone’s like, hey do you like, you know, blond girls or brunettes or… You would be like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Like, I’ll take them all, goddammit. Not on the same session because, you know, tend to get upset at each other if they’re in the same bed.

-What about, rear delts? You do them with your back training? Do you need to isolate them?

-Yeah, you need to isolate them if your rear delts are lagging and you can do some rear delt work. That’s quite good. I would actually say one of my favorite exercises for rear delts is the Smith machine. You could do it with the barbell, too. In a rack, the Smith machine inverted row. So you get the Smith machine, you plank your body and you pull yourself and, pulling height can be here, it can be here, it can be here, can be here. Somewhere between here and here is where most people will find, especially if they bring their arms back. Dude, I get a fucking rear delt pump from that. I almost never get a real pump from anything. Also, you get a deep tension, high tension at the stretch. Easier at the contraction because the angle improves for you, vectors get easier and so it’s actually like a really good force curve. It also beefs up the rest of your upper back, which is dope. If you’re spending all of your time on, like, just a rear delts, it’s kind of weird. It’s fine. Then, you know, cross body or rear delt cable stuff is excellent. I hate the rear delt machine. It almost does nothing for me at all, you know, just it ends up being a back exercise. I would just prefer to do the elbows, elbows up and out, face pulls against a barbell. The leverage advantage. You know the TRX? You know what that is? The TRX bands? Those are actually excellent for it because again, they incorporate leverage advantage and with them you can start low and pull high or start high and pull low whichever way hit your rear delts better. I think that’s an excellent exercise. What I generally say to people is I almost always treat rear delts like I treat front delts. I almost never train front delts on purpose. I almost never train rear delts on purpose. Because if you do proper full range of motion back training, bro, if you look at an anatomy book and you look at any back exercise… Pull ups. Tell me rear delt… If you had a tear, like a fucking avulsion in your rear delt, you could do pull ups? No fucking way. It’d be the most painful thing in the world. Oh shit. It looks like they contribute a very large fraction of the force. A lot of people just forget, like like like this… Like… Well, hold on a sec… What other function is part of the delts? To do this. And this. And so you’re doing like 18 sets of rear delts anyway all the time. If you need extra-dope, but what I like to do is for my shoulder volume, all of my shoulder volume, almost all of it, I like extra on the side delt because the side doesn’t get much from pushing and pulling and also the side delt has by far the most visual appeal. Like if you have big rear delts like yeah, it looks cool, if you have big front delts, you look strong, if you have big side delts, like you probably gettin pussy right now, big homie, you feel me? You can’t bat the pussy away, man. It just keeps following you everywhere.

-It’s funny, even for rehab there’s research that compound exercises, which anything that pulls the elbow back will train the rear delts, are just as effective as all the standard rehab type external rotation and stuff.

-I don’t even know. Don’t even get me started on that shit.

-What about traps? Do you isolate those more?

-On an as needed basis. I almost never isolate them. I went through a phase where for, like a year and a half I isolated traps, and they got bigger.

-Which ones? Middle, lower, upper?

-Upper. So because like, so with the way I row with a low angle rowing like mid traps is just not a problem. And so lower traps definitely not a problem. Upper traps could use more work, but honestly like the way, if you do a lot of side delt training, especially with dumbbells and machines and cross body, I mean, like your traps are working.

-Do you actively shrug?

-No, but what I do is I try to focus on completing the movement with good execution, and I try to focus to make sure that I can feel it in my side delts, you know, like the “elbow up” cue like, pulling with your side delts. But I never, ever, ever try to de-emphasize my traps. And I think that’s a critical problem that many people run into, because the overall neural drive, you can get into a muscle or, he’s going to be limited by your bandwidth mentally of doing 50 other things and be like, okay, do your laterals, focus on your delt delts-okay, focus on not using your traps-okay, focus on your 2017 tax returns, think of all that and what was your first girlfriend’s favorite food? You’d be like, I don’t even fuck I’m doing anymore. You’re not going to get high neural drive. So what I usually tell people is focus on your side delts in side delt training, your traps won’t take over, they will contribute like they’re fucking supposed to. Like when you have people squat, do you tell them focus on your quads? Or do you tell them don’t focus on your glutes? I don’t even know how the fuck to do that. How do you not focus on something? It’s fucking insane. And it’s a big problem because you end up like using 5 kilos instead of 10 kilos, and then you end up just like… oh, the fucking… you know the guys doing this fucking one armed shit, like just to here. And I’m like, why don’t you go higher? Why don’t you use more weight and like fucking: “My traps take over.” And I look at their physique. I’m like: “What traps, motherfucker? You don’t even have any goddamn traps.” And here’s a really good news. If you are working on your biggest side delts that you can and you train them normally your traps will get almost as big or bigger than you’ve even wanted, and that’s amazing. You never have to train your traps. I’ve literally seen men in the gym, guys that are trying to isolate their delts, like with all this crazy shit to get the traps out and then they do shrugs later and I’m just like, did you misunderstand how… it just baffles… that baffles me…

-In general, I think there’s a myth in bodybuilding circles that if you get more activity in one muscle group, it must come at the expense of another and research very clearly shows that’s not the case.

-Opposite. You know, often case is like really strong triceps can push your pecs to go to limits they wouldn’t be able to before because like you can get the concentric up with more triceps than you’re supposed to and on the eccentric it’s all pecs and your pecs like, dude, I can’t even do this anymore. You can really push your muscles super hard. Do some people have a mind muscle connection problem with a certain muscle? Yes, but don’t worry about the other muscles. Literally don’t think about the other muscles. Think about your pecs. don’t worry about what your triceps are doing. Think about pushing through your pecs. Then you might get a little bit of better result. But like the whole “this other thing is taking over”… Usually it means you need to focus more on the muscle. Here’s another thing. It means your technique might use some work. You imagine someone doing very close grip bench and be like: “I just feel it in my triceps?” Like, oh no shit, motherfucker. Widen your grip a little bit. Some people like… Oh, I’m just getting catty. I don’t, I don’t want to be all negative. But some people like, will talk about mind-muscle connection and feeling a muscle, and you’ll watch them do an exercise of their doing this shit and you’ll like you shut up. What are you doing? Have you ever seen Jared Feather train? When you train like Jared you get to talk about mind-muscle connection till you’re blue in the face. If you don’t train like that, at least start training in a way that externally I can tell you’re like trying to do something organized. Like, I should be like, man, I can’t. I don’t really feel my back in rows and you watch them do rows and they’re like this. You know, like, I don’t I don’t know what you feel at all. I don’t feel my hips or my dick coming out. I don’t know. By the way, do you like my content? Then you’ll love my online PT certification course. Instead of spending ten years sifting through misinformation and being confused by all the contradictory information on YouTube, in less than one year you’ll learn absolutely everything you need to know to transform your physique and, if you’re a pro, the results of your plans. My research team and I have compiled quite literally all available information on muscle growth, fat loss, strength development and health sciences into a practical, take home messages to take your physique to the next level. And we teach the methods that we ourselves actually use as coaches with our clients ranging from gen pop to professional bodybuilders. You’ll also get a PT Toolkit with calculators, case studies, how to guides, an exercise library, and hefty discounts to our partners products and services. Of course, you shouldn’t take my word for it. Check out the reviews of our former students in the link below. To my knowledge, we have the highest student satisfaction scores in the market. Okay, back to the video. Speaking of triceps and pecs, what are your favorite exercises for those?

-So for the pecs, this is like an exercise most people won’t run into. But cambered bar bench presses are just like GOATed beyond recognition.

-For the extra range of motion.

-Oh my god bro, that extra three inches, let me tell you. Am I right? It’s so big. It’s so big.

-But about the bench press now…

-Say it again.

-We’re talking about the bench press.

-Oh, for sure! I… There’s nothing big in my life I would ever say about. So, it’s now 3.5in. The, the stimulus is just wild because, like, on all the technical grounds, like, it’s a very stable movement, it’s a very loadable movement. And it’s very, it’s movement’s easy to replicate technique wise. And all of a sudden it’s a three inches extra insanely difficult eccentric. It just blows your pecs into the moon. So I’d say that’s great. I would say properly executed incline dumbbell presses into which you take the proximal edge of the dumbbell and you touch it to the proximal edge of your bicep or the distal edge of your front delt. Make sure you hear that correctly. I am talking about touching the dumbbell like three inches deeper than your pecs. Because guys do dumbbell press and they stop here. Sometimes they don’t even touch their pecs and I’m like… Every time we have someone on RP, we’re training, We’re like, watch this, we teach them the technique And after one set they’re like, “Oh, oh, holy shit! My chest.” Like, yeah, that’s that’s like pretty straight forward. So those are good exercises. Deficit push ups are amazing. For some folks that want overall chest development and respond well, slightly lean forward dips are actually quite good. I love bench presses. I think bench presses are amazing for the chest. And almost everyone… I know some people don’t like them and I totally get it. Almost everyone that doesn’t like the bench press, or incline press for pecs is almost always doing it wrong. Like they’re not arching or contracting. They’re not controlling the centric, they’re not pausing. Like, of course your fucking shoulders hurt. But they think some of those core movements are just really tough to be. A good press machine is excellent, one that allows you to go really deep, like, that Atlantis machine and things. A lot of… you’ve been around the world, training…. You ever trained on Technogym equipment?

-Yeah.

-Is there a way we can get the United Nations to, like, cease and desist like Technogym from, like spreading their equipment all around the world?

-There’s a few manufacturers that are extremely popular for no reason, that to me that seems related to the quality of the equipment, like force curves are terrible.

-Terrible.

-Range of motion is not good. They just don’t fit well. The movement. So it feels like a little bit awkward.

-Yes. It’s like, I’ve done some of their like lat pulldown stuff and I’m like, I’ve never been able to feel elbow pain on a lat pull down until now. And no lat pump. Like how did you guys do it?

-They have some okay… They have some okay machines, but…

-That’s one hell of a compliment.

-What about triceps? You need isolation work?

-Yeah, yeah. Like if you want the biggest triceps, you are behoove you to do isolation work.

-What type? Push downs?

-So I love skull crushers. The barbell or Smith machine or inverted skull crusher, All to me the same class of movement, are amazing because they have almost the perfect force curve. Especially if you do inverted skull crushers because they’re easier at the top. Way harder at the bottom. And, just by leverage. So I think skull crushers are excellent. I think most people who say they don’t get a lot of skull crushers or their elbows hurt are doing the movement in a way that’s not good for the body, they experiment with different things. Skull crushers. To me, it begins… so there’s a spectrum from close grip bench all the way to overhead behind the neck extension. It’s a full spectrum. So you can do incline skulls. You can do skulls to a bench behind you. You can do skulls to your actual skull. You can do eyes, nose, mouth, chin, throat. That’s actually one of the best exercises I have ever taught anyone. My arms are slightly too big to do it at this point, but. But can you guys see’em, that’s right, that’s right. If you can do this it’s so unbelievable. Get a spotter. But do skull crushers. So unlock at your elbows, I would generally do a false grip because it seems to be easier on the elbows, in my experience, unlock, and then in basically a straight line, come down to where you gently touch, like, open your chin, gently touch and pause for one second with the barbell touching your throat. It’s a deficit. Menno, it fucks people so bad. And it’s just it’s just going to annihilate you. And like that class of movement, deep skull crushers, amazing. Push downs are awesome. I don’t like rope push downs because like they emphasize the contraction, which is the least useful part of the movement and the stretch is kind of always like eh. If you do push downs, I do like people to do the Jared Feather technique where they stay upright and as they bring the bar up, they pull their elbows back to get a deep stretch. I don’t like push downs out front. They’re cool. People are like, yeah, but fucking long head like, yeah, dope. There’s like 18 other ways to train your long head. One of them is just all back movements train your long head quite well. All pulling movements. The other thing is overhead work. I don’t do overhead work for my triceps anymore. Mostly because, I just got big enough to where like… You almost never see, like, like national level guys and pro level guys doing overhead, behind neck extensions. And you’re like, is it just a bro thing? And the reality is they just can’t put their arms there anymore. Like it just doesn’t work. I used to do them for a long time.

-They’re too big.

-Literally just too big. There’s too much stuff in the way. I did them for a very long time. Some of the very flexible guys can do it, and it’s always a beautiful thing. Unfortunately not in the cards for me, but I did them for years. I did them with a straight bar, I did them with EZ bar… EZ bar standing overhead extensions where you focus on… Your elbows can actually flare any way you want. It’s a decent cue to flare them forward, at least on the way down. Make sure your elbow is pushed really far ahead of you, so it’s like in a squat… You don’t want to squat back and down for your quads, you want to squat forward and down. And so in an overhead extension, you actually want your elbows to move forward as you come down as opposed to back. Now, back work great too but if you move them forward and down, you actually get the peak tension exactly at the peak stretch. And keep them nice and close. Like sets of 15 to 20. EZ bar… Just annihilation. It’s an amazing exercise. Fucks your long head up, fucks every head up. So overhead extensions with cables, with barbells, with EZ bars are awesome. So we have: skull variations, push down… So actually, to use the better anatomical procedure: push downs, skulls, incline variation and overhead. I would do some combination of all those rotated through the years. And I would say for most people, for full development, have some kind of movement that’s either a push down or a skull, one part of the week for triceps or a few of the days, and then one or a few of the days have some kind of overhead movement that you do. And I think it really squares away everything. Dips are excellent, but dips are one of those things like, like in the RP Hypertrophy App we have dips as a tricep exercise, but there’s some nuance there because it does hit your chest. It’s kind of like, oh, it’s kind of more 50-50… There are ways if you plank your body very vertical and when you’re dipping, instead of taking your shoulders and putting them really far forward, which is more chest you actually, this is really difficult, you break and then you let your elbows slide back, but keeping upright. It ends up making like this arm angle at the bottom and it’s fucking brutal. You’re like, oh, I can do 10 dips. Like everyone’s looking at you at the gym. Like this guy is an idiot. In regular dips he could put 225 on and go for forever. Those kinds of dips where you really extend your elbow out, phenomenal for triceps. What I like to do is, for many people to get quite strong, do like 5 sets of overhead extensions or push downs or skulls, and then go do 4 or 5 sets of dips. Holy shit. Like you’re going to do sets of 5 to 10 dips, and every set is going to be like your muscles just burning alive. And it’s all really good.

-And then finally, the muscle that all the bros have been waiting for, the guns-biceps.

-We did chest already, didn’t we? I’m an idiot. The biceps. So, like, at this point I’ve become like a trillionaire, spoiled bicep exercise enthusiast to where like, if you pick me up in a Mercedes and it’s not a Rolls Royce I’m like, oh, I’m sorry, sir, I’m waiting for my vehicle. And you’re like, I am the vehicle. I’m like, no, there’s been a misunderstanding. I’d never set my foot in one of these. So like barbell curls and shit, cable curls, like they fuck, they’re dope and they work, they’re effective, so they’re great. Feel free to use them. But once you’ve tasted the nectar of inclined curls with a very deep incline, lying curls, on a bench or what… probably my favorite all time bicep exercise… I’m not saying it’s the best, just I love it. Free motion behind the back curls. So really Bayesian curls, but with two arms at a time. And, just basically like the attachments, you step forward and you get the supports to basically be orthogonal to you here so that the cable is pulling back exactly at the bottom. Here you go really far behind your back. I actually did that line curls yesterday, my biceps are sore as fuck. And you pull really far back and then you come up and curl. At the very top here it’s super easy, which is exactly what you want. And you can back up rest for a second, keep going with myo reps. Easy to set up, easy to warm up for. I mean, it’s just like God’s exercise for biceps and it fucking looks lame. But god damn does it screw you up in the best possible way. And because it pulls your elbows back for you and everything, it’s actually, I think, amazing for shoulder health and elbow health because it really stretches the dog shit out of everything. So that. If you don’t have one of those free motion machines, I would say doing dumbbell curls, lay down on a bench and then take dumbbells, come out here, go all the way and up and down… Phenomenal, because the lengthened situation is amazing. The stretch situation is amazing and all of a sudden it’s just a great movement and very easy to do. Myo reps with is not systemically fatiguing. That’s another thing. You lie down and do bicep curls. Like you can do that until you’re blue in the face. Like when you get strong enough standing barbell curls are kind of annoying because like, I don’t know, do you get, like, I get my back gets tired from doing standing barbell curls pretty heavy. I’m just like, ugh…

-Yeah. I’m not a big fan of barbell curls in general,

-Which is a backwards force curve for hypertrophy.

-You don’t get full range motion. You can, if you push your elbows forwards, it’s a little bit better, but then you actually do feel your core a lot with heavy weights.

-Yes, yes Jared does that… The Jared curl like that but also like yes, you’re now you get the length and tension, but you’re no longer getting the stretch because you’re actually getting less stretch. And so it’s kind of like you could, you can you can rig curls to be good. Or you can do line curls or behind the back curls and just get like, amazing results. Yeah.

-So two things we touched on a few times are good exercise technique, lengthened bias… Actually, third thing is progressive overload. Like to go into those things in bit more detail with problems that people currently face and the last studies.

-Yeah. One thing with progressive overload, a lot of people have issue with… They increase the weight, they try to do more reps, but then it comes at the expense of technique. Mindset wise, training wise… How do you deal with maintaining good technique, not compromising range of motion while implementing progressive overload?

-I’ll make an analogy here that’s maybe a little funny, but… it’s a stretch, but I think it has some wisdom in it. And I say, you’re hooking up with someone, right? You’re doing the deed. Anyway, sorry. I hope that sound comes through. You’re going back and forth at a certain amplitude…

-Amplitude…

-Amplitude, man… She’s like: “Oh my God, give me amplitude!” What? Stop picking up physics grad students.

-”Increase force output!”

-”Oh my God! Let’s do this in an accelerator!” You’re like, “I don’t know if that’s a good idea!” So how important is your amplitude? How important is your rhythm? How important is frequency? How important is all those things important for stroking. Right? How important is it that you are still inside of the vagina? I would say it’s of preeminent importance, because that’s the only place that that matters. It’s a stretch. It’s an exaggeration, but there’s some grain of truth to that that applies to technique. The purpose of technique is not for evidence based bros to be: “Good technique, bro!”, though it does do that. The purpose of technique is to put the tension where you need it to make the stimulus happen. And to keep you safe and to let you know like am I really progressing or am I bullshitting myself. Standardized technique. So technique to me is like a first principles. I don’t like the term first principles because there are many layers of principles, but a lower level of principle than how many reps you’re doing. It’s within the context of good technique, how many reps you’re doing. Here’s a better analogy. You’re doing a bicycle race and you decided to take a shortcut. You won the race, but they don’t give you a trophy and they say you can never compete again. And you’re confused. But I raced my bicycle to the finish line. No, idiot. You were supposed to go around this way, not through this way. Oh that’s right. So because technique allows us to maximize the stimulus, allows us to minimize injury risk and fatigue, and allows us to make sure that we standardize and we know our progression is happening, then technique is something we do not trade out ever. So people always ask me, when is your time to throw technique out the window? Like never. And certainly there are times where I can bullshit you and do nuance. And when I talk to bros, I got to be like, well, sometimes it’s fun, YOLO and all that shit. But real talk, I feel like for real though, like never. Good technique is good technique. And then everything on top of that is like, oh, I can’t do another rep if I use good technique. Good job. Your set is over. Well, I need more stimulus. Sweet, take five seconds of break and do a myo rep, or take two minutes and do another set, or do lengthened partials. But if you have to like, throw your technique off completely to do more reps, I think you’ve really like, you’ve made a fundamental mischaracterization of why you’re in the gym. You’re not in the gym to do reps, you’re not in the gym to… RP Hypertrophy App says 15 reps at 300 pounds, you’re not there to get 15 reps. You are there to stimulate the muscle, which means you do good technique and then however many reps you can with good technique. Is 15 the goal? Yes. Do 15. Can you not do 15? Then it’s 14 and you’re done. To me, Menno, it’s that simple. Am I missing something?

-Mindset wise you basically have to get zero tolerance policy. You just have to…

-Great question. Not zero tolerance in an insane OCD way because guys will be like, their elbows will do this, they say: “That’s it. I’m failing.” No no no no no no no no no no no. Fundamentally decent technique, right? So like sometimes you’re… We’re going to getting banned on YouTube for the shit I’m going to say. It’s going to use another vagina analogy. Like it is not true to say that your penis has to go all the way in every time and almost all the way out every time. Sometimes you can have a few mid strokes in there, sometimes a long strokes, but make sure it’s still in. Technique is how I look at it. Like, are you still doing the range of motion that you try to do? Is your ability to control your body still decent? Like if you’re doing dumbbell press, this is what a good rep looks like. This is what a bad rep looks like? Fuck it, send it, do another one. But if a bad rep looks like this, like bro, you’re done. If someone who’s a third day at the gym can tell you you have bad technique you’re not doing good technique anymore. So there’s a tolerance limit. But the tolerance limit is small enough to know, like I’m still doing the thing. Let me give you another decent analogy. Driving a car. Just don’t get half your car on the other lane. If your wheel hits this lane a little bit and then that lane, you’re good. But don’t drive on the fucking wrong side of the road. And I think most people, when they struggle with what’s perfect technique and what’s good technique, a lot of times they really know what it is but it’s very easy to give yourself the excuse to say, oh, my technique is not good anymore because you could push it further and still have decent technique. Here’s another thing. I’ll speak for Jared, though he’s not here. What Jared would say is this: when you feel that your technique is slipping, that’s when it’s time to have even better technique. Like, oh fuck. Like, oh, I don’t know if I can do this with a good technique. Sweet. Really retract and go again. But now think even more technique and even more strength. It’s not versus. It’s at the same time. It’s like, do I swing my sword around like this with zombies or I do like…. Well, no. You do the Roman short sword. It’s athletic, it’s fast, but it’s also precision. It’s both. It’s both, like, that’s the best way to describe it. So don’t get psychotic and OCD and be like, oh, as soon as my elbows are off… As soon as your technique feels off-fix it. Fix it right there for the next rep. And if you’re trying your goddamn best and your technique is really getting wacky, then it’s time to go. Technique is one of those things, like something they say about, like collapsing nations and armies and stuff is everything seems fine until the whole thing goes, you know. Technique is one of those to me where if you really try to focus on it again and it doesn’t work, then, you know, it’s no go.

-Right. And how do you feel about the recent preprints that came out that’s show supposedly technique doesn’t matter? Yeah, for those that don’t know. Yeah, it’s a group of untrained individuals. It’s a limitation. Trained one arm with push downs and biceps curls. One arm did strict technique, elbow at the side, just the elbow motion, and then the other arm used a lot of body movements, body English where the push downs kind of turning into a dip, like lean into the weight and for the curls really swing up the weights and make sure you get the weight up kind of no matter what. And they got essentially equal gains in this eight week study.

-I mean there’s a usual limitations of first of all it’s only a weak second of all it’s on untrained people. Another problem is one study at a time shows you almost nothing and then multiple studies together show you something. So taking all those limitations, I would say if we just say, okay, actually, this study is revealing the ground truth and this study turns out to be one of those, like, really middle of the bell curve studies after 20 studies are conducted. Let’s just assume that for experiment, for just like thought experiment sake. I would say what that studies illustrated is that you get roughly the same growth for if you cheat or if you don’t cheat. And there is a way to interpret that it doesn’t matter if you cheat or not. And that way to interpret that study is wrong. Because if you take your car and you drive 150 miles an hour, and you get to someplace weaving in and out of traffic and you get to that place at the same time as someone who drives 60 miles an hour and drives calmly, you can say, it just doesn’t matter how fast you go. And that’s true as far as the measured variable of how soon you get there. Because like, everyone ran into traffic and it just didn’t matter. But that’s looking at part of the picture. I’ve never heard anyone say that strict technique will have a very high effect of maximizing your direct stimulus to the muscle. I’ve never made that claim myself as far as I can tell. For some people the technique is so bad that that’s the case, but for most folks it’s just fine. So what I’m saying is if you do cheat curls your biceps will grow plenty big and strong. The thing is what are you paying? What are the costs? So you’re using more weight to get the same effect, or you’re doing more reps to get the same effect.

-Which was indeed the case in this study.

-Correct? You spend extra energy from all the other muscles of your body. You are needlessly exposing yourself to injury risk and fatigue.

-Because of the higher weights?

-Because the higher weights, because you’re doing more mechanical work. And the mechanical work… Imagine there’s another way to say this. Like the two groups did very different amounts of mechanical work. The cheat group did much more work, but only got the same exact results. Holy shit, why would you do that? And so if you think that doing cheat reps like bent rows, cheat bent rows, cheat curls, is going to grow you muscle. Well, you’re right, but how many more sets of bent rows could you have done if you just did strict technique and just had more energy to do more sets of bent rows? And how much better would your leg workouts go two days later because you didn’t use your posterior chain to lift half the weight? The answer is it’s meaningful and significant. And so what I would say is this study is hopefully one of many we’ll see in the future that I think probably will illustrate the fact that cheating is a fine way to get direct gains, but the stimulus to fatigue ratio is just highly suboptimal. The stimulus to risk ratio is highly suboptimal. There have been many people who have done strict curls that have fuck themselves up. Very few people screw themselves up on… or sorry, strict curls, cheat curls that have fuck themselves up. Very few people get hurt doing strict curls. And so at the end of the day, it’s like if I’m taking all of these other risks and imposing this much fatigue on the rest of my muscles, on my system, on my spine, what else am I getting out of it? And the answer is nothing. Well, gee whiz, man, that means really, that good technique is a really good thing. And to me, the study is just a really good partial recognition of the fact that good technique has really big upsides. So we did not need a study on this. We could have reasoned through it. Good to have a study because our reasoning could be wrong. It’s never a good bet unless you have empirical testing. But, that’s the way I interpret the study is like, yes. So on mechanistic grounds, there’s I wouldn’t actually predict that you could have less growth. Like, I’ll put it this way… If the study discovered that there’s significantly less growth for the cheat rep condition, I would actually be a little bit confused. Like, fuck man, I guess my muscle connection really does matter a lot or something. Like maybe like, I don’t know, like the triceps don’t really get to failure because everything else did. It would really be confusing. And the high absolute forces on the eccentric and stuff like they help, they help, but apparently they don’t help enough. And so the stimulus to fatigue ratio, stimulus to risk is not great. And now it’s something that we can be more confident about saying. No doubt people will put out the study and comment and Instagram comments on YouTube about how technique is done and cheat reps work and it would just say that most of those people just haven’t thought it through sufficiently and most of those people aren’t the kind of people that need to think about things. They do have a feeling. And then they later do the very mild level of thinking on top of that, to justify their feelings.

-Another area that we’ve had a lot of studies on recently that work mostly in the negative is the lengthened bias. So we had a lot of really compelling research initially coming out pretty much at the same time, an avalanche of research in favor of exercises with more lengthened bias, even lengthened partials beating full range of motion training. And then last month alone, we had meta analysis, well, October this was… Meta analysis showing that lengthened exercises have basically a trivial effect size in favor or over shortened exercises like training at longer muscle lengths does produce more growth, but it’s pretty much trivial. And then we had two studies in trained individuals showing pretty much equal growth with lengthened partials versus full range of motion training, in contrast to the basically two other studies, compelling studies that we had showing at lengthened partials even beats full range of motion training interestingly. And now we also have a study showing that, cable lateral raises didn’t significantly produce more growth, a bit of a trend…

-I saw that…

-than dumbbell lateral raises. So has the tide turned? Is lengthened bias still something you should seek out in your training?

-If you look at all the studies together, there is still a clear relationship that the lengthened component is extra special. I don’t think it’s by like double or triple the growth. I never thought that. I think it’s by a margin, but I think it’s one of those things where if you can easily do exercises that accommodate a longer length, if your stimulus proxies also agree, like it gets you way more sore, way more pumped, way more locally fatigued, and has allowed you to progress faster and see better visual gains than I would say, because you have full decision about what to do in the gym, I would say my best advice, and this has been the case for a long time, if you can manage to, don’t skip the deep bottom stretch of an exercise and pick exercises that load the deep bottom stretch extensively. Whatever else you do, do you want to do partials? Sweet. Do you want to do full range? Cool. Do you want to squeeze at the top? Dope. But if you have an exercise in which you’re missing that like bottom half or the bottom half is there but with like incline curls, it’s just not loaded. I say probably not doing your best to get the growth that you want. Is it marginal? Absolutely. Could you just do more sets of shortened partials and still get the same growth? Yeah, definitely. Stimulus to fatigue ratio. Does that make sense? No, not a ton. I think the local fatigue imposed by lengthened partials is massive. But that’s what you want. For similar or lower systemic fatigue, which is good. So I say my my best tentative conclusion for now, this could change, is at the very least try to have most of your exercises not obviously skip the lengthened component and try to load it extensively. Does that mean you should be doing lengthened partials for everything? I’m not confident enough to say that yet. The recent literature has not been kind to it yet or so far, and so I would say at the very least, just don’t skip that bottom part and really focus on it and whatever else you want to do is kind of like, no one really knows what else is better. Just for a bunch of functional benefits and stuff I think full range of motion is kind of cool. And so what I would say is… and there was a direct study on this a little while back where it was like emphasizing the lengthened component with full range versus just lengthened and they got essentially the same results, I’d say, like, yeah, like… That’s more or less how I train much of the time is emphasizing the bottom stretch, but still going through most of the top.

-Right. It makes sense. I think in general, a big confusion is that people have, with fitness research they interpret something as like this is now debunked.

-Yeah.

-Whereas if you look at it purely empirically, like, like a statistician, many of the things we recommend that we have in common, even though we disagree on some things, is that almost all the things we recommend purely statistically, even if you don’t know the mechanisms, you have no idea if this study is good, that study is good, but research overwhelmingly shows it’s either positive or neutral, and the chance of it being detrimental is very small.

-Yes.

-And you could make that argument with high frequency training, with lengthened partials, like with partials maybe not so much, but at least making sure that you stimulate muscles at long muscle lengths.

-Yes.

-It’s going to be either positive or maybe at worst neutral. But, based on the current literature, the chance of it being harmful is really, really small.

-Yeah. Yeah, harmful or missing out on obvious gains.

-Yeah.

-Which is the biggest harm of all.

-Yeah.

-Yeah, 100%. And I think people often also mistake or just don’t understand… Not to their, you know, not trying to, you know, disparage anybody, but like, effect sizes are just something people don’t really know. Most people think, they just don’t know the difference between significance and effect size. And just to sort of clear this up. So significance is like, can you even really say you’re looking at two different things? Even though they might be very, very like someone’s like, okay, here’s significance, ready? You get two different species of South African ant, and a really like deep dive insect person would be like, yeah, those are two different species. They look the fucking same. They’re both tiny and damn near equivalent, but they actually are different. But are they different in any meaningful way? Like well, this one not bite me? Like no, they both fucking bite you. Like, okay. Do they behave differently? Like not really, they’re about the same. But they’re different. We know they’re different. That’s significance. So when someone’s like, oh, this is significantly better. Like, you know, it’s almost certainly really better. Effect size is by how much better. And so it’s kind of like, oh, oh, here’s actually a better one than the ant analogy. You get 2 pro boxers, a guy that’s ranked #1 and a guy that’s ranked #3. Is it true that the rank one guy is significantly better? Yes. Is it true that the effect size of him being better is high? No. Every third match he lose to the other guy and also, if you look at a guy at a club and he looks at you wrong, you’re like, “The fuck is that guy?” Like, “Oh, that’s the boxer dude.” You’re like “Yeah, what’s his rank?” Like? “He’s #3.” Like “I’m going to fuck him up!” Like, no you’re not. No you’re not because you’re ranked nothing And he’s going to… he’s like ten times the boxer you’ll ever be. That’s effect size. So we go back to the exercise science literature. People will say, you know like lying leg curls are inferior to a seated leg curls in many experiments. True. Significant. So they’re different. But like lying leg curls are like the, #3 boxer and seated are like #1, like they’ll both fuck you up big time and the differences between them are nuanced and also if you match up to that #1 boxer and like, you have some kind of advantage where you’re like, you’re a southpaw or you have really big reach, you actually have better results against the #1 guy then against the #3 guy, the #3 guy comes way into your circle too match, his uppercut game is out of this world, his body shots are gnarly, and while that #1 guy can neutralize him, you can’t. And so it’s actually better for you to be fighting the #1 guy. And for some people lying leg curls work definitely better than seated leg curls. And if you do seated leg curls for six months straight by novelty alone lying leg curls will be better. That’s how close it is. And I think some people will confuse those two. They’re different by a margin versus they’re meaningfully different in a way that you can apply and that’ll take things like, oh man, like so we don’t do anything at a shortened length anymore. Like, no no no, they’re still great, but like, it’s probably true to say that on average it’s a little bit better to emphasize the lengthened component, and it’s a bit of nuance there, for sure. The reality is like, you know, go to the gym, read the literature, do generally the stuff that’s a good idea, experiment with the stuff that maybe you don’t know about, the stuff that’s not as good-try it anyway and see if you like it and if you like and it works for you, great. Fucking do it. But, don’t pretend like, you know, some things are just categorically just night and day better than others. Those things do exist, for sure, but they’re mostly like, how do I get my quads bigger? Is it doing bicep curls or is it doing leg extensions? Like, yes, you will see very big effect sizes there.

-Mike Israetel, everyone. I would tell you to promote your products or anything, but everyone on this channel knows who you are. They can find everything on the Renaissance Periodization channel. You also have your own Making Progress channel for non fitness stuff. And yeah, everybody already knows who you are.

-Excellent. Menno, thank you so much.