hey folks Dr Mike here for RP strength welcome to another episode of Mike's training regular old training um Scott's this one going up on the uh regular channel I think so so if you guys want to see more of this we do make quite a few more of these but these are in our member section usually so if you want to sign up for that you get all kinds of other goodies in there and this is one of them suppose if you think this is a goodie but uh it's just my normal training no pump and Circumstance nothing crazy today I am uh roughly 11 weeks out from Masters Nationals where I'll be trying to you know put my best physique on the stage so far things are going pretty well I uh today I weighed 233 pounds which um is on the low end for me of my current uh weight cycle I'll weigh depending on if it was a kind of a higher calorie day or low calorie day day or two before I was somewhere between well really 232 and 240 at this point but um I'm hoping to get that down closer to the in know 229 to 237 kind of range you think like what what do you mean like you got 11 weeks left you're supposed to just continue to lose like a pound a week over that time and that will occur in tissue and body fat hopefully but as you guys may well understand I'm not exactly the natester produce more pharmacology as your prep gets closer as your show gets closer and that pharmacology for many people and definitely for me holds body weight on you like crazy it fills your muscles up with water and that will gain you know I'll gain I have sort of two bumps left in farm and each bump will give me three to five pounds of body weight and it makes my appearance look cooler but nonetheless if I just go by the scale it's real real confusing so my RP diet coach app which I use to program my dieting my end diet goal is 229 pounds uh and this I calculated is sort of roughly what will take to get me nice and shredded but uh if you looked at my current low body weight like later this week I'll probably hit like 231 or something on the scale and you're G to be like the fuck dude you really you're going to take another 10 weeks to lose two pounds and that's not how it works because I next week I introduce my first up upping of farm and that's going to be you know the weight scale just doesn't go down for two weeks at all sometimes even goes up and then for another week or so it's stable and then for another week it goes down at the end and then I have to make another introduction for the last little tail thing so if I could just scoot that down to 229 while at the same time you know 6 to 10 pounds of of uh of body water and actal muscle tissue are added during that process yeah could be a pretty cool look so that's the situation generally spe specifically I'm in my second to last week of my accumulation phase for this Mesa cycle and using the RP hopy app of course which you guys will see in screenshots of uh every time I do an exercise today and it's a pull day which means uh my program's constructed a little bit interestingly but I do calves first is you got to do calves at some point doing them before legs screws up your leg workout doing them after legs you don't have any energy you can do them on a push day that's totally fine but if you scoot calves on a push and pole day to the end you're really just kind of mailing it in there's no other way to say that so for me calves before I start my back workout is awesome because they just uh don't really I mean they don't at all systemically fatigue me the fatigue is only local I don't use my calvs in any of the other movements today and I have full bore energy at the beginning of my workout to do this kind of thing on my leg days I actually train forearms first for this mesle cycle and it's been working out great because like I don't use my forearms at all for my legs and now I can train them really nice and hard so start with calvs then we're going to go to machine rows the prime row is what I'm going to be using today it's Superior to almost every other row because it allows you to load that stretch position you an insane range of motion unloads the contracted position which is awesome that Force curve really matches what the body seems to prefer for muscle growth and then after that I'm going to do straight arm lat pull Downs or otherwise known as LP prayers if you're a mano henselman fan which you should be he has a YouTube I was using the uh Prime machine for that um single joint overhead work but I to be completely honest fellas it sounds kind of fucking weird I'm literally too big for the machine like it Clips my lats on the way down and I'm like the fuck is going on there's no way to adjust it so it's kind of sweet you know ascended Beyond machine size remember Jared and I were training in a gym in San Diego actually called the gym in San Diego which is the best gym in San Diego as far as I can tell and uh there was a similar machine there and Jared and I had planned to use it we're really excited we got in there and we were like looked around adjusted some things couldn't fit that's it no more machine so I'm switching to the straight arm laat pull Downs I love this movement I haven't done it in months and months it's going to blow me up I'll probably keep it in all the way to the show and then that's just two back exercises definitely enough to Nuke my back because I train back basically twice a week and then after that I'm going to be doing um free motion cable lateral raises and those are going to be really awesome I'll talk through those more specifically when we get there but um it's a really cool exercise and uh just in case I forget to thank him Joe Bennett who is hypertrophy coach on in Instagram super great guy he saw me using um or I think maybe we critiqued a video of his right Scott the Batista video and he had the um uh the cuffs on there the the wrist cuffs so you can clip directly into the machine and not have to use your hands and I think I said something and then he just like was like hey what's your address and of course any young man asked me for my address I instantly send him my address various pictures of myself that my Pearl Officer says they're not again again not a good idea to send to people Mike um and he sent me some of these uh wrist cuffs and they're amazing they've completely transformed my shoulder training in in a pretty interesting sense because I'm not limited by my grip anymore Versa grips do an amazing job at mitigating this problem but you got to kind of readjust them every now and again because I'm doing High Reps it's this weird cable setup and I end up kind of hooking it it works but the the clip situation is is way better the thing is Versa grips are still dominant for 99% of all other exercises you can't exactly clip yourself into a barbell or a machine but into a free motion or cable machine literally comes with a clip you guys will see that in a bit that's it so four exercises and Cals Jesus like that doesn't count so three and a half exercises um let's get a cracking and I'll you know I'll say some things between sets and you guys can enjoy the amazing music that I listen to when I train nope that's just in my head all right let's get to training so I'm just doing a couple reps here warming up I'm actually going to be doing calf raises on the uh belt squat machine but this is just a fun place to get some uh blood through the calves get some warmth going because once I clip in there my weight's already on there I'm just fucking going so I do that let the calves rest a little bit and then I do my uh calisthenics which is arm circles just I've been this is a warmup I've been been doing my entire bodybuilding career and the vast majority of my training career in general kick out my knees kind of feel out my joints kick out my elbows so it's interesting the first time I just did this kind of throw the elbows out thing both of them clicked but the second time they don't click so I'm getting some clicks out I really like to do this do some rotations my hips and spine just clicked a few times now they're not clicking do some side bends get a couple weird clicks there and this just kind of warms my core up a little bit warms me up generally so here I'm kind of doing a good morning to get the ham stretched but then I also round my back to stretch my back just getting in touch with my body raising the body temperature a slight bit although calf raisers will do that for us just fine you don't have to do anything like this in your own training but for me I used to get little um pings and dings every now and again before I started doing this and after I started doing it it led to kind of a little bit better smoothness to my training and the warm-ups go better still so could be some old man yells a cloud type of show this is how I was raised this used to be America wrong Channel all right all right I'm going to go look at my app see how many reps I have I'm going to train caps all right folks calf raises Matt winning belt squat great belt squat machine it's built with the kind of quality that you see in Ohio regular real America none of this foreign bullshit you know what I'm saying fellas readjust a little bit there all right that's 23 just have myself a seat this is like an allegory for capitalism you know like you change your desk man fuck steel bars the corporate machine or keeping you in you know what's stopping you from just unclipping yourself and being free your mind bro they get to you in elementary school do your homework why so I can practice working for the fucking boss fuck that set2 for [Music] so I did 15 there because your boy yapped a little too much in the last rest break and uh typically i l i rest uh much less time and so because I did 15 there I'm going to rest much less time here and uh do a few reps shy to get the same rep total that makes the most sense so I got 15 means on my last one instead of 10 I got to do seven and on this one I got to do 11 let's go [Music] oh fuck that hurts you guys know shit serious when the hood comes off in here still from the hood seven lucky number seven [Music] [Music] I'm at last rep you guys will notice that I scooted down and waited for two seconds as if I was going to do another some shit you might have heard me say before as as if another the last rep of Any Given set is typically in the conversation for being very muscle growth promoting why is the last rep maybe the most growth promoting but maybe not the most but definitely in there is because you have maximum metabolites maximum pump and all of your fibers have to show up to try to contract to help you do that last rep because all the other fibers are fatigued so you may be getting pretty good fiber recruitment there's more nuanced conversation there if the reps are really high the fastp fibers kind of smoke a Sig and they're out to set a seven at the end it's probably maximum recruitment the Ecentric of the rep The Descent is also very very muscle growth promoting and you don't have to save your energy for anything because the last rep of a set you get to rest afterwards so when people do that last rep let's say in dumbbell press calf raas is also a great example you dumbbell press and then they rack okay but what if you got it up on that last one and you took your time to really get that last Ecentric is not very difficult because you're already up there just controlling the way down and you get a crapload of per rep stimulus it's to me something that just makes a lot of sense you got there finish strong as if you're going to do another rep and that muscle growth message sentence to the cell with an exclamation mark instead of a dot dot dot the cell's like G to put the weight down Fine is this an important thing not really is it a religious thing you got to do the last rep as if you're going to do them no but it uh you know we're in here to get jacked and might as well do the kind of stuff that oh you oh oh you're interested oh yeah yeah yeah oh yeah what was I saying I distracted myself so every single set should end with a rep that looks like you're about to do another ideally speaking of which let's go warm up for the bake all right warm up set nothing too [Music] crazy getting in the hardest part Big Stretch sh easy warmup set of 12 I'm going to slap another plate on here I do a set of 6 to8 and slap some more weight and yeah either take it for another two to four reps here if it feels pretty good and I feel pretty warm I'll just do a work set you know what F pretty good on this so actually going to go up to two plates in addition for total my working weight is this with some small change on the end so I think it's 2115 PBS that bottom 25 I don't count that's for ballast so it's not super easy at the top because if it's too easy you actually just kind of fall back and so I count this as 180 so 180 plus oh cool I have a even plate to put on I slap on a 35 and then that's going to be my work weight so it's perfect I'm going to rest a little bit and then I'm going to do probably a set of six with this weight I'll see you guys in just a sec hopefully my grip is good enough I'm haven't used the verses yet saving them for the work set going to do hopefully a set about four to six reps here this is pretty heavy not exactly my working weight but getting close [Music] feels good today I'm not going to lie that feels fucking good my last prep kind have doubted myself a little bit which is fundamentally not terrible and thought maybe I was wasn't training hard enough which you know people have said to me that I don't train so hard and uh they're not wrong you know they're not wrong they do leave some reps in the tank and I was like you know what let me rise up to the occasion and I started training harder getting closer to failure consistently and uh just made me really really fatigued did not add any more muscle than normal it just was not worth it and ever since then more or less this whole past year half year including now I've been stopping short of failure two three reps on the tank um in my last week of the meso I stopped honestly one to two reps in the tank uh and I'm having basically some of the best training in my entire life consistently week after week after week I'm getting stronger I'm recovering and my muscle size is kind of absurdly the biggest ever been so yeah hard training is cool if you've never done it before you got to do it to figure out where your limits are I mean probably in almost all of high school and definitely all of college I trained every single set to failure multiple set program so I was dope um I got hurt more I didn't uh understand what fatigue was and after 3 weeks of training i' always get hit like a ton of bricks and I was like the fuck's going on my training partners are experiencing the same thing and uh so I know how training to failure feels I know a lot about it and uh when I discovered reps and reserve it boosted my training like crazy when I recently went back to closer to failure style training it degraded my training now that I'm back to more reps in reserve my training is better again to me that's that's something also the research says that R is at least equivalent to train into failure in context so yeah uh it feels good to be training intelligently again and getting better results and I will say that um there are definitely folks who need to train harder a ton of people but there are also lots of folks out there who are training really hard because it's an emotional situation and they're TR trying to prove something in the gym to themselves maybe they're fighting some demons maybe they think if I train harder I'll be better than everyone in the reality is what makes you better is genetics time drugs and putting in consistent difficult effort um whether or not you do that last rep uh really going super close to failure it uh May is likely to make no difference at all and it is probably more likely in more cases to make you worse next week but bodybuilding is a week after week after week after week situation you know people say shit like do or die like leave it all in the gym like hold on a second I need some of it for later so for me it's been working great getting uh further from failure and I'm sure you'll see this in the comments In This Very video you get some tough guys like yeah man but fucking I don't train like that bro I go all out like word up um trying to train in such a way that is maximum effect demons and shit I'm already done with all that fuck crap so that's what Brazilian jiu-jitsu is for really so I'm just going to do uh the kind of training that is a combination of scientifically supported and seems to work the best for me and if you got some comments about how I don't train hard enough yeah compared to your standards I probably don't but do you look like me no you probably look better fuck anyway for now you do but wait till I do this setup back let's fucking kick it easily the most difficult part of this lift is the unloading and settling in 12 reps is the goal [Music] that was fucking sweet this machine is undefeated I love this shit super easy at the top which allows me to Crunch that PE contraction which I like that PE contraction is probably not worth a damn but ASMR wise it feels sweet lets me really feel like I've reset the rep what it also lets me do is get in touch mine muscle wise with my back so I can pre-contract it to slow that Ecentric get a ton out of it on the way down versus like you know more arms than back big massive stretch at the bottom it's brutal the force curve on this is just it's just hard to beat so highly recommend Prime equipment in general is fucking sweet and this Prime row Best in Class legit which is why I know I'm one uh 12 reps that felt great strength so far on my prep total prep length is 18 weeks I've already gotten through like seven weeks of prep weird uh strength has gone up so far A little bit which is cool my strength will probably continue to climb through allive prep just by the bidest of margins I'm not trying to push it just little tiny PRS here and there a rep here and there extra 2 and a half pounds here and there works really well now for some of you at home asking how the fuck does your strength continue to go up through allive prep Drugs That's it typically you lose some strength just a little bit tail end of prep if you're natural or if you're doing gear and you're doing it wrong um the last couple weeks water manipulation drying out estrogen management you know your strength is a question mark because you wouldn't even be testing it at that point staying a little bit further from failure or very light weights High Reps it's tough to track then but generally speaking for enhanced preps uh intelligently designed enhanced preps should keep your strength either stable most of the time or slowly rising and uh it's kind of cool but um you need pay the price on the back end actually right then and there with a terrible psychology of drugs and make me feel awful and uh of course shortening my lifespan yay yeah it's just like this whole body thing is like a weird art project where uh yeah it's like being any other artist you finish your artwork for that day you feel really happy you walk home from school and you get beat up by the bully for being an art nerd just described Scott who Scott the video guy life except his music nerd which is arguably even worse set two nine reps f got another set of eight and then I do a down set where I take a 45 off so say 215 PBS external load non-machine load and a go to 170 um after this so it's 12 98 and then I think I have to do another 12 at 170 so it's really good extra volume a little bit of a different rep range seems to be adding a little bit more muscle than just exact same rep range the entire time tentative tentative but there's at least one decent study to support that and personal experience one Downs set at the end of a a bunch of heavy sets seems to take some boxes the heavy set doesn't um and after that straight arm pull Downs then lateral raises the cable and then I uh shower Scot video Guy usually helps with that there are parts of the body that I can reach all my parts of the body but I don't want to yeah and then after that food and then recording uh exercise scientist reacts videos Scott can we give a preview of what those are going to be who we doing Jay Cutler and me fucking favorite Doran fucking Yates and I know he doesn't talk like this he don't talk like this do he he's like a some kind of fucking Midlands accent with fucking scotch and Irish in there and why not fucking Welsh it's all the same it's all the fucking same you give me a a New Yorker hey yo whoa and a fucking North Carolinian I tell you what man sound the same to me man it's all American e same with you British folk but in any case we're going to do Dorian we talk some shit of course we're going to pay major respects of course and generally just look at his bubbly muscle body and just wonder just wonder what could have been huh let's do another set Mike you're careing off into your bullshit again sh [Music] [Music] oh yeah that'll fucking work and now take a plate off 170 rest a little bit do 12 and that's enough roll for straight arm pull Downs in a little bit so got four sets here straight arm pull down I might only do two sets because all my other muscles are going to heal with just one rest day between this half week and the next half week I have to let my back heal but straight arm pull Downs are new for me first time today long time I was in this meso using the uh machine straight arm pull down situation and I just like I said earlier did not fuck and uh cool thing about the RP hypertrophy app link in description is that uh you can trade out exercises anytime and it actually gives you the option of trading them out for good like for the whole meso or like repeat this trade out or you can trade it out just for one session and it doesn't touch anything the next session you come in it's all the same exercises with the same weight progressions you were using before which is a sweet feature because if you're in a situation like I'm right now and you're like this exercise kind of sucks I want this new exercise and I just want it to perseverate perfect the box is auto checked for you when you replace exercise you're traveling going on vacation going on a trip you CH a random gym you'll be back to your own ship next week you want to keep progressing it's mid mzo you just want to highlight that box repeat and all of a sudden you get to keep jamming on it and uh you do whatever different replacement exercise for that day or week that you're traveling come back the next week like nothing ever a change look up your app it continues that progression for you that you start started two weeks ago or had been doing two weeks ago so kind of a cool tool we we really designed the app with the advanced user in mind we designed the app literally so that myself and Jared could use it and we do we don't I don't train without it anymore training without it seems alien it's like walking around with no clothes which I think is fun but the law is weird it's like don't do it there's kids weird shit so it's just an awesome thing and I really like it and if if you would just for the love of God just subscribe I could finally get some money in my life look at this look what I'm wearing free t-shirt Walmart shorts literally Walmart shoes walmart.com these are $10 old socks look at how ugly I am you guys think I can afford cosmetic surgery you don't think I'd run to that fucking place if they offered it I would but can't even afford to run think about that so if you want to support people of lower socioeconomic status by the app 12 reps [Music] [Music] going to unrack this take off my verses I'll see you guys for the warmup for lat prayers all right straight arm lap pull Downs AKA lap prayer feel pretty good I just did a little quick warmup set about I used 95 lbs I did six reps um cool thing about warming up is that once you do your first muscle Group Training for that day all other warm-ups for that same muscle are way way easier just don't require a lot maybe just one set the best term I've ever heard for this is a term uh I think invented by Mr Jay Cutler multi-time Mr Olympia he called them feel sets used do a set with like some intermediate weight just one set maybe five to 10 reps just kind of get the feel of it get the feel of the movement get everything uh moving in the right pattern and uh that also you know wakes up the nervous system component that's supposed to be in charge of that movement and so it's really really awesome you don't can't that technically a warmup anymore in some sense in a general sense it is because the term warmup we use colloquially uh for a bunch of different processes and that's all called the warmup the physical warming is just a part of it but you know my back is physically warm as fuck you guys saw on those rows my LPS were kicking it so this kind of just feels it out and then now I'm going to do work sets with 115 PBS close to the same weight but uh not for a set of six but hopefully for a set of somewhere between 10 and 20 haven't done this in a while we'll see how it goes I think somewhere between 10 and 20 is going to be a good thing again controlled Ecentric at all times deep stretch people often when they come up here they lean up with a machine don't do that lean down so that your lats stretch more you can feel that as far as grips are concerned um I'm going to be using the uh straight bar attachment basically there's dandles on it but I don't use those for this uh movement grips for lat prayers or straight arm lat pull Downs it's one of those things that dealer's Choice it's just variation now in some sense do your lats get better activity if you have the vertical grip like this sure but if you put your pinkies out it actually stretches a part of the lat that normally doesn't get stretched there's a conversation to be had there and you know some people say like well you're training the chair is Major when you do that like sweet I want that muscle big too um no one ever just looks at your lats ever it's always everything in context so overall back width yeah this is the shit and you have vertical positioning is great 45 degre is great and even straight is great try buy all of them over the course of time see which one feels better for you on essentially two factors one is stimulus proxies like how much of a pump how much do you feel the tension blah blah blah how much do your lats get sore and the other is fatigue specifically joint connective tissue fatigue which means like if grabbing it like this means no shoulder and elbow pain but grabbing like this means shoulder and elbow pain like yeah this is the one that wins not always because months later you could come back to this with normal weight work up to it and then all the elbow pain and shoulder pain is gone so variation is a big deal and last thing I'll say before starting is variation is a concept that a lot of folks in the gym who know a lot of other things they seemly don't understand u a lot of people know you got to train hard a lot of people know you got to do the basics and shit like that a lot of people know that you know volume matters how much you do as as a thing but a lot of people are still looking for like the number one exercise for XYZ with the perfect GP position hand spacing that's a non-answer question because it's like asking uh fuck it well say this is actually quite good analogy you know what's the best sex position what the fuck what like any sex position after in my case 30 seconds and in your case probably an hour and a half since you're all adult film stars that watch this channel um she gets old you got to switch it up and even if you're fucking grinding in one position it's fucking dope for fucking days weeks months at some point you're like honey get on top which I never say because nobody ever gets on top me babe I'm On Top uh yeah yeah let's do these [Music] h that fucks hard joins feel great Lads feel fucking Zapped yes Christ that feels fucking great you know great in the painful sense free motion cable y raises let's go warm up on them raise These Bars up in my uh RP hypertrophy app in the notes feature I have all the specific up down in out written down every week I know what to do and uh you'll notice it's a pretty high up because I want maximum tension here minimum tension here Big Stretch and uh having a high position helps with that the low position isn't bad or anything but if you try the high one and stand out in front a little bit could work well taking these guys putting them away I could have done that more uh stealthily this is a mix of Gatorade and whey protein cool shake to be anti-catabolic start the anabolic process start the recovering process and it actually keeps my energy up a little bit towards the end of workouts all right lean forward a little bit notice line of pull perpendicular which is really good a lot of tension here minimum here control Ecentric boom hypertrophy coach the uh uh what's it called the wrist thingies go get them they're fucking sweet this set coming up first set so this is my rep match which uh is a feature you can use in the app and basically I have three sets of 20 to do the first set I'm going to do a straight 20 close to failure the second and third sets I do as many reps as I can at a time rest a little bit and then keep going I rest I Don't Unplug I just kind of move back take the tension off the shoulders and keep plugging along so it's three sets of 20 but it's really like probably six approaches to failure instead of three and it's just so mashes a ton of volume and a ton of relative effort it's really really good so I'm going to scoot my ass through here oh there we go let's do reps what I'm G pull the mic out here all right 20 ah works a lot more smoothly 20 reps take a little break another 20 and then another 20 I ah shit all right that was actually 22 reps so I have 18 total left is that going to be our little secret guys cuz yeah my rep match means hit the same total reps over each set as many my at many sets as it takes but to be completely honest as long as you hit that first set reach your first goal the other subsequent sets instead of seeing him as 20 202 you can see him as 20 and then 40 and for the 40 total reps as long as you're getting close to failure on each minis set as many minis sets as it takes so I did 20 then it's 22 now it's going to be 18 I'm going to set up my own camera here for my Instagram where you guys can follow me I post 95% of my training at least one set of almost every exercise I post screenshots of the app so you can see my exact program I do that all the time so if you guys want to follow me on Instagram I'm Dr Mike gell on Instagram we I'm Dr Mike gel in real life [Music] [Music] [Music] folks that's training if you guys want to see more of this kind of training get two options for these full length feature production YouTube videos the member section on our YouTube is really good you also get uh explicit versions of the exercise scientist critiques videos I say a lot of shit that does not make it to YouTube you'll get all that shit uh when you do the member situation because you can't cancel that and uh if you want to follow me in Instagram I post my training in much lower quality video format with much worse editing all the time so guys thanks so much for tuning in best wishes in your own training train SMART Train hard drink your milk go to school don't do drugs slightly hypocritical on my part I did uh I I consumed so much milk and went to so much school I get a little pass on the drugs see you guys next time [Music]