Transcript for:
Insights from QA with Andy Baker

all right loud and clear so it looks like where it go so appreciate starting strength for the invitation to have me on today so I don't have a set topic today they had asked if I wanted to speak on something in particular not really I think what I'm gonna do is just about an hour of QA so I think that'll be the most valuable thing rather than listen to me you know rattle on about stuff I'm just gonna try to take as many questions as I can and give us good answers as I can in about the next hour so so we will get started I'm just going to kind of take them as I see them someone asks is that the new shirt yes that's one of my new shirts I don't know what you guys can see it but I'm not big into the whole merchandise thing but since we've all got a little extra time to kill since our gyms are closed and we're not training people and that sort of thing I went ahead and took the time to get some shirts made so if guys want any of my Baker bottle club shirts I believe the best place to go is probably go to my Instagram which is at Baker barbell and so you can go there and if you want if you're going to give me a follow on on my Instagram and then also you can look in the the link is there for for shirts if you want to find it there okay what is the average weight of your guys who hit 500 400 600 so I'm assuming that's 400 bench 500 squats 600 deadlift yeah and as you said everyone's different the five I don't know that there is an average weight that beats impossible to answer I will say the 500 squad and the 600 deadlift are quite a bit more common to achieve than the than the 400-pound bench so you're gonna see a lot less 400-pound benches then you will 500 squats and then probably especially 600 deadlifts so a lot of that asks a lot of that has to do with build there's definitely I have a lot of light lighter guys you know that can hit you know the 600-pound deadlifts that sort of things it's just it's a little bit easier based on your your leverages whereas you know to climb up to a 400-pound bench takes a little bit more so you know definitely for the 400-pound bench you know north of 200 pounds is generally you know pretty standard I don't think I've ever had a guy at less than less than 200 pounds hit a 400-pound bench but you know I've had a few most of them you know probably low to mid 200 something like that that they've worked up over once you get into the higher 200-pound body weights the 400 bench becomes you know a bit more achievable what is the second-best state after Texas that's a weird question actually you bribing surprising here we say this but actually California so I guess just because I lived there so that was uh I actually enjoyed Southern California quite a bit I lived there for years while I was active duty so a lot of weirdos of course but it's a pretty cool state okay what is your favorite memory with you and rip hmm let me come back to that one I have to think about that one a little bit there's quite a few see what do people tend to screw up the most on your templates and programs oh that's a good one and it's not just that's just not my my templates and programs you know I would say the most common mistakes that people make when they're following any program is to not not plan it out and then see it through so I just have this conversation the other day with some with some members on my Facebook group about you know that kind of trying to select which programming methodology to follow which program to follow you know post novice there's a lot of there's a lot of different options and there's a lot of different things that can work there's not necessarily one approach everybody's kind of always looking for that one optimal program that they can put together that's going to give them you know the the optimal amount of progress but that that's potentially achievable with a lot of different programming options and you know there's it's time to learn yourself and learn your tolerances learn works for you learn what what doesn't and so part of what you're going to want to do as an intermediate is experiment a little bit with different programming methodologies you know different exercise selections and that sort of thing but also know that you have to put something together and you have it's there's a bit of an unknown there you never you can never figure everything out at the front end of a program and solve every possible problem so you've just got a lady stand out that's reasonable and then go with it so whether that's eight weeks or twelve weeks or sixteen weeks or something lay something out that seems reasonable to you based on you know your previous training experiences based on all the information that you've gathered lay something out know where your strength is going into it so whether that's a one rep max or whatever you have to have some sort of baseline to know kind of where you're at and then have a date it doesn't have to be an official meet but some sort of testing date that's by yourself in your garage whatever but some sort of test at the end to be able to weigh the effectiveness of the program or not and then the most critical thing is to see it through because even if you choose something and lay it out and you get to the end of it and you test out and the results weren't so great and the progress wasn't you know as profound as you hoped and thought it would be the benefit is is that you will have at least learned something about your own body you'll you'll have learned what worked and what didn't work so typically what you'll see is on a lot of programs guys will say you know my squat my deadlift did really well on this program and I progressed you know I got you know 20 25 pounds you know added to my max or whatever on this program but my bench in my press didn't really move that much okay well that's a data point you can use you can you can say okay well I did a you know a Texas method program or a heavy light-medium program or some sort of split routine I mean there's a million different ways to draw things out and this approach worked really really well for this lift or that lift and not so good for not so good for this lift and then you go back and you either run it again or you drop something similar make some changes and and you you base it off of what worked and what didn't work and if the the more you repeat that process the better you're gonna get at programming for yourself because you'll know okay this lift needs a ton of volume you know I don't do well on my bench with a higher intensity approach I need a lot of volume on my bench press I need a lot of frequency on my bench press you know whereas maybe the deadlift not so much maybe I'm do better dead lifting once a week with less volume you know maybe the squad is somewhere in middle it's a very a little bit for everybody but if you if you talk and start programs all the time so I address this you know years ago and a couple articles about chronic program hopping in other words I do something three weeks I don't really like the way it's going so I stopped and I just make a wholesale change to something else I do that for a month and then I stop and then I do something totally different well one you're you're almost guaranteeing yourself that one you're not going to make great progress when you program hop like that if sometimes it gives the illusion that you're making progress because when you stop and you try something new it always feels like there's kind of excitement to it or whatever you may feel you know good the initial couple weeks but most programs get you know get harder in the middle and towards the end and that's where you really got a you know push through the end and see what the outcome is if you program hop all the time you're almost guaranteed to not make any really sustainable progress but you also are never learning you're never learning about what approach works for you and what doesn't so even if you if you see something through to the end of 12 week 16 weeks regardless of what it is you know whether it works really well or whether it doesn't at least you'll have a good data pointing experience from it so then in the future when you make Pro you when you make a choice about what type of program to follow you have a better filter so you can look and say oh man you know this this this program has a lot of deadlift volume and a lot of deadlift frequency and you know I've done that approach several times and I really didn't make good progress on that or I went backwards doing that so your filter you can just filter that out you know or you can look at something and say oh yeah that you know this looks a lot like this other thing that I did that works really well let me give it's a little bit different but it's along the same lines of what I've done in the past that worked for me so I'm gonna try this or you know the the the ultimate goal is to be able to you know put something together for yourself and program for yourself and the more times you see things through and go back and objectively evaluate the results of better the better you'll get it writing out programming for yourself and not always having to rely on a template or you know something like that so that's that's the biggest thing it's just it's just pick something you know that's that's reasonable and that's the thing as a lot of people are afraid well what if it doesn't work you know most of the time if it's reasonable the worst the worst case scenario is usually that you kind of stagnate if you pick something that's really at the far end of one of the of the spectrum then the chances of you know massive regression is higher but on most kind of middle-of-the-road programs usually the worst case scenario is more of kind of a stagnation as far as in rather than the whole sale of regression so if you pick something that's further you know really really really high on the volume side or really really low on the volume side but really high on the intensity side so something that's kind of swings really far one or the other then you run more of a risk of really regressing or less but generally the way I program for people I usually stiff I don't know them that well you know and I didn't start with them as a novice on I'm picking up a coaching client that that's been training for a number of years and I'd really don't know them that well you know I do a questionnaire that sort of thing but you really I don't know them know them I usually start them out with kind of a middle-of-the-road type approach and that allows me to adjust it you know kind of up or down based on the feedback that I'm getting so the worst thing to do is just take a guess at somebody and say okay I'm gonna throw a ton of volume at this person and see if it works because if it doesn't work then you run the risk of you know causing them to over train and maybe regress it get burned out really early into the program and you can do the same thing on the other end of the spectrum you know pushing a program that's really you know heavily intense intensity based and really low on the volume most people respond best to somewhere to an approach that somewhere middle road not necessarily super high volume not Sara Lee super low volume but if you can start with the middle-of-the-road approach and just and just progress it and then adjust it you know every few weeks based on what's happening that's a much much easier approach to get people into a program that's right from them in it for them and it's a lot less risky in terms of picking an approach that's totally wrong so most people like to go to middle road like I said at worst you'll kind of just stagnate not make any progress but necessarily go backwards so there's that um any recommendations for baseball players there's none of anecdotal evidence that overhead lists are bad your thoughts I think that's that's I think that's dogma you know that's stuck around in that in that world for a long time I can tell you I've worked with a lot of baseball players I've worked with a pitcher's in particular now you know you don't with a baseball especially a pitcher you don't necessarily have to overdo the upper body stimulus you don't need to crush them with a lot of volume or intensity on the upper body lifts and that's just because they're they're putting so many repetitions on that arm you know and a lot of these kids nowadays are practicing and taking pitching lessons and playing in these seasonal leagues and everything they operate year-round and so you don't especially with a pitcher your focus it's really gonna be on the lower body so you know you can get if you get a pitcher in there and he's got a you know he doesn't have much of a squad or you know most of them don't have any squatted at all you teach them how to squat and you build up their lower body strength and you even if you just do kind of some maintenance level upper body stuff with them you're gonna get you know some more juice on that fastball and kind of the same thing with the you know even with the position players but in terms of the press being bad you know there's nothing wrong with the movement itself the only risk you would and you could do it to an inch the press Chin's anything is just too much volume combined with the amount of practice and game play that they have and that's true with any sport is when you're working with an athlete you really have to look at all of the all of the issues that you don't have control of as a strength coach and so you have to look at how many times a week is this kid practicing how hard are these practices how many times a week is he in engaging in actual competition whether it's you know games or anything like that so and then you have to balance what you're doing as a strength coach to make sure that you're adding to their performance as a player and not taking it away so you always want to get them stronger but you have to be careful how hard you push you know in the gym in order to get them stronger because if you know with the kids a lot of them the high school whether it's them or their parents or whatever if they see that the the training is taking away from their performance you know they're too sore you know or just they're getting more overuse type stuff because they're doing a lot of volume in the gym plus a lot of the volume with the sports stuff you know so you can overdo it with any of the upper body movements but in terms of the press having mechanic anything wrong for the shoulders I I would say it's the opposite I've worked with a lot of baseball players but with lots and lots and lots of swimmers so that was something that I kind of stumbled onto early and Mike was working with a lot of a high school and college swimmers around the Houston area and I mean I've probably seen dozens and dozens these kids at the high school and college level and they present a lot of pops even at a very young age with a lot of shoulder issues a lot of shoulder tendinitis and that's our thing and these kids a lot of times the parents have spent a lot of money on physical therapy and Rehab high stuff and they do a lot of work with their trainers and they get no relief and the first thing I do is how many times a week they're gonna come and see me whether it's one two or three times a week I will have them press every session starting with something light you know so whether it's empty bar you know or whether it's forty five pound bar or a light training bar but I will have them press three sets of five every single session and within a few weeks usually that shoulder pain starts to clear up and then that'd be that is a staple in the program it's overhead press as kind of a notice not only just a strength training tool but also kind of a prehab type movement to prevent further you know further pain and that sort of thing so I am in a hundred percent disagreement with the fact that overhead pressing should not be done with overhead athletes it's just like anything it's the amount that you do is important so but you could say the same thing for lower body you know exercise if you're working with a track and field athlete I mean you can certainly body volume in the intensity of the squatting and deadlifting and that sort of thing that they do because because the total workload that they're doing in the gym combined with all their sports stuff can just add up to be too much for them to recover from and you know the kids typically they don't their diet is garbage there a lot of them stay up too late don't get enough sleep and that sort of thing so you've got a you've got the way all that sort of stuff to make sure that you're adding value instead of taking it away it was asking another group for benchpress assistance close grip or incline well that's a tough call I like them both those are probably my two favorite benchpress assistance movements I think probably right off the bat close grips might help a little bit more because people tend to be stronger on their close grip bench press like you have a guy never lifted before or he's never done any assistance type movements before he's just done you know playing bench pressing and you know kind of the big four squat bench press deadlift and you start adding assistance movements to his routine you know a lot of guys are not that much weaker on a Close Grip than they are on a on a regular bench press so sometimes when that's the case the the effect from adding the assistance work is going to be a little bit more significant in the short term with movements that they're stronger on already because there's less of a learning curve so they get right away they get into having a more of a training effect because they're able to use there's less form issues there's less technical issues they're using heavier loads so the potential to get more carryover in the short term but so what happens a lot like with incline presses especially people really don't like that movement I happen to love inclines personally and I like them for clients but just having worked with a lot of people a lot of people don't like the clients when they're first introduced it feels awkward to them or it kind of aggravates their shoulder a little bit you know whatever the case is it usually it's the path you'll sweared to them so it feels like a very moving to them and so because they're not technically proficient in the movement the weights are gonna be you know pretty low compared to the bench press and so at the beginning there's not going to be that much carryover from working with it it's like a guy that starts doing front squats for the first time you know a lot of guys they start their front squat on a really really low compared to their back squat it doesn't have much carryover to the main lift until they be 410 we proficient at the movement they gain that technical proficiency in the movement you start to see some like kind of novice like gains so you start to kind of get that novice effect in that movement to where they've got the technique dialed in and so then there's a really there's kind of it's kind of a muddle through maybe first couple times they do it but then after that they start progressing really really really fast on it as they get it out of the movement then it starts getting harder and it just like any other movement the longer you do it the harder it's to make progress on it but I feel like once you start making that progress on the movement once it gets hard in other words you've you've ironed out your technical issues and you have you've kind of got past you've got all the gains that you're going to get out of kind of that novice effect from that new exercise then once you start to make what I call those hard gains that's when it starts to carry over quite a bit more so I feel like the incline is something that's definitely worth definitely worth learning I think it can add a lot of mass on the pedals better than a Close Grip can so if you're you definitely if you're a guy that's you know you can just look at yourself if you know how Beck mass your bench press is going to suffer so and a lot of guys find that in order to develop develop more pet mass the bench press especially if you bench more like a power lifter with a you know with a big arch a wide grip bringing the bar down you know lower onto the lower onto the torso it's it's actually not that stimulative movement for the pectoral so doing this like a Close Grip or a an incline press dips can be good working with dumbbells that sort of thing for assistance type work and build up the PEC mask you know and potentially bring up a weakness so in that regard I'd really like inclines you know for that you know you talk to a lot of body builders and a lot of body builders will use the incline that's one of their or the primary chest movement because I feel like it's a better developer of the of the pecs than it is a flat bench press and a lot of that has to do with just the style in which you flat bench so again if more like a power lifter a lot of times it's not that stimulated to the pad so so that so that the answer tonight I feel like long probably probably short term the the close grip is better long-term potentially the incline is better and also with the incline tend to get a lot more carryover to your press so you kind of give it to four if you're a guy that likes to track your benchpress and your overhead press the the incline is a good kind of two to one movement because it'll have carryover to both so yeah I definitely I definitely like the incline press what are the most difficult to becoming an SSC gaining experience with clients you know it's easier to learn the material wouldn't have more context it would be very difficult to sit down with somebody who has somebody who maybe has only trained themselves for years and then set their try to go through the SSC certification process it would just be hard without a broader base of context without having spent more time in the gym yourself but also more time you know were clients and trying to apply the material to a wide range of different clientele so and that's so it's kind of a catch-22 if you don't have you know you don't have to have professional certification in order to build up a client base but if you're waiting to get the SSC and then start your coaching practice after that that's going to be harder I would say if you want to become a starting strength coach I would start your coaching practice now and start seeing as many clients as you can now running people through you know the novice progression in this forms of intermediate level programming coaching people in person over longer periods of time I'm just seeing people on occasion for form checks like that's that's one thing but then handling somebody for a longer period of time when you're seeing them multiple times per week so you're watching you're seeing in basically in real time the entire process play out and you're seeing that process play out over and over and over again with you know young athletes with twenty and thirty year old guys with men with women with older with people with injuries and you know all kinds of different psychological makeups and all that sort of thing like it's all different and so the the broader the base you can get in terms of the types of clients that you work with and the more repetition you can get working with more people the easier it is going to be to internalize that material because you've seen it play over again and so then a lot of this stuff will make make a little bit more sense to you so you just you there is no substitute for just you know working with people you know and getting them to turn and it just it put you put yourself on a lot of where this stuff becomes a lot less theoretical a lot more practical to where you've actually seen you know what works and what doesn't but you know that's I had mine I think I got think I got certified as a starting strength coach in 2012 I want to say that was that was the year I got certified but I had opened my dam in 2007 so I had already been seeing in and even before I opened my gym I had worked as a coach for a while so but I had been doing it you know full-time intensively he's a coach and a gym owner for four or five years before I ever even took the strength exam so it was the material was you know it was now that mind blowing whereas it might be to somebody that is has never seen you know the process play out thought over again is the counterpart to starting strength in the nutrition department I don't exactly what that means in terms of whether it's who's the the best nutrition guy or the best type of kind of commercial commercially available program out there you know oddly in terms of if you look at all the fad kind of named diets out there I mean and there's there's dozens hundreds of them that have coming on over the years you know it's the the one I I feel like what would work the best for an athlete that is looking for you know a combination of you know of performance and managing proper body composition giving the requisite amount of protein in the requisite amount of carbs optimal amount of feeding times and that sort of thing if you look at the old some of you guys that are a little bit younger may not know what I'm talking about it but if you look at the old Bill Phillips a live program that's actually a real it approach for a lot of people it it's a good starting place because it involves portion sizes instead of counting macros and for a lot of people that's gonna be a really good place to start is just getting the right amount of foods and approximately the right portions I think people go way overboard with counting macros anyway people get neurotic about it in terms of you know I got to eat 13 blueberries or you know whatever it is you got a real butt like that's a moving target even on a daily just because what we're trying to do is match our mat our intake to our caloric expenditure and the your caloric expenditure varies day to day so that's not like you know that's gonna be you know it could potentially be you know several hundred calories burned more or less day to day based on you know your activity level your training that sort of thing so trying to get too neurotic about you know the exact amount of carbohydrate or whatever that you're taking you know a little bit unnecessary until you get into kind of the finer points of you know managing your body composition trying to get down to a you know much lower body fat that sort of thing but in terms of somebody that's starting out if you look at that which was just basically you know three meals a day kind of eyeball or some sizes the old you know kind of a third of your plate of protein a third year plate of complex Hydra it's a 30 or plate of fibrous vegetables that's a pretty cut for meal composition if you're just kind of kind of eyeball it and then of course you know that whole thing that whole bod life program was designed to sell supplements that was designed to sell his EAS supplements at the same time it was still it was still a good approach which was basically you had the three kind of portioned out meals per day then you had the three protein shakes top of that you know and so you could certainly do have any you know you know teen supplement that you wanted to or not use supplementation to just convenient for a lot of people to kind of rotate meals shake Mila shake to make sure that you're getting that good protein B in every three to four hours throughout the day so you know that's in terms of kind of a fad diets generally I point a lot of people towards that because it's really really easy to follow it's not super super Bergeon and so if we're just looking to get somebody healthier get them you know feeding themselves adequately for barbells trying to get that and manage their body composition that's actually a pretty good approach so in terms of the bet you know Maya I mean I'm I'm great friends with Nathan Peyton who to me is the best nutrition guy high-street he does the nutrition for I think he five of the world Strongest Man witness have been you know he does Martines diet Brian Shaw's diet he did Travis Ortmeyer back in the day he works with a lot of strength athletes a lot of power lifters a lot of bodybuilders that sort of thing he's a good mine and he's to me he's he's oh he's a wizard with nutrition so if you want to go to the next level and have somebody really really really handy nutrition for you and really with a very high touch approach Bates and Payton to me is is the guy to is the guy to go see thoughts on programming bring a caloric deficit on a popular program yeah that can get pretty cuts I think one of the I think what's worked for me I've asked for sure and with my client I've worked with is you got to remember when you're on a caloric deficit the you're not gonna be building you know a lot of new muscle mass unless you're unless you're a novice or unless you're really really overweight so if you're very very overweight you can you can go into a caloric deficit you're still in an environment that's pretty anabolic when you're carrying a lot of when you're carrying a lot of fat tissue so you can go into deficit and still build some muscle mass and if you're if you're new to lifting for sure that's amplified even where but if you're trying to you know if you're not that overweight let's say you're a twenty percent body fat you want to get closer to ten or fifteen percent body fat you got to realize during that a cut like that you're not going to be building new muscle mass so the name of the game there is maintenance of makes of muscle mass it's all that you're trying to do and what we know about maintenance is that strength little mass can be maintained with far less volume than it takes to build that same muscle so one of the things that I make sure and have people do and that I've done in the past that's worked best for me is is I just keep the volume much much lower on a deficit than I would I definitely don't agree with you know when you're in a deficit to just lighten up waste and do more volume you got to remember one you're in a caloric deficit almost always your carbohydrate intake is going to be lower just because it's it's usually a necessity in order you have a you have a finite amount of calories you can take in and you have to allocate a big chunk of those to your protein intake because you've got to have the protein available in order to maintain the muscle mass doesn't leave a very big budget left for your kind of your energy calories so to speak your carbs so your your carbohydrate intake almost always comes down just because you don't have a lot of extra calories in your budget so the the the the carbs are there basically to fuel your training and if you don't very many carbohydrates available in your caloric budget you just don't have that much energy to train so you want to use the amount that you have as efficiently as oh so focus that on you intense efforts rather than what I mean by intense efforts I don't mean going heavy for singles and triples and that sort of thing that's usually a bad idea when you're in a caloric deficit it's super super heavy one you're not going to make a lot of one it's gonna push your volume too low but also you're you're opening yourself up to injury when you're in a depleted state and you're trying to go that heavy so I typically recommend that guys go super super low and the rep ranges and super super heavy they're in a caloric deficit because again we're not when you're when you're programming deficit you're you are not and this is I have to hammer this home with guy so much you are not trying to maintain your peak strengths you were going to lose your peak strength if you go 20% body fat down to let's say 1200 body fat you are going to lose your top-end strength so the idea is not to try to maintain or one rep maxes its to maintain as much muscle mass as you can as you can and maintenance of muscle mass it's different than maintenance of top-end strength okay so what we want to do to maintain that muscle mass I'm gonna have guys operate a lot more in the five like the fun eight rep range on their heavy compound movements but with high effort sets so like you know that may just be like one or two all-out sets in that five to eight rep range enough probably to maintain your muscle mass and you may do this multiple times per week and using porn exercises there's a lot of different ways to do it to make sure your volume doesn't get too low so I'm not I don't necessarily mean one step per week but at a given training session you may not do more than just a meal of all out sets kind of in that five to eight rep range as a means to hang on to your muscle mass so as opposed to dropping the weight really low and trying to do a bunch of volume you're not going to have the calories or the carbohydrate do that and I don't think it's as an effective way in order to maintain the muscle mass then trying to keep pain on the bar but doing it with less volume so that would be my thoughts I have a lot of free time I want to train every day any recommended routine so I'm a novice have to have the discipline to train and you have to have the discipline to rest you know it's just training seven days a week is generally not a not good so you know discipline yourself to take the rest days because you need them that's when you're growing and you get stronger when you're out of the gym not when you're in the gym the gym is a stimulus or for getting for getting stronger and adding muscle mass but it's there every is equally as important you need you need to you know there's there's no reason to train seven days a week so you're just gonna have to castor dies the program in order to make it work and you know it it won't work as well so take take those days off and use those to focus on your rest and your nutrition is there any damaged strength coming from France I have know some of you guys are posting some I can't do like a programming consult on this some of you guys are posting some stuff with like your macros and your lifts and your training schedule and like that's I'm not gonna go through that in the comments if you want to email me me Kingwood strength at gmail.com and i'll point you in the right or if you want some really detailed programming help but not on Facebook comments um on a 43 year old male the deadlift he's a ranked not but can't seem to teach him how to hold his back and Nixon I've tried various cues the same exercise on the floor nothing seems to work should I have him do already else to train the erector or would you take another approach yeah that's a tough one it's frustrating when you get a client that really really really struggles with that and a lot of middle-aged men especially or the the worst about that so females pick it up right away usually well not all younger guys but most younger guys pick it up with but some of the older guys they haven't they really have a problem with that so you there's a lot of different approaches to take doing the RTLS that's that's that's actually not a bad approach also you could call it an RT L or you can also call it a ring from the top so a lot of guys can set their back easier and when they're in a standing position but not as well that when they're bent over you know if especially - I kind of look at his positioning at the bottom if I'll have them take it off right now you know the belt sometimes kind of impedes that sensation you know what's going on right there so take the belt off for now sometimes if the guy is more overweight it's harder for this back just because you can't mechanically get into the right position but sometimes you can have them do it start with them if they can do it standing start with them standing and then have them lower it down like you would like you know and have them hold it you know hold it at the top you know kind of tactile EQ them at the top and say look how does now this is how we want it the whole set be sure he understands that and then having you know initiate the movement publishing the hips back not bending over most guys first start out especially if they're not real athletically gifted the way that they have in RDL interpret in their head is to bend over and throw their torso for rather than push their ass back and so they have be taught that the motion of an RDL is not to throw the torso forward it's to push the ass back so you can teach them that while holding us back in extensions and sometimes doing it in reverse order like that clicks a little bit better for me because they they just have to stay can get it set at the time now all they have to do is just not let it go and then you just kind of kind of watch the guy and if you can see exactly where in the movement he's starting to lose it and sometimes it's it's pretty close to the bottom so it might be one to three inches off of the floor or it really starts to lose that back extension and so what you might do temporarily is have the guy do all his deadlifts off like a 1/2 to 3 inch block so just kind of where he where if he at the lower limb of the movement if he can't hold us back in extension at the very bottom just elevate the bar up a little bit I mean you got to be patient with this kind of stuff you know build them some typically as guys get longer to the they're there that kind of proprioceptive awareness and their their ability sabar get better so you may have to just have him dead lift off like say two inch blocks for a while and a lot of guys can set their back better if the bar is elevated for them just a little bit so now don't get I don't mean the lifts are standing on a two inch block I mean the bar elevated on like two inch blocks or on really low pins out of the rack but have them do something like that and and just build its base of strength on that over the course of a week and then try to take it down and see what happens you know if you started him on to which blocks do that for Meeks then lower it down to a one inch block one inch mat do that for a while and then you know a couple weeks later pull off and see if he can pull them all the way from the floor so that's way that a lot of times that top-down approach can can work pretty well so your instincts were probably right on that will you go more into the equipment part of the business I don't know what that means like selling equipment no grip work has been pretty easy to do in quarantine so any general thoughts on grip strength also with a four-day chocolate would you recommend and coping it into the upper body days or as their own mini where else I actually do the if I do grip training for an athlete whether it's like on an upper low or program I typically drip tray on the lower body days because that's when we deadlift so I don't like typically the way I arrange things I have guys do their upper body workout like if we're trying to four days a week I have them do upper body Monday and Thursday and then lower body Tuesday and Friday so I don't like to do I don't like to do grip work the day before we deadlift so the grip work would actually be on the lower body days when they're when they're doing their dead lifting exercises so so grip work I had to do I never struggled with grip until I tore my bicep a couple and after I started got a heavier train you know I started building my strength back up and of course it started with just building up the strength in the bicep and the you know the arm overall and the shoulders and that sort of thing but as I got kind of basically healed up and regained my muscle mass the the biggest limitation for me strength-wise was actually my grip strength in the arm that I had operated on and actually it's still that way I'm about two years away from surgery and I still haven't gotten a hundred percent of my grip strength back in that hand so I'm not sure it may come back but but I did quite a bit of grip work there in order to build that back up and so I did I focused on two exercises and I stole these from galata you guys know who Josh brian is he does the whole jailhouse strong thing and all that he's a he's a buddy of mine and I talked with him about you know grip training because then he's big into grip training trains a lot of strongmen and stuff like that and so the two exercises he recommended to me that I felt really helped one was plate pinches and the way that he had me do him was I didn't start with like two heavy plates holding him together and we see if you guys can see I didn't start with two heavy plates holding them together with all my fingers and thumbs I started with like two and a half's and fives and I was I was surprised how hard it was it was really really really hard and again this was right after surgery it's probably artificially weak but basically what I would do is take like a couple of five-pound plates and you got to put them together so that the you're holding on to the smooth side of the plates and you're not cheating by holding on to like you know the lip or whatever but I would hold like two five pound plates together for like 30 seconds with my forefinger and my thumb and then I would rest for a little bit and I would take him and I would hold him for 30 seconds with my middle finger and my thumb and then I would do it with my ring finger and my thumb and then my pinky and my thumb and I would do like 30 seconds on like on each finger like that and then I went through the whole hand again so instead of doing like my entire you know fist trying to hold on to something I did one finger at a time like that and that was really really really hard but it worked really really really fast to build my grip strength back up and you could feel all Vipers and muscles in your hands that you didn't even realize that you had were really really singing to me while I was doing this so that worked really really well the other thing that I did was I did suitcase deadlift one side of the body so that means you're gonna you load up the bar and then you're gonna deadlift it instead of facing the bar you're you're the bar is gonna be next to you on the ground so you're gonna reach down and grab the bar right in the middle of it with just one hand and I was doing sets of three to five reps on that just on one hand and that's that's unbelievably hard you know I think the first time I put it on there I put like 135 on and that was too heavy the first time that I did it and so I had to I think I started out I had to lower down to like 95 or something like that but that that challenges you in a lot of different directions to hold onto the bar like that so I was doing the suitcase lifts on both sides and then as I got stronger on those what I noticed not only was my grip strength improving a hell of a lot but it's a hell of a good exercise on the obliques so I think for like heavy squatting and dead lifting you know oblique strength is a is a good thing to train and that was a really good exercise that I would end I said twice a week and I just linearly progress them you know I kind of phased out of them but those two things really really helped my grip strength intermediate for two aces method how long should the work out to be how many accessory movements a day accumulated junk volume from too many accessories should I do less or more you know I'd say don't like training sessions to be more than about an hour and a half if we can get in and out in 60 to 90 minutes I feel like that's optimal I really don't like when I see guys that are you know emailing me saying there they had a volume David glass long two and a half hours long that's that's really not a sustainable way to train I really don't like that I like to arrange things you can get things done in about 90 minutes I feel like if you're not getting things done in that period of time you probably there's probably time to be saved there it's not necessarily that you need to do less work but you just need to be more efficient and how you go about your training you need to go get through your warm-ups faster not do less warm-ups just get through them faster a lot of guys take way too long between their warm-ups and then they way too long between their between their sets between their work sets so try to save yourself time on rest time especially you can save a lot of time you're gonna put your phone away you know if you're a guy that's joking around on your phone and stuff like that between warm-up sets and all that you haven't you don't realize how much time that wastes so you know to put your phone away and get really really focused you know blow through your warm-up sets you know get to your work sets and then you know rest so that you can complete your work but make you know keep a timer going and there's no no reason for you to be standing around for 15 minutes between sets and I think you know taking two and three hour workout those for you guys that's it's unnecessary so rest time is where you can really save a lot of time in terms of like a four day Texas method so typically the way I like to arrange that is I like on a four day split I like to do the intense and I start with an intensity lift so that would be like you know a bench intensity and then press volume and then squat intensity and deadlift volume I like to arrange it like that rather than trying to do all your volume on one day and all your tea on an earth that's a better way to kind of spread the stress out evenly over the course so when when you're doing that you know for the lower body you probably need a lot less accessory movements as compared to the upper body just because squats deadlifts are tend to be so thorough and how well they you know and how and how well they train the lower body so and especially if you find yourself out of shape and not to get through your workouts very fast the perfect thing to do on your lower body days is is implement some prowler or sled condition think so the squat deadlift and then go push the sled or drag the sled and you need to just get yourself in better shape and in better physical condition so that you can train it a little bit better pace and not drag the workouts on forever and you know the sled dragging the sled pushing Prowler pushing not only is an awesome conditioning tool but it also act acts as a very good hypertrophy stimulus for the for the leg about being killer on your lower body like a lot of some lower body assistance movements are if you do unilateral work or machine based work and all that kind of stuff the problem with a lot of that stuff is manikin it can really ramp up the mess for a lot of people when you combine it with all the squats and deadlifts and it's just very difficult to recover from whereas I find that the sled and the Prowler in addition to the squats and deadlifts can actually make the recovery a little bit easier so that's a perfect time to throw that stuff in as far as the other movements I actually do a lot of times I do ends and pull-ups on the squad and the deadlift day it's a back exercise obviously it's an upper body movement but it can kind of fit well in that pattern of like a squat deadlift and then do your Chin's or pull-ups you're working your back a lot when you deadlift anyway so it's fine to throw those in there and then typically because the upper body this the press and the bench may need more assistance work things like dip or variations like we talked about the bench you know dumbbell that I seen dumbbell incline pressing you know dedicated tricep worth lying tricep engines you know stuff like that you're typically at some point you're going to need that stuff to keep progressing on your band your press you're going to need a little bit of assistance works so happen as I do kind of the bench and the press assistant work on those days and then I might have got to lurch ins pull-ups rows that sort of thing on their squad and their deadlift day what is the a the oldest client that you are training my oldest client is 88 years old so but I've had them in the gym in their 90's so but yeah the oldest current client is 88 and I've got a couple that are in there I've got a few that are in their early 80s I've got a ton that are in their 70s a lot in their 60s so yeah and actually uh miss Jean who's 88 she started with me when she was 80 so she's been training with me for eight years so super proud of her if you were 45 years old body weight 250 and had been basically squatting and dead lifting four sets of five for the last five years what would your conditioning look letting out what exercises how often would you build up to them I've been doing short sprints and my joints hurts two weeks and yeah sprint at 45 especially if they're full speed sprints it's probably not the right place to start you know full speed spreads for guys that are you know 35 40 and beyond are not a good idea I don't think I think from a conditioning standpoint you can get so I don't know what your if you're calling Sprint's if you're actually meaning like full speed like you're running a 40 in high school I would I do not recommend that I think the the risk is high for you know the very least pulled hamstrings and things like that but also you know guys blown out Achilles tendon stuff like that I think from a conditioning standpoint you can get the exact same benefit from running your Sprint's at 70 or 80 percent of what would be your top speed so whether that's on the track or going to a field or something like that and going 50 to 100 yards you know running a quote a sprint but definitely not all out max effort type of spreads you know so you can stuff like that they do they do take a toll even the even the court you know half speed or quarter speeds first that's a big adjustment to the tissue it's totally different than lifting weights or impact your you know at 45 and you're 250 so you're heavier you know you're not your joints connective tissue and the muscles are not adapted to that so it doesn't surprise me that the recovery is taking longer you know you always just think that you're trying to add you always start easier and with a low volume so if you overdo just like with weights if you overdo the intensity or the volume right out of the gate it's going to be hard to recover from that so probably what the spreads probably overdoing the intensity a little bit you know there's nothing wrong with you know what's starting with you know walking if you really really inactive for a while you know even just starting you know 30-minute walking a day for a couple couple days a week if nothing else just to condition your feet and your ankles and your knees and stuff like that where guys tend to have problems when they start doing a lot of conditioning just condition yourself to carry you know your weight for longer periods of time like that and then start to increase the speed that you're doing I really am a fan of what distance sprints for conditioning especially for younger guys when I used to work with MMA guys and judo guys and stuff like that where we would have had to get him in really really high levels of conditioning for for their for their fights that was that was one of my go-to as was going to the track and doing like you know 200 meters France 400 meters France now with the younger group I would have them go a little bit you know a little bit harder than a guy that's 45 and 250 but that's a hell of a way to get in shape this distance Prince there's there to me there's nothing harder than 400 or repeats I mean you think we can shape until you start running 400 meter repeats on an incomplete rest so that is a good way to get in shape but also you know I'd say you know in your situation you know build up to that I really I love sled dragging I think sled dragging is a great way to get introduced to a little bit harder for more conditioning you start with just some walking and then you find a place to drag a sled you know and just going even 20 to 40 minutes start with a lightweight just kind of going back and forth whether it's in a parking lot or whatever and then there's lots of different ways you can do it you can work with heavy Road those shorter distances with longer rest periods you can do lighter weights but relatively on inso sled dragging is great next step up from there is doing stuff like like pushing the Prowler is basically the neck from there pushing as hard if you guys have never worked with a sled pushing a Prowler as far harder than dragging the sled so working with working with the prowl or you know is that kind of the next thing for me and you know then maybe working up into doing those Sprint's at the track if you're really looking to get in shape but for most people who are trying to get in shape just kind of in a general sense and to help them you know get through their workouts better that sort of things I think sled dragging is really really under it's really easy to recover from too even if the you if the individual workout is hard the sled dragging is really easy to recover from comparatively to a lot of the other protocols you can do and again and also it builds up leg mats of you if you're progressive with it and the amount that you do and the weight that you do it's a good hypertrophy stimulus as what as well as a conditioning stimulus so I would definitely look into maybe some sled dragging and then I mean there's other stuff you can do too I mean I know people aversion to sleds and prowlers and that sometimes it's just the logistical challenge of I don't have a plate I don't have a sled I don't have a prowler even if I did not have a place to push one you know if you're blessed with a gym with a big turf field or something you know that that's a different story but a lot of us don't have that type of access so like I've got a parking lot a parking lot in the gym where my gym is at that hardly anybody uses so when we the only downside here as being in Texas it's a lot of times it 105 degrees outside and I don't want to kill my clients but when the weather is ok we do all that stuff out back we do a lot of sleds and prowlers and stuff but if you don't have access to that you know the the rower is good airdyne bikes things like that are good you can look because you can do them you can do hit intervals you can also just do steady-state 20 30 40 minutes at a time that sort of thing and it's pretty low impact doesn't beat up your joints and your lower back and everything like running we'll have you worked with the soccer players with knee issues yeah I'm wondering what's your experience in working with them to increase increase leg and hip strength to resolve any issues I mean getting stronger typically helps you know I don't do anything special for them it's just in them how to squat correctly you know building up strings you know in a lot of ways but I mean that's that's really it there's no there's no I don't do things special with soccer players or females that I wouldn't do with anybody else that that you know has a has an issue the first step is to teach them the proper mechanics and then give them progressively stronger on it and you you know usually if it doesn't alleviate it completely it usually helps let's see any advice on squat grip in respect to avoiding shoulder elbow bicep tendonitis affects bench and press performance yeah it's a really common problem in low bar squatting so there's a lot of other stuff here I'm not going to read but okay so basically with the squat grip and that you know whether an elbow bicep that sort of thing there's it can come from a couple of different places one is to make sure that when that you don't have the bar too low a lot of guys will get the bar too low and what happens is they wind up getting a lot of the bar bands rather than distribute it on their back so a bar too low you know there's a natural shelf on the on your back when you've got your shoulder blade attack and you get the bar on there especially if you've got some meat on the back there's a natural shelf for that bar will sit and if you get the bar down too low it's below that shelf and it will have a tendency to want to slide down your back and so there's two things that guys do to accommodate for that both of which are wrong is one is too low and there and it's feel feeling like it's going to roll down their back they either they either distribute the weight in so they're actually it's not all on their back they're holding a lot of the weight in their hands and so that will allot of times manifest itself in shoulder issues because you can kind of imagine that cranking back a little bit more on your shoulder you know over the course of several heavy to five that's that's a lot of torque on the shoulders that you that you don't want so or what they do is they go over way too much because in order to get that bar to keep it over the mid-foot when it's too low they'll have to bend over way too much so both of those things are not are not preferred so you want to make sure one that the bar is not both so we want a low bar squat but people often don't don't recognize that the difference between a high bar squad and a low bar squad is not how much you know it's it's it's not it's not a huge gap on the back it's it's it's only a matter of a couple but you have to remember that that couple inches that are moving up or down is relative to the middle of the foot which is a very small point so two or three inches one way or the other is actually you know look like that much on the back but relative to that small point of your foot where your balance point is that it's a pretty big increase so make sure that that is there the other thing I see guys do this all the time when they come into the gym perform checks is they have a tendency to want to set their hands on the bar first so they think that okay this is the correct squat the the correct grip width is right here and so they take a grip on the bar and then they try to go underneath and get under that their hands already in place and it's too tight they can't get it there so get your hands out there if it's hard to get in position get your hands in further further then get underneath the bar get the bar that where it needs to be on your back and then get the hands in as tight as you can without being severely uncomfortable the the the primary so when we look at bar placement and squat and and the the width of a squat grip bar Berkman is far and away more important than the width of your hands it's it's more important to have the bar in the right spot than it is to have your hands at some kind of arbitrary distance so we want to have the hands in tight because it helps us keep the shoulder blades retracted but if you can keep the shoulder blades retracted and the bar is in the right spot on your back you can have your hands out a little bit more and that'll alleviate some of that elbow and bicep pain you don't have to keep your hands in as tight as they absolutely can be because they're your elbows your forearms they're under a lot of pressure when you're holding it like that and that that over time if you're doing a lot of squat frequency is probably what's contributing to that inflammation so just loosen your grip up a little bit by letting it slide out a little bit without losing up your upper back okay so when we when we widen the grip out we keep our upper back tight we don't widen the grip and and at the same time relax our upper back we don't want to be squatting with a loose upper back want to have our upper back nice nice and tied up under the bar so if you can do that and you keep the bar bought you can afford to widen your hands out a little bit and that should give you some relief the other thing you can do as far as affecting your youth to reorganize your training temporarily to not school not bench right after you squat you can your bench first if you want to but then go squat so you can you can certainly do that it's nothing necessarily magical about squatting first you could bench first and then go squat or you might have to organize it more in terms of like a phrase split where you say you bench on Monday and thirds in to your squads day and Friday might cut your frequency down under squats a little bit but you might need the reduced frequency right now to let some of that inflammation dissipate and that void the problem of if your elbows get inflamed from this collects at least you have a day off afterwards to let them kind of heal up rather than going right into the bench press my 13 year old daughter complains that her knees hurt while squatting and bends her with her torso almost horizontal in order to reach depth even with only bodyweight do you have any suggestions to correct this I'm trying to get our form corrected befool yeah actually one you got to remember a 13 year old over something there in there 20 is different from one 13 year old did that so they're not all the same and the more you know the more hormonal Ishii is like a child the they tend to be less mechanically proficient so your training really really young kids you know I've got young kids my daughter is old son is 10 and I would them in the gym a little bit but their form is not really repeatable I mean you can they you can get them into the right you can get them to do the right stuff but they're gonna have their but they're really really pliable really hyper mobile especially girls and they're just they're you know they're like it's like training Gumby they just they're not rigid enough to really hold their mechanics together that well so there's some expected kind of you know play in the forum like that but if it's really really bit certainly with a young that if you're doing something that hurts stop because the worst thing you can do is burn them out on train and get them to live not like it and if if if something's not I mean it may be may be your fault as a coach or whatever the circumstances may be if a kid at 13 years old it's already started to experience pain due to their training then change your approach do something different or change you know to give her a break or whatever because the worst thing you can do is take a 13 14 15 year old kid and train them like they're an 18 year old kid and burn him out on it so that the buddies 15 or 16 she hates it and doesn't want anything to do so if you don't make it fun for them if it's not enjoyable you know and if they dread it if that sort of thing if you're gonna you're gonna ruin them early so you got to kind of keep that in mind is keep in mind her age but in turf you know I'd have to look at you know in terms of what's going on it's hard to diagnose form issues in this format but kind of the same thing where I was talking about earlier about changing the position where you start from so I've got a really hard a hard time deadlifting getting set up at the bottom change your approach to have any him get set up at the top and then teach it the opposite way is he instead of teaching from the bottom up teach it from the top down do the same thing on the squat and use a box squat so if they can't feel if she can't get the bottom position of a squat right starter on the box at the bottom so her her rep begins while she's seated on the box and then you put her feet in the right position you put her knees in the right position you angle her torso at the right position you get her back set and then you tell her this is the correct bottom position of a squat now stand up and have her stand up and then have a return to that same seated box position and pause down there and do everything real slow with no weight and just have her do lock squats and that having that that cue down there of a place to sit so she doesn't go too deep and it just kind of it just kind of it normalizes the form a little bit better to have a have a box there once she gets a hang of the box squat you know and maybe go to a pair of dumbbells you know and have her hold the dumbbells on her shoulders at first and then just to get her a little bit of resistance and then have her do that you know and if she can do that well you know without bending over too much and that sort of thing then you know progress her to a light bar you know and probably for her age I mean a thirteen-year-old girl is probably not going to start with a 45-pound bar unless she's a more advanced athlete but you need to have a lighter training bar you know something like a you know like a 15 pound training bar or something like that so the 15 pounders can be a little too light they don't get the weight doesn't give them enough feedback but still 25 30 might be the sweet spot so you need to definitely start it with something light and don't progress and wait until the lips got the form mastered and then just don't overdo it with the amount of reps that she does or days of the week and when you see that she's starting to lutely you know and it's not fun anymore than you know let her go come back to it another day when cycling from higher volume to lower volumes is the best to run things out until you stall or just a set amount of time no I don't like to I like to I like to change things up before we have hard stalls it just it from a kind of a fatigue management standard you know you don't I don't like to wait until the we all off until I make a change on something you know I don't I don't like to keep going until a guy starts missing a bunch of reps and things like that you make changes so because it's hard to recover from that and then the problem is whatever you whatever changes you make in the next phase of training whether it's just a an adjustment to the current program you're on or a kind of a wholesale switch to something new if you go into that with an absolute ton of fatigue it screws up the initiation of the new program so you don't you want to keep the there's no reason to go so you have missed weights and all that kind of thing I mean missed weights are going into them from time to time but I wouldn't make that you're you know we're gonna go until we start mates and then we make changes because at that point you know the wheels have already started to kind of fall off in terms of that sort of thing so that's something that's way easier for me to manage in the gym than it is with you know say like working the line clients just because you're there with them all the time you can see work out to work out what's happening you're like okay things are certainly hard fatigue starting to build up let's go ahead and make you know I can see within the next workout or to regard having some maybe some performance regression so we're gonna go ahead and make some changes now whatever those are you know before we before the wheels come off it's a little bit harder to do if you're programming for your son or more inexperienced you know or if you're programming for somebody online where you know so much in their videos and that sort of thing but online programming and in-person programming and in-person coach as someone that does a lot of both they are not the same thing at all and you it's much more to manage these things in an online environment and when you're with somebody in the gym all the time so you've went in doubt I usually tell people you don't you're usually not wrong to be on the conservative side you know if a lot of times that one extra workouts not going to you but it might break you so just kind of in the more advanced you get I think the more true that is because the more fatigue you're capable of jigging and the longer it takes to recover from a hard bout of overtraining I don't just mean fatigue my workout but serious overtraining which is the results repeated you know - well it's over and over and over again without a break one that you once you kind of push into that overtraining status it's it's hard to recover from and the the whatever gains you get are generally not worth the cost of lost training time I'm dead lifting six sets of five at 60% times per week increasing my weight every week do you think my 1rm deadlift will go up through this with no squatting high-volume Dethlefs I know this is against common wisdom might that seems like seems like an inefficient approach to me so it seems like a lot you can try and see you know how long you know it's not six sets of five three times a week is not sustainable so however long you're planning on doing this Florine all you can do is test it at the end and see what happens stuff like that works you know super high volumes for short periods of time sometimes works and then guys go back to it and it's like you know 10 20 years ago you know kind of with all the strength training stuff first kind of let loose on the internet all you guys are too young to remember this but out of these like old Russian powerlifting programs and stuff where everywhere and they work like super high-volume super high frequency squat and deadlift stuff and there's a million of them I'm sure they arrived around somewhere I don't know I don't use them but you know guys would do those and so you would have you would have different results some people would use them and they you know like a lot of people they would they would not 60% isn't that much so you know it's not really to me that's it's not much of a strength stimulus but it's your bad guys that got these like really you know you know really profound training effects from these super high-volume programs and they would get it once and then they would try to go back on it again and it didn't work like they would hit a wall that second time or they would just hit the wall the first time they get about halfway through a protocol like that and it wouldn't work so again it was like I was going back and talking about earlier you know in this broadcast where if you pick an approach that's really really far on one end of the room there's a chance that you get a really really profound training effect from it but there's also a chance that you you hit a brick wall at six sets of five at 60% to me I don't that seemed that seems real conservative on the weight side of things it seems like a lot potentially not a lot of return I think you could update it a little bit and bring down I'm I'm biased towards being more efficient with the training so that's you again it seems like a lot of a lot of work for potentially maybe not a lot of progress good question what is the first thing you look for when analyzing the past program of a brand new client under your supervision and determine and need a change well first thing I ask is you know what are you doing right now what is the last six months or so look like I don't need a lot of guys will send me like the past ten years it's like no I would Steve like the past six months or so and I'll look at what have you been doing the last six months and it's jerking and if it's not working at all or if they're regressing or having a lot of recovery problems then I'll look at that it kind of goes back to where I was just say and I'll see are they operating at one in a spectrum or the other and if so it usually could obvious what the problem is so you've been the guy and says hey I've been training this I've been doing this program for six months and you know I'm really really burned out I'll hired all the time I've swore all the time I'm my weights are not going up and I look at the approach and I see he's squatting four days a week he's benching four days a week he's dead lifting three days a week he's got all this accessory and GP work and all this stuff and I go you're you're overtraining so the fix for that is easy we're gonna I'm gonna bring the volume way down probably keep the intensity down for a little bit of time till he gets recovered but then we're gonna change to more of an intensity an intensity based approach with a more middle of the road type of volume and obviously this the volume approach wasn't working or he was doing it too long without a break so high-volume can work but you have to factor in d loads in there and a lot of guys don't so they just run with this never-ending climbing volume and you can't do that high volume only works when it's done cyclically so high volume can work but it's still buy them in cycles where there's periods of where you step back d load operate at a lower volume building that up over time to a higher volume that's so you have to that's the thing with higher volume is you have to understand how to cycle it appropriately you can't just stay with higher volume and perpetuity it doesn't work so you'll burn out so I'll look at it so that in a case like that it's really really easy we just do the opposite of what he's been doing you know I may look and see you know there are is there a lot of excess we cloud as you've been doing a lot of accessory type work or whatever we make some of that stuff so we can get back to the basic so just get back to see if we can make progress with you know of that minimal effective dose type concept get more efficient with our training and then re-add stuff later on as we need it but sometimes a guy gets to do it so much stuff it's it's it's very clouded and murky and hard to see what's working what's not what's just junk what's it's effective so you've got to kind of pull it all out and start over the other end of the spectrum might be I get a guy that you know he's been trained in any ideas program you know it's really really low volume low frequency even lifting twice a week he's only doing like one or two work sets or exercise and says well you know I've been doing this for six months I really haven't made any progress it's pretty obvious we're not gonna take his volume down further because he's already doing minimal volumes in frequency so we say all right you need more work you're you're not making enough you're not do enough to disrupt you know kind of that that homeostasis that we talked about we're not you're not doing an ork so we're gonna need to add some more in we need more volume more frequent with the sort of thing with adjust intensity accordingly we're gonna get them going on an approach that's adding more work in sometimes it's just something different so it's it's nice that usually it is a case of a little less and a little more so you either need to take some stuff out or put some more in but sometimes also just if you look at a guy you know he's just been doing sets of five like we had a guy earlier one of the questions was I've been that's a five for like five years well maybe you know if you're stagnant it might be a little bit you know sets of five on the big four you know that's that's perfect for you know a novice it's perfect for an early intermediate but once you've been training for a while you know different rep ranges different exercises you know there's all lots of different calls and your body will need something a little bit different in order to keep adapting so it's not just changed for the sake of change it's not just throwing in variety because we do murder the the you know muscle confusion or whatever it's not necessarily that but there is there is reality the fact that the body will get used to the same stimulus thrown at it over and over and over over again so there's changes in volume and intensity frequency and then there's changes in stimulus so it might be you know exposing the guy to some new exercises and new rep ranges and things like that intermedia guys who let me look at the time real quick okay we're at about an hour nineteen I'm gonna go for hour and a half so I'm gonna go for about two I'll answer as many as I can there for intermediate guys getting back I could soon eight plus we lay off I'm wondering how lping back up and transition to intermediate programming should go I'm gonna actually I haven't done it yet rip asked me a couple weeks ago to right after this I'm gonna write an article on that and it's gonna go up on the starting strength website i reposted on my blog - but I'm gonna put it on the it'll it'll go up lighting strength here at some point I need to get to it similar question to above can you affect to get your pre layoff Texas method weights using LP maybe we've had a couple of cases of guys that have done that before where they ran a novelty and kind of ran its course they go to intermediate level programming for a while they experience a long layoff for whatever reason and then they get back into training after a few months and they just restart on novice linear progression again and they wind up having this amazing run of progress takes them far and away past anything they've ever that they've ever done before sometimes that happens just with that kind of resets is Rhys instinct from getting away from the weight that common I mean that happens in advanced lifters and everything to for not just using the novice program but we're after a really long period of deconditioning you know and then getting back into it the the stimulus sometimes very profound and you can definitely slingshot back up past weights where you had been out before as you kind of maybe constantly dealing with this underlying fatigue underlying kind of overreaching that's kind of always present when you're very consistent with your training so I typically don't recommend an approach where you take months out of the gym you know on a consistent basis but sometimes you know time to time we see that with the guys you know I experienced that with myself when I was out for I took a long layoff after I had my three just because of the surgery but just a lot of other stuff too just being burnt out on the gym and that sort of thing we had a period there many months right I didn't train at all and I got back into it of course I was weak as hell when I started but it depended me long to get back up to my old PRS okay in practical programming when discussing the dynamic effort method I believe you see five seventy and seventy five percent as the same percentages for dynamic effort without existence what percentages would you start with when using accommodating resistance do you calculate the percentage based off of the top-end weight they are also how much of the way it should be accommodating resistance versus straight weight asking for raw lifters yeah so I do like for dynamic effort work when I first start somebody with it and we always just use straight weights and but over time the use of bands I think can be effective for raw lifters I only the light band tension I don't think there's any reason for a raw lifter to overload a squat or a bench or a deadlift but certainly a squad in a bench I don't feel like there's really a need to overload that lift by using a ton of heavy band tension with a really light bar weight just because the lifters are going to be their weakest out of the bottom of the so that the bottom of the squat it's not my gear so for a lot of you guys that that don't know about all the really really heavy band work is designed for guys that were competing it's that's a big deal anymore but it was in the 90s early 2000s most powerlifting was done in you know it was done in squat suits and bit shirts which do a lot of the work for the lifter at the bottom of it so the bench shirt gives you a lot of rebound out of the bottom and a squat suit gives you a lot of rebound out of them so that the the work really really started for the lifter at the top so he had to have a lot of wild strength to be able to hit those huge numbers so they started training with really really heavy band tensions to mimic what would be happening in the suits and the shirts for a row lifter there's really no point in doing that there's really no point in in overloading the top of it to that degree but a light band tension can be really good for helping with speed and just for a different effect of altering the load so you the light band tension would be like a like a mini band or a monster mini band nothing on what who you buy from and and typically when you do that you're going to lower your percentages down to around like 50 to 60 percent so you would that means 50 to 60 percent of your one rep max on the bar and so if you're a 500-pound squatter start with like 250 pounds of bar weight and then add the light the light minions or monster mini bands to that and then with like with everything with the dynamic effort sets you're using bar speed as your gauge so if you can move so the percentages are a guideline but they're not on solute so you put the weight on your back you squat it for a double or triple if you've got decent speed art then you're probably in the neighborhood of being right the weight turns into a slow grind to heavy so the the point of this the point of the dynamic effort method is to accumulate a metric on a volume without a drop in bar speed and so that there's there's there's less fatigue from a whole lot of volume so it's a little bit different approach of accumulating volume for for a more advanced guy and so you're going to use that bar speed on there so if you put 50 50 percent on plus light bands and you squat it fast but it doesn't feel like efforts probably put a little bit more weight on so there's a there's kind of that middle ground there where you should have no trouble moving the bar fast provided that you're maximally trying to move past so if you're moving at that with a half-assed effort it's too light okay but if you're putting everything you have into it and it's moving slow it's probably too heavy so you want to be able to kind of like bill star used to say you want to be able to make the plates rattle at the top okay that's a but you have you want to have to work in order to make that happen okay hey I can make 135 rattle at the top without having to squat it very hard okay but you put on 350 405 you get a heavier weight on there still make the plates rattle but you have to try to make it rather okay so that's weight with dynamic effort for it to work the bands can be useful and keeping from slowing down at the top so that you're accelerating all the way through the lift I also think that there's some muscle building effects the band's just from the overloaded eccentric the way I teach dynamic effort is I don't do the whole rep fast I do a controlled eccentric with a pause and a super fast and explosive concentric so and I think that tempo is really really good for lifters to build muscle man I think that the bands actually help to build muscle mass and a more advanced lifter because I think the band's added to that eccentric can put on actually really really stressful to the muscles in a good way so so that's you know 60 65 to 75 percent is a pretty good ballpark I've run the conjugate program in my online coaching Club and I waive the weights most coaches do a three-week wave so we're like like 65 70 75 I actually do a five week wave I start at 60 and I go all the way to 80 so we go 60 65 70 75 80 and it's a cycle back over at 60 the reason being is I just like to expose the guys to a little bit of work on both ends I like it 60% the weights are moving really fast so they're getting a true you know a true dynamic you know type of explosive effort plus it kind of D loads the weight a little bit from their homework allows a little bit of recovery to happen and then by the fifth week though we're pushing like 10 doubles or 10 triples at 80% and that actually is some work so the guys have to they have to really you know they have to really work to move that and that's without that 60 to 80 percent is usually without bands I told if they want to add bands they can put it on the 60 and 65 percent but it's 70 75 and 80 percent we're not using bands and all that that's just straight way to putting bands on 80 percent it's not going to be speed work I can tell you that and so that's that's the way that we will typically that and so they get they get some closure to both they get them really heavy you know they're 12 doubles at 80 percent which is pretty tough to do on short rest period too so you're you're moving these weights not enough state of full recovery and then the next week we cycle back to 60% so it allows them to offload a little bit and that just gives them some exposure to volume work kind of it all ends of the spectrum any thoughts about mixed approaches for intermediate trainees currently my squat and press seemed to respond best to a volume and intensity approach and my bench and deadlift more of a heavy light approach yeah it's fine use whatever you don't have to there's absolutely no rule that says that you have to have lift programmed exactly the same way so some lifts like a lot of that we'll find out that their bench requires a lot more volume and frequency than say their deadlift so there's there's a you also have to look to at how one lifts effects there so when you look at say programming deadlift volume and deadlift frequency you can't judge that independently of squat volume and squat frequency because there's so much overlap there if you're doing with a shitload of squats you know per week if your squat volume is very high or your intensity is high and you've got a lot of very stressful squat programming going on that's gonna affect your deadlift programming so you might have to bring the deadlift down a little bit and so you have to look at the way that these things affect each other but yeah there's there's absolutely no reason why you have to get guys a lot of times and I'm guilty of this too is you look at a program on paper and we like everything to look very symmetrical and very even and very universal and we like to have you know but it often doesn't work like that I mean it may be that the press and the left require two completely different approaches you know and the squad and the bench require two completely different approach I mean there may be some similarities between lifters but you know some guys they have to train the press a lot harder with a lot of all you man a lot of intensity you know where we have guys doing you know five sets of five you know on the press one day of the week then a light set in the middle and then like 10 singles you know I'm Friday for their press where that's probably that's not going to work for the deadlift or the squat you know that might be way overkill on those types of movements because you're using more muscle mass you're using heavier weight it's more stressful the squat and the deadlift overlap much more than say the press and the bench overlap you know you've got Teague that builds up in a low back you have to monitor so just you have to pay it the most valuable tool that you have in your programming toolkit is your own feedback okay your own feedback to respond to different training approaches is the most valuable piece of information you have the most value piece of information is not practical programming it's not blog articles it's not what any coach or lifter has a most valuable tool that you have is your own experience under the bar so you're in one matters to you okay it doesn't matter - we always talk about well in one it doesn't matter it does matter it matters to you okay you know it doesn't necessarily matter on applying your program the clients that you train so the way that I train on how I train all my clients although I may learn some things from training myself that I apply to my clients just because something worked for me it's ludicrous to think that that approach is going to work for all the clients that walk through my doors because this this approach works for this coach hates this or this coach advocates that or I read this in this article you know that's all good stuff to kind of put in there but you have to filter it out again they're getting experience so if you know hey I can't volume and intensity in the same week on this lift man I hit a brick wall in two or three weeks that's goal that's golden information that you've got to hang on to and know how to program that way okay and the same thing for dog won't be quiet so the same thing you know with your other lifts it's if you do head better with heavy light you know you can only do I can do one stressful you know session per week on this lift and the other day I just got to kind of keep it easy with active recovery and that's good you know with that know regardless of what anyone says okay I'm gonna answer one more question well it looks like we're about out of questions or I scroll them also okay so I'm gonna call a day on the QA so I appreciate all you guys that tuned in hope it whistle I'm gonna shamelessly plug my own stuff now so if you want to go to my website it's Andy Baker calm and basically all my services and products are there so got programming templates there to sign up for one-on-one coaching you can go there if you want to join my lower cost option for online coaching join the Baker barbell club online so if you have a question feel free to help me if you're not sure like what product or service is right for you just email me it's kingwood strength at gmail.com be happy to answer your questions and then head over to my instagram at baker barbell and give me a follow there and if you want to look at some of the t-shirts I just had printed up you can take a look there as well boom guys thank you very much talk to you soon