I grew up, powerlifting was one of the things I did on the side. It actually wasn't a sport. I mean, I boxing was my life, but I became hooked on being in the gym. And the gym I belonged to was a dungeon. It was an old man dungeon, two stories underground with no windows. And I didn't realize how lucky I was at the time, but this happened to be like the power training, you the powerlifting epicenter, right? So, you basically just had a bunch of middle-aged men who were machines. Like, you know, these are even even the guys that weighed like, you know, everybody could bench press two times their body weight, squat three times their body weight, deadlift four times their body weight. So that's what I grew up doing. I was like, we bench, we squat, we deadlift, and we do it really, really heavy. And not surprisingly, over time, like I started to get injured, right? I injured my back by the time I was in medical school. and um kind of decided like I I don't know if this is worth the risk anymore. Like I don't I don't really see that I need to have four plates on my back squatting anymore and almost through necessity had to discover single leg training. So, I want you to say more about that experience and help somebody because I have patients who really can't believe that you can achieve optimal lower body hypertrophy without a barbell on your back or without picking a barbell up off the floor. Yeah. Which is amazing. I same background as you. I got into competitive powerlifting in college just because I was no longer an athlete and I was looking for an outlet and it was like, okay, I'm good at lifting weights. So started competing in powerlifting. Started hurting myself, back problem, shoulder surgery and athletic training background, get to college as a strength coach, start to see the same things. I've got athletes with back problems. Everybody's back problem seems to come down to one thing, back squatting. Every kid, cuz we weren't we there weren't deadlift, we were the old school like squat, bench, power clean because that was the football mentality at that time. But the people with back pain had it always related right back to back squat. We started to look at that and think, okay, if we're doing something that we know is hurting 20% of our population, should we continue to do that? For a while, we had to because the football coaches mandated it. But when I got to the point where I was kind of fully in control, I said, "We're not going to do this anymore." And then we went the unilateral route. Sorry. When you say football coaches, are you saying even at the level of the NFL? uh at at every level the football coaches, you know, they want to know how many guys can bench press 400 lb and how many guys can squat 500 lb and how many guys can, you know, they're it's it's still a very old school mentality. It's getting better. NFL level is getting much better because is the bench still uh in the combine for anyone but a quarterback? Yeah, everybody's still benching and still benching 225 as a strength test. They do an endurance test for strength. We could talk about the the foolishness of the combine, too, but that's another The same combine that you helped develop. The same combine that I helped 10 people for. Yes. It is not. I always tell people it's like getting in copy of the SAT and all you got to do is cheat. You just got to practice the event, practice the questions, you know the test. You know the answers, practice, you'll get good at it. We we developed that thought process. But so we started going just down this sort of unilateral rabbit hole and then we but then you start getting into the biggest thing that people have to understand is when you get into the bilateral deficit research, you're stronger on one leg. You have more strength capability on one leg than you do on two because your body there's and there's research. It's so interesting. Sorry to interrupt you, Mike. It's so interesting how difficult it is to appreciate that when you're not doing unilateral exercises and people don't try it. And then it's very dogma oriented because we we've all grown up around kind of the squat poems and all these things about, you know, king of all lifts and all this that people spout. And I'm always kind of spouting the anti of that. But the reality is we started seeing when we first started testing is what happened was one of my assistants this guy Jeff Oliver who's been at Holy Cross for 25 years said to me if we could test you onelegged strength would you stop squatting and I was like yes. So then we said okay let's try to figure out how we test. So we started making up these sort of halfass onelegg squat test you know doing rep maxes in different split squat variations and things but when we did it the results blew us away in terms of the difference between sides blew you away. Uh, no. The the the ability to be stronger than we were or as strong as we were bilaterally blew us away. So, we had guys the first year I did it with my hockey team 200 maybe six or seven somewhere in there. And everybody could split squat what they could front squat. Same amount. So, if I did a backsplit squat test, everybody that could backslit squat 300 lb was a 300lb front squatter. Everybody that could back split squat, you know, project project out to a 400 lb max was a 400 front squat. Right across the board, it was exactly dead even one leg to two legs. And then people would say that's cuz they're using their back leg. They were trying to come up with all these rationale for why it wasn't. But the numbers were just glaring, you know. Then we went to a split squat test and we had one kid who did uh did 240 lbs for 20 reps, which you know, if you bilateral it out, it's 480 for 20. He's a 200lb hockey player, 190 lb hockey player. They just the numbers started to smack us in the face a little bit and I started look and then you start looking at the bilateral like you look at the grip strength research bilateral deficit right hand plus left hand will be more than combined two hand you look at you know they've done it with leg extension they've done it with a bunch of different things and what they realize I think this is my own theory but we neurologically know that we are unilateral if I said to you try to dunk a basketball I'm going to guarantee your right hand I'm going to jump off one foot you're going to jump off your left foot you're going to hold the ball in your right hand everybody Everybody here is going to do it except 10% of us are lefty. So 10% of us are going to grab it in our left hand. But everybody knows if I say to you throw a baseball, I always say to somebody, if I say throw a baseball, everybody knows how to throw it. If I say throw two baseballs, somebody would think, I'm not really sure how I'm supposed to do this right now. We understand neurology and then we deny it when we start strength training because we want to deny it. And I think it's actually limiting. I think I've said to people I think I think I spent a lot of time probably making people less athletic at the higher levels. One of the things that we you you you think that that you did that in the past? In the past. Yeah. Because we had some of our really some of our super elite like NFL wide receiver type guys would be very resistant to really heavy back squats and deadlifts and things like that. And they would always they were like cats. They were like I don't I don't like it. I don't like it. It makes my back so I don't feel right. And what you realize is you were probably dampening their nervous system a little bit because the analogy I always use if you think of like the mountain, the guy from uh Game of Thrones, he was an Icelandic basketball player, decent mid-level Icelandic basketball player. When he became one of the world's strongest men, he was a worse basketball player. And I can remember I went to used to go to powerlifting meets and I'd look at the powerlifting meets and I would be like, "Nobody here looks athletic. No one." And then I'd go to an Olympic lifting meet and I'd be like, "Oo, these cats are athletic. Like, these guys can they can jump and they can sprint and they've got big traps and big asses. They look so they looked more like what I wanted my athletes to look like." Whereas powerlifting, it was sort of like a semi-mobile refrigerator imitation, you know, just people lumbering and even little people lumbering around. The little people lumbered just as bad as the big people. And then you go to a track meet and go watch the sprints and the jumps and you're like, "Wait, that's what I want. That's what I'm trying to get everybody to. So, I became a big Charlie Francis guy in the 90s. You know, you start looking at this and saying, "Okay, let's look at how the fastest people in the world, the people that jump the highest in the world, what are they doing for training?" And again, you started to see more unilateral work, unilateral plow work, unilateral strength work. So, it was sort of this this rabbit hole that I just I went down and never came back from. So Jeff, in your world training people the way you are, what are the exceptions to those rules for you? When are the times when you're saying or are you saying no, I still see that the riskreward tradeoff for someone in a certain position is there for you know a back a barbell back squat or you know a sumo deadlift or something like that. How do you how do you think about that? I think that if there's there's always the argument of can you train see a lot of times in especially in Mike's world too when when people come to him they've already learned bad mechanics for squats so they're bad squatters when they come to him so they're already demonstrating habits that are going to totally break down their body by continuing to pile more and more weight on I think when you can intervene with somebody at an early age and teach them biomechanically how to squat better, which Mike and I have discussed before at length, like it's not it's not easy to to really dissect that lift. It's a complicated lift. There's a lot of moving parts. So, you have to be willing to spend a lot of time with that person to teach them from the ground up. In those instances when you can, I think you could probably teach somebody how to squat more safely. That doesn't take away the fact that if you can do it and not have to load that way and especially as we talk about the aging population, then the benefits might still outweigh outweigh the risks in terms of it's just better to single leg squat. But I think that you can probably teach that lift, but you have to be willing to teach that person to either unlearn the bad things that they've already learned or if they're starting out early, learn how to do it more properly. And you could do it in stages, too. can by squatting to a box, you can biomechanically fix a lot of people's issues because having the target or the safety net behind them is enough to sort of get them to actually move in a better better way. But you don't want to train that way, you know, without ultimately going to a freestanding squat if they're going to be ultimately, you know, playing playing sports and needing to do something like, let's say, an offensive lineman coming off the off the uh the line. But I again I'm actually in Mike's camp in terms of the value of of of single leg training. We do so much single leg training with Athlete X because I believe that it's not just the unloading that we get from the single leg squat. It's just a it's just as Mike said how we're wired, how we're actually preferred to move. And I I get I took some along the way because anytime you pick up a leg from the ground, it's functional training. And then all of a sudden that has was a cool thing at one time. It's not a cool thing anymore, but you do pick up your leg and yes, that's functional for a reason. So, I think doing uh lunging and step-ups, we did we built a whole program in our um and with the Mets around step-ups and lunging because we knew how important that was. And again, we did other forms of bilateral lifting. We would do trap bar deadlifting um to to clean up some of the issues that people had. I always say that if you want to learn how to squat, take a dumbbell, um, hold it between your your hands or a kettle bell and just let the ball let the dumbbell the weight go straight down to the ground. It will put you biomechanically in almost a perfect position because you're just letting the the the weight drop straight down your center of mass. That's a great tool for teaching people what it's supposed to feel like. But when you then go put the bar in their back, as soon as the bar they don't have thoracic mobility, all the things that they're lacking start to change that that dramatically from just you think it's the same exercise cuz you're going straight up and down, but it's a very different exercise because now when your hands are up and again thoracic extension is more required, they don't have that and the whole system gets thrown out of whack. So it it's um it's done. it's still done in certain circumstances and you're always going to still encounter people who I don't know Mike you might just tell them to go to a different gym but like you know there's going to be people who will insist that they still have to squat and they want to learn how to do it and do it more safely and I think having the you know the the the willingness or the ability to still coach them through that is important but because of guys like Mike and because hopefully stuff that I talk about like there people are less reliant on those as the as the only things that they can do. I'm Peter Atia. This podcast relies exclusively on premium subscribers for support, which allows us to provide all our content without taking a single penny from advertisers. I believe this keeps my content honest, making it a trusted resource for listeners like you. 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