Transcript for:
Berserk Method 2024 Fourth Edition

hello everybody my name is bald omn man and today I am super excited to bring y'all the berserk method 2024 fourth edition I put these guides together every year to give you a self- coaching guide that gives you the a toz beginning to end steps that you need to follow to coach yourself and have success in your training because truth be told in the fitness industry especially out of most other Industries it's very predatory and the truth of how to get things done effectively is made in such a way that often times you need to Shell out sometimes thousands of dollars to be able to have very simple things answered for you and that's not something that I wanted now the why behind this canara mior was a really big inspiration of mine and when he passed away in May a few years ago it left me feeling depressed quite honestly and I thought a lot about how his work was formative in my life and I thought about how I could give back to something and then I thought more about how each and every one of us has a spark inside something that we do that no one can do quite like us so nobody does what you do quite like you my spark is anything in relation to physical training and education and then distilling those ideas in a way that anyone could follow and on that regard I want to say thank you because each and every year I'm able to put these guides together and you guys take great benefit from them and moreover just as a result of this platform I say this all the time but I live weights for a living and that's crazy I would have never expected that this is something that I could do but it just goes to show you when you do things for the right reason you get everything that you need in life and this is not only a a teaching course that I'm giving for y'all but just food for thought about how you could apply what doing here and what Mira Sensei did with berserk and anything that you have passion in I also want to give a kator Yama his flowers as well since making the Third Edition he has also passed away so I just want to say rest in peace to him as well his work was really important in my formative years and it's just something that I also want to carry on and portray to y'all with what I do with regards to training so again thank you for clicking on the video get ready for the best self- coaching experience of your life and get ready to learn now here's what I want you to expect with the fourth edition nothing in the last Edition was wrong I don't want you to think this invalidates anything that we talked about already what we're doing is we're exploring areas of opportunity that upon review of the the Third Edition it was a lot more nuts and bolts right like how do I structure this in my program how do I do that and there wasn't as much self- coaching Concepts in there as I would have wanted I'm not going to read through all these freaking slides bro I have to I say this all the time but I have to inject my personality into this because the way that I Envision you consuming this is you go through the table of contents you see what's interesting to you so if you find that you need more like movement prep you might go to the Practical Training Concepts if you just need help coaching yourself which is most people who clicked on this video you're going to click through here and watch this but there's going to be people that watch it from beginning to end and to keep y'all entertained I have to have my personality in here but just as a a high Lev breakdown of everything we're going to talk about we're going to start off with everything you need before training this is things like just lifts that I put in every program will break the ice with a list because everybody likes list but we'll also touch on some other things that you need to do before you even think about creating serious goals or really attacking the gym with maximum intensity of course a greatly expanded on the self- coaching part and this is the part that I'm most proud of and I think is going to give you the most value and was lacking the most in the first three editions then we'll go through practical Training Concepts of course I had to have the Eric ban hog and enough just do this just to give you something for food for thought if you're new or confused and then and the berserk Manifesto this is stuff that makes the berserk method the berserk method we're going to start off with everything that you need before you train starting with what is the berserk method it's my ever growing and evolving approach to training it started off one way and it's ended up this way nothing is so vastly different to where even if I went back and watched the first edition where my Baseline of knowledge was lower than it is now it was three or four years ago It Isn't So Different that anything in that is wrong but it's grown and we've compounded but it's mostly about effective self- coaching weeding through all the nonsense and looking at things as a problem and a solution and we'll talk about ways to Envision that for yourself because it's not something that comes easy to a lot of people and it's certainly something that you'll need to do if you're going to be coaching yourself that comes down to holding yourself accountable being able to look at things for what they are and and not what social media guy is trying to get you to see from it or eventually trying to get you to take out your credit card basically um and being able to keep yourself on track to make great progress as well the berserk method is also adaptable and this is with any goal that you you have it could be powerlifting bodybuilding just Lifting for fun we achieve that by attacking our lwh hanging fruits and this is something that I'm going to expand on great greatly as we continue throughout the presentation and most importantly we're going to be developing into the perfect lifter whatever that means to you we'll talk about how to define that for yourself and how I Define that for myself personally when we get more towards the Berserker Manifesto section of the presentation now I said we break the ice with a list I had some staple lifts in the Third Edition of this those weren't wrong I do want to offer some new things that I've been using the past year or so because I am a coach I do coach people also I coach myself these are things that I find myself using most often I'm going to have a separate follow-up video to go into more detail I'm just going to give you a highle breakdown of what these are and quickly why I like them but most importantly bro you got to have at least one lift in your program that makes you look jacked while you're doing it I was watching a a good buddy of mine Brendan teats he he said this in a video he said he did deficit deadlifts without a belt on because he just looked jacked while he did it and that's like you know the monkey and the light bulb or whatever the adage is it just made sense to me so there's a lot of stuff that not going to lie I have it in my program over other things just because it it makes me look jacked while I'm doing and I like seeing myself in the mirror look we all do man we don't pursue this as a hobby to just be like yeah I don't I don't care what I look like let's be real bro but more importantly in terms of mechanistic things like things that benefit the forward progression of our program fun is important but the nuts and bolts are as well I put an extended range of motion press whether that be like a deep dip a deep bench press like on a cambert bar or deficit weighted push-up things along those lines you could also achieve the same thing with shoulder pressing as well so if you wanted to shoulder press with a cambera bar which I've done it's an extreme range of motion you get the same thing with dumbbells more importantly though with regards to pressing being well-rounded and and just pressing in general is something that I put a really high premium on even when I'm working with someone who is a powerlifter we still make sure to hit the incline sometimes the decline always dumbbells and of course extended range of motion pressing not only just the one press that you mainly want to get better at to that end something that I prescribe a lot is a seated shoulder press That's What back support we put it at a high incline I just find that this is a really good lift to isolate the shoulders and remove the pecs from the equation there's this ongoing discussion of is the bench enough for shoulders I used to say so myself and it's been my experience the past couple years that a good shoulder press that you connect well with just instantaneously well over time but you'll notice that it gives you a lot better of a shoulder workout instantaneously but over time you'll notice that it makes you a lot wider as well which is really important also beltless hinge and squat patterns it could be anything I specify beltless here just because I find that when you can't rely on a belt to help you brace it teaches you how to brace in of itself effectively and how to find effective positioning so how to stack like for example your upper back your hips and your foot pressure to be able to squat upright we'll talk more about that when we talk about cues that I like for each lift a little bit but along those lines we have front foot elevated split squats just because I find that they're hard good work capacity and they also make people with certain you know your hips are built a certain way just a a way of saying the gigabrain terminology and this really helps increase your hip flexibility to be able to be more stable in your squats weighted leg raises these are a really good weighted ab exercise that people can do anywhere it's pretty much what I like it anybody could do it you could sprinkle it frequently throughout your training program lastly and this is something I'm going to greatly expand upon in the follow-up video bodybuilder calisthenics just doing lightweight calisthenics in a way where you don't have to add a lot of weight because I find that when we add a lot of weight to a calisthenics exercise it becomes less of a good hypertrophy movement or developmental exercise in general and more of just like a eagle lift foolproof isolation is the last one speaks for itself again we'll talk about each and every one of these at more length in the follow-up video just wanted to give you a highle breakdown some things that you could do right now add these to your training where it's applicable and you'll get a good result from it here's a really important concept that I want to cover today which will frequently pop back up throughout the rest of the presentation but this encapsulates something that not only just helps you in your training but just helps you in in life in general and it's something that I call the 10,000 F foot View and it's pretty much how we're going to use this to avoid bad or unnecessary advice and more importantly create better decision-making skills because we're going to be coaching ourselves there's a few things that you want to ask yourself and this is you looking from the 10,000 foot view so just imagine yourself with what it means is if you can look down on the the content that you're listening to the person that you're talking to and again this could be at any Avenue in life it could be at a job interview it could be at work it could be some some guy at the club lying to you about something what is it that they're saying first and foremost like what are they saying a lot of times with videos for example they'll have a really long drawn out way of saying something very simple like I don't like front squats because of this or I don't like bench press because of that you have to be able to look at that and not necessarily what they're trying to get you to do so that's the second question what are they trying to get me to do are they trying to get me to run their training program or they trying to get me to hate this because they hate it or are they trying to prescribe me something that is genuinely helpful in whatever use case they're talking about more importantly though is if it's potentially useful what is the real benefit what what would I get out of doing this oftentimes especially when I release programs I have fellas that really just love the idea of running a cool new program and they don't see that a lot of the benefits that they're they're going to reap from running my program they're already getting from a program that they're they have been running for a long time or sometimes not even for a long time a lot of fellas maybe you can chime in and say if you're guilty of this just constantly switch their programs like every other month sometimes even every few weeks you have to ask yourself am I doing this already last but not least does this actually attack my areas of opportunity I find a lot of times when we we you know we all do it right we all Tinker with our programs and you would think that advanced people don't do this either Advanced people Tinker with their program sometimes more you have to ask yourself does this actually attack my areas of opportunity because you could add something to your program that doesn't have any real benefit or it's something that you're doing already and you could end up you know including something that is generally helpful but doesn't actually attack your your area of opportunity and thus you make no progress in the areas you're trying to make progress in these are just some quick questions that you can have to really protect you in situations where you're creating a strong sense of self and you're you're creating goals which we'll get into in a sec but mostly this is just to protect you from bad advice on social media bro like we were talking about a little bit earlier Fitness industry can be very predatory to say the least and a lot of times it ain't even about giving you quality advice it's about appealing to your desire for novelty or division right and not necessarily giving you great advice that is actionable and is good for you it also allows you in short to take advice that is potentially good but wouldn't be applied well because you're just not the Right audience for that particular piece of device now in terms of what a 10,000 foot view does it's a highlevel way of thinking and I don't mean to say like high level like it's better high level meaning broad you're looking at the broad sense of things versus something that is more mechanistic which is more nuts and bolts it's more detailed detailed and I think that if you look at things in a more detailed manner you may not see at a high level or in a broad fashion what they're really trying to say to you now there are a lot of Pros to looking at things from like a detailed perspective it allows you to be more inpersonal it allows you to be able to prescribe things it allows you to say oh this seems interesting this seems helpful this seems like this could help me for my bench press this seems like this could help me grow my legs a little bit more but there are also a lot of Pros behind being Broad in your thinking as well it allows you to be more objective and detached okay this is a chest exercise that works just as well as the chest exercise that I'm doing already it's cool but for me to do this it would halt my rate of progression on the other exercise I'd have to relearn the technique and overall I would just be wasting my time so I not going to do this there are times when you have to apply both though you can't always look at thing in a broad fashion because when it when it comes time to make specific changes to your program you need to be able to look at things in a detailed fashion but in my opinion that has to come after looking at the broad picture of what you're trying to do so I'll give you an example let's just say you were you were trying to find uh a tropical rainforest but instead of opening up a world map and then looking at areas that have trees and and tropical rain foresty type geographical features you just start at a random point on the map and just start freaking walking and you're like I'm going to walk until I find a tropical rainforest you have to be able to look at things in a broad view first and then you zoom in and and you apply more mechan istic detailed thinking to it but the real talk behind all this though is is that a lot of times when navigating advice on social media and this stops you from making changes to your program every time you find something that looks ridiculously cool you have to be able to separate the the personality and the Charisma from the facts of the matter that's what all this is about and ultimately this is the beginning of what makes a good lifter and a successful program which we'll now begin to talk more about this is more mindset this is a high level breakdown of lifters who I see Thrive and lifters who eventually just burn out most of the time what separates the two and not even just the two of these types of lifters a good lifter from a great lifter is time or bad lifter from a good lifter or from a great lifter is time it's not genetics it's not they use better equipment from you it's time many lifters end up burning out though and not being able to invest that time because they didn't set proper actionable goals their process is garbage or it's just something that's not repeatable or or something that they can commit to so it's that's like the example of fellas we'll use diet for instance someone who makes good lifestyle changes and has a good diet is going to have on average a better body composition than someone that just crash diets something that we could all relate to and and rationalize it makes sense last but not least some lifters who Thrive versus succeed it's just a attitude thing sometimes they just have a poor mindset lifters who have a great mindset which we'll talk more about I call it the champion checklist they they just think about things differently from people who tend to burn out and that's either them being hyper negative or just arrogant just insufferable starting with the champion checklist cuz we're trying to be Champions we're not trying to be Chumps I'm still going to talk to you about things that I see in Chumps but in Champions this is what I often see first and foremost you're confident in your abilities but you're not cocky and this comes down to the way that you talk about things and the way that you view yourself there's a big difference between for example saying I'm good at what I'm doing and this this makes me excited to try to be the best or to be the best that I can be and saying something which is more of an entitled way of looking at it as I'm good and because of that I am the best or I deserve to be the best that's where a lot of people burn in burn out in because simply put the work that you have to put in to be the best version of yourself is so Monumental it's arrogant to be to just say something like that because you have no idea of the work you're not performative when you're a champion so you're I I put the silent like a gan lasagna Lil Wayne said that in the early 2000s let me know if you're familiar with that bar you don't bite off more than you can chew like we talked about a little bit earlier you set actionable goals that make sense so saying that I want to make the goal of putting half an inch on my quads in six months and here's how I'm going to do it I'm good at squatting I'm good at laying out my squat training here's how I'm going to do it is way different from you squatting 405 for the first time maybe even as a teenager which is great and then saying I'm going to break the squat world record by the time I'm 20 just because I'm good at squatting it's totally it doesn't make sense it's not actionable you're going to create a process that supports those goals that are actionable and make sense and overall you're going to have a good time doing it it's enjoyable you're going to have fun and when something doesn't go right you're going to take personal accountability now here's what Chumps do right Chumps are either extremely Doomer or you just think you're a lot better than you are now that's not to say if you're down in the dumps right now I'm not calling you a chump I'm talking about the person that is so insufferably negative about everything that it's it's almost like I don't want to say the what I want to say because I don't want to get demonetized but it's almost like a a way of coping that's a good way to put it I was going to say a word that starts with m and ends with Y it's almost a way of coping and making yourself feel better or making yourself feel good that you're you're talking negatively about yourself and then on the opposite end of course you have someone that just is innately just boosting themselves up in a way that isn't realistic or reflective of reality like we said earlier it's the difference between saying I'm good so I'm going to try my best to get better and saying because I'm good I can be the best in the world I'm going to break the squat record by the time I'm 20 you set these insane goals with no real plan of how to achieve them time and time again and this is why when this is one of the reasons why when people reach out for coaching I make sure to have a a deeper conversation with them about what they're really looking for for because if you you come to a coach or or anything or even to yourself and you have this insane goal it's always these people that work really really hard because they're good at something it's like Vegeta in Dragon Ball Z he was the saiyan elite he was good at fighting but as soon as he got his butt whooped now he's all down in the dups and much the same as soon as you reach that first Plateau or your rate of progress slows down or you have a bad workout suddenly because your sense of self comes from the fact that you're good now you don't want to do it anymore and these are the guys that burn out cuz you don't act like actually lifting weights you just like the perceived outcome and and ultimately how it allows you to boost your ego this is like the you know broccoli boy is that good genetics great at lifting but it's the the figure8 bumper plate deadlift bar clout Goblin broccoli haircut lifters that they're not going to training 5 years from now they're going to be a cubicle crunching numbers which there's nothing wrong with doing that bro but you're not going to be lifting in 5 years if you have that type of attitude these types of fellas Chumps they blame they blame their failures on things other than themselves whereas the champion takes accountability they'll blame their genetics your equipment oh they distracted me oh they walked in front of my camera oh it's too loud in here oh my music didn't work so that's why I I didn't eat and sleep the way I was supposed to or try hard enough my accessories and only did what I was good at wasn't because of anything that I did they're unwilling to be introspective at the end of the day Champion Chum we're looking to be Champions at the end of the day the final answer to all this is just because you're good at something doesn't mean you're the only one who is and you have to have a strong process and your success begins and ends with you you have to have effective goal setting and this has to be a skill that you develop in cult it over time which is what we're going to get into next effective goal setting I like to break it down like this man we all are doing this for a hobby we have to be able to make this something that we want to do long term what do you like about lifting weights ask yourself that what do you want out of lifting weights if you want uh short-term results there's a level of effort that comes into play with that that is a lot less than you might think versus you burning out trying to do something magnificent one thing that I think is really helpful is creating an idea of your perfect athlete and then finding someone who reflects that in real life so for me Dan Green right off the top of my head Dan Green is extremely jacked he's strong at everything his form is immaculate on everything and overall he's just a stud I watched him lift in the animal cage and fellas him training one time a week basically and not using as much performance enhancers as he used to he he was still incredibly thick and much bigger than you would think bro so Dan Green off the top of my head is my ideal athlete part of effective goal setting though is having that ideal athlete having your your why and your your what do I want to do but then defining them into well-defined goals and then not constantly moving them I want to constantly improve in my training over a long period of time and learn more very well- defined goal what I do want to let you know is that there are multiple things that you can do multiple goals that you have but there's a limit your goals have to be synergist to one another or you have to be willing to say that okay say for instance I want to be fast at running and I also want to be really jacked you can't be the fastest that you can be while also getting as jacked as you possibly can be there'll have to be some give and take and there will be a limit with either of those things where you'll have to decide for yourself which is more important to you but most importantly you want to have the right mindset in terms of your timeline and what the overall process is going to look like but most importantly just keep your goals simple for the most part most of us just want to get jacked and look good that's all I want to talk about some common goals just because saying it out loud will give a lot of people who are confused about how do I set an effective goal and what's what's a good goal here are some common goals that aren't as complicated to reach as you would expect we'll start with the first one I want to gain some muscle what do you think comes into play with just gaining some muscle and looking good without your shirt on two to three days at the gym good diet reasonable body composition absolutely everybody here can do that now more than likely with like a 30 to 45 minute gym session two to three times a week if that's what you want that's the type of program that you want to run if you have time to do only that perfect you can still gain some muscle you have to work within your limits and within your goals you want to get extremely jacked it's just more time in the gym and more accountability in terms of are you eating enough are you sleeping enough are you managing stress and we'll get into how to do all of that but if this is what you want this is what you need to do if you want to be jacked in and in good shape you may need a few conditioning sessions on top of your training which could just be something like super sets or timed rest intervals or something of that nature and then last but not least like we just mentioned if you want to gain a little muscle and be in shape you don't need to train all that much bro you can just Keno bodybody for instance he only trains upper body I'm not trying to give his guy his big UPS or nothing but the dude lifts weights like two times a week if you want to be in shape on top of that you can do the rest of the the workout is conditioning the rest of the times per week is conditioning you can run the other three days of the week that's actually what I did mostly when I was a teenager and I was in great shape sometimes goals overlap though if you generally just want to get bigger you can focus on getting stronger with good form of course and vice versa so if your goal isn't specifically to be a powerlifter or to to be a specific strength athlete you don't need to specialize in your training or overemphasize anything or have goals that are so really irrelevant to you that you get burnt out and you get lost in the sauce or you create a process that isn't enjoyable your goals are very very general more than likely and all of this is just to give you food for thought to maybe make you rethink what you're doing right now and maybe do it a little bit better now when it comes to changing goals the simpler your goal is the less often that you're going to need to move the goal post meaning like if you want to G gain muscle you don't need to be changing programs or changing parameters or or or intaking all this different advice if you just have the goal of gaining a lot of muscle it's a simple goal that you don't need to be moving the the goal poost on I think people confuse wanting to change goals with engagement and what's helpful for me is just having little side quests to keep you engaged with your training explore novelty with things like you know I want to be able to do 50 push-ups un less than 30 seconds with good form you can do something like that while not deviating from your overall program or your overall goals it's just stuff like that man Buy in is very important for our goals and this is really important you have to be bought in to what your goals are meaning you have to with every fiber of your being if you want to get jacked you're going to want to have to commit to that you're going to want to buy into the process that has to be something that you enjoy novelty at the end of the day is nice it's like e a bar of chocolate it's nice for 5 minutes and then you're like man I shouldn't ate all that chocolate much the same if you're constantly changing things in your program or in your overall approach or your goals you're going to have that temporary feeling of this is fun or yeah I like doing this but then at the end of the year when your your counterpart is put on five pounds of muscle and you look the same or Worse don't blame them don't blame your genetics blame the fact that you're changing things around too much Bayan is passion and at the end of the day we all should be having fun with this this is a hobby even for me bro I do this for a living if I did not have fun doing this I would not be doing it now with talking about the process a lot of us do not have good outside of the gym habits or for people that are doing mostly the right thing we have one or two things we could touch up on that would vastly improve our results in the gym overall it's a mindset thing we want to aim to do these things well at a high level breakdown we're going to talk about a few of these in more detail than others because more of them some of them are a little bit more important than others or not necessarily more important but people mess up on them more eating well is a big one because it's something that will either make you spin your wheels or make really great progress eating well means looking at things in terms of what are the building blocks of a good diet what is what is a quality food in terms of is this something I should be eating or is this something that has protein and and carbs and fat in it but it has a million ingredients and stuff that makes me have to use the bathroom instantly as soon as I eat it or makes my stomach feel bad digestion is a really important aspect of uh eating well as well so so if you eat something like we said ticks all those boxes of it has calories protein carbs and everything else but it makes you feel like garbage brother it's not something that you should be eating unless you can avoid it resting is really important as well it's a recovery process this isn't just sleep it's just things that we do to be able to recover optimizing physical activity so getting in our steps in a way that is repeatable it doesn't require a lot of time and ultimately having a high physical activity is going to have a cascading effect on everything else we're also going to get into the micronutrient and work life balance and and boundaries that you should be setting now ultimately with all these things that like I said aiming to do them well is incredibly important you aim to be a champion like we just talked about attack your low hanging fruits what aren't you doing you're likely doing some of this stuff cuz it's sense to you but some of it might not be self-evident to you or maybe you know that you're not doing it well but also know what's realistic for you to do well so for example if you have two jobs a wife kids and you're working out maybe sleep won't be something that you can really help to be quite honest with you maybe all you can schedule is 6 hours of sleep eight nine would be better but if you're also not eating well and you're also allowing your hips to degrade because you sit all day instead of getting up and walking around these are things we have control over challenge your idea of what you have control over though because a lot of people I find that just because things are hard there's no way for them to be better or there's no way to improve something because even if you're unable to eat well and you're unable to you know you know you're not eating well or you're not resting well you're not optimizing your physical AC ity you have a bad work life balance and you don't eat vegetables there's likely at least one or two of those that you can improve or even if you improved all of them just a little bit you would notice a big difference in your quality of life and in your results you can always do something better though even if you're doing them well now starting off with eating well big thing that I say and have been saying for years now is eating to support your training a lot of people ask me what this means when I say it because I don't always explain it thoroughly I would say just enough to be able to get you to think about it but not I don't explain it thoroughly a lot of the times here's some key points first and foremost eat foods that make you feel strong I talk about the legendary Gyro Bowl on the channel something that I've been promising to post what which I've been using as a carrot to dangle in front of you to get you to come to my videos and ask me about the dryr bowl to boost the algorithm no I'm just kidding I just genuinely just be eating my food bro and I forget to to post about it but gyro bowls make me feel strong freaking eggs make me feel strong Burgers make me feel strong burgers and and rice and and avocados and broccoli and all that mixed up together that whole foods make me feel strong so that's what I eat I don't eat anything that makes me feel bad so if I'm like I feel lethargic I have to go to the bathroom this makes me have to puke this is disgusting I'm just not going to eat it and I don't think that you should eat it either that's not to say that you should avoid certain food groups but only eat things that make you feel strong and avoid those foods that make you feel bad I want to talk more about the the weight gain and the weight loss mindsets because ultimately all other things equal you could eat high quality foods but if you're not eating enough to support your goal of either weight gain or weight loss you're not going to get your desired result there's two groups of people that are in a gaining mindset there are the people that eat way too much and then there are the people that are underweight and need to put more weight on their frame basically put some meat on their bones people that eat way too much here's how I want you to think about the calorie Surplus you eating 5 6 700 800 calories extra on top of what you need to to gain let's say 1 to 2 pounds in a month not a week a month you're not going to get any extra recovery benefits in your training by eating those extra calories and being that much above your your your total daily energy expenditure the only thing that's that's going to do is is is increase your waistline it may even make you more lethargic which defeats the whole entire purpose of a calorie Surplus and it makes it so that your necessity to cut is going to come a lot quicker I'll tell you what fellas I have been in a gaining mindset eating to support my training for years now I still have full six-pack abs good vascularity I'm how long has it been since I started gaining I was like in the 170s and I'm in the low 200s now I'm not fat I look I look around outside I take my shirt off and I like I like to call it Beach Lane if you look amazing to the average person without your shirt on at all times you're in a good spot and that that's something that you can achieve with eating to support your training and not gaining weight to arbitrarily just gain weight now for people that have trouble putting on weight and want to gain weight you don't eat as much as you think you do that's just the honest truth even with a a gentleman that I work with he would swear up and down that he would eat you know however many calories we decided he was going to eat until I just eventually said like look man document everything that you eat in a day every day for a week and then let's see how much you're eating turns out that overestimating stuff some days were much higher than others I would say for guys like that think less about what the the overweight fellas are thinking about and think more about accurately tracking and then with the weight loss mindsets this is something that categorically I find that most people conflate trimming down or or trimming down to a healthy weight to just depriving themselves so instead of eating enough protein and and carbs and micronutrients to be able to support good training while still losing weight they just completely deprive themselves of everything if you're eating in a sensible calorie deficit and you're getting in a good activity level which is 10,000 steps or more per day the weight is going to fall off your body like no one's business fellas it doesn't take very long to lose an appreciable amount of weight in a way that will vastly change your physique if you stay within that healthy weight range and if you're not within that healthy weight range it still won't take all that long relatively speaking to lose a ton of weight but you don't want to deprive yourself and depriving yourself it's it's like more isn't better so a bigger calorie deficit eliminating food food is not better it's not going to give you any benefit over creating a repeatable process and that's what that's all about like just like we talked about before with our mindset just little quick things that I want to talk about though is more micronutrients is better so the more vegetables and fruits and micronutrient dense meats and things like that that we're able to eat the better that we're going to feel and the better we're going to digest things the more energy we're going to have during training the better our recovery is going to be so make sure you get your micronutrients in I prefer that you get it in through food but if you need to get it in through a multivitamin it's better than nothing fellas but make an effort to get in more micronutrients and you're going to get a better result from it a cool little hack that we'll we'll more than likely talk about a little bit later when we talk about activity level is is that whether you're bulking or cutting especially if you're bulking daily activity level is still a great idea so if I burn which is what I burn if I burn about 800 extra calories from getting in my 12 to 15,000 steps per day at my body weight if I eat maybe a fourth of those calories that I have to eat to be able to uh maintain my body composition in vegetables and fruits those extra micronutrients are going to proportionately benefit me versus if I I wasn't getting them in even at the exact same energy balance and another thing that I want you to consider in general with with uh caloric intake is that even if your energy balance is the same which we break it down borney style if you eat 3,000 calories and you do zero activity level that balances out the same to me eating 4,000 calories and getting in my current activity level or 3800 calories eating the 3,800 calories is more anabolic even though the energy balance is the same it's more protein it's more protein synthesis it's more micronutrients it's more uh water more than likely so if you can eat more whether you're bulking or cutting you want to do that you don't want to deprive yourself now in terms of getting in your standard electrolytes which is your sodium your uh magnesium your calcium your potassium I prefer that you get that in through food so it's like potatoes kiwis bananas uh salty salt is easy to get it's in freaking everything um calcium you can get in through a lot of dairy products and you know if you want to be a tror and do like the carnivore style grinding up eggshells you can do that but you're going to get most of it just through drinking stuff like milk almond milk things of that nature but if you need to supplement with magnesium that's something that is going to benefit greatly your your sleep things of that nature and I prefer that you get in most of it through food supplement with magnesium and you'd be pretty much good to go gut health that's another really important thing before we move on to the the rest and the recovery which would be a bit more brief because it's not as intensive as eating well I told you I'd focus more on this if you check the box of eating to support your training you're eating micronutrients you're getting in your electrolytes you're eating stuff that makes you feel pretty good but you're not digesting it well there's all kinds of inflammation in your your your bowels and you're avoiding you're not avoiding bowel distress which we all know what that means we got to to to Brown town and make a deposit in the the porcelain Palace fellas I don't know if I can say what I want to without getting demonetized but I hope that you're picking up on what I'm putting down if you're having to take trips to the porcelain Palace down Browntown Avenue constantly bro your gut health is garbage and you need to eat things that don't do that some people unfortunately have irritable bowel syndrome so they're their options are more limited but most of us have relative ly normal stomachs we just have certain things that when we eat it it just makes us feel bad so like for me for instance I can't eat a lot of spicy food it is what it is bro I like the way spicy food tastes but if I eat the spicy food I'm volcano blasting for days and I can't have that I hope that was really helpful and insightful to people because diet is really important recovery practices though obviously it's sleep you want to be able to sleep as much as possible basic stuff like making sure that you're sleeping in a cool dark room no noise going on in the background if possible if you live in a city that's unavoidable but if you can set up some ambient noise that drowns all that other city noise out that's really effective and then your sleep supplements so like your magnesium things of that nature anything prescribed by a doctor you would want to consult with them but that's just basic things that you can do the more you maximize sleep the more you recover right the it's like the healing pod in Dragon Ball Z Goku freaking raised to a 3 million power level before fighting Frieza by going in the freaking healing chamber most important though I think with regards to many young men and especially with a lot of crazy stuff that's going on in the around the world now I look at my analytics and I got fellas from all over the world uh watching the channel regularly is stress try to compartmentalize things this is something that I learned in the military but being able to separate your circumstances from how you're feeling in the moment sometimes is what is going to get you throughout the day that's not to say ignore what's stressing you out but when it comes to going to the gym or when it's time to go to sleep stressing about things that are ultimately outside of your control is something that's robbing you of your quality of life because ultimately it's what's what's keeps you up at night even if it's not as serious as something really really serious like the crazy stuff that's going on it could be you're you're nervous about a freaking exam you're nervous about going out on a date with the Chica you talked up at the freaking at the bar it could be anything bro anything that you're stressed about try to compartmentalize it and be honest about what you're stressed about as well a lot of us just act like nothing is going on in life and we we lie to ourselves and we cope instead of just saying like look man I can put this aside and think about this later right now it's time to train ultimately what I'm going to suggest though is just if you need it therapy or if you need it get medical help for that there's no reason why you can't do that when it comes to men one of the main things that takes up takes us up out of here is US to ourselves and that comes on the back of stress and things of that nature if you're picking up what I'm putting down but we have things I think most of us anyway where if we eliminate certain things in our life that are stressful and this will come into play with the the boundary setting that we'll talk a little bit more about later we can have things that we can absolutely eliminate from our lives that will greatly impact our our stress and our quality of life but outside all the mental stuff just general physical things that you can do is just get really good blood flow in the middle of your workouts and after your workouts that's going to promote recovery really really well even though it doesn't like actually in all in all actuality like make you recover faster it may make something that's stiff feel less stiff which ultimately will allow you to be more comfortable relaxed and everything has a cascading effect and it also just feels really good right in your physical activity though you want to make sure that you're not double dipping in certain things that bury you so like if you squatted for instance don't do freaking Sprint intervals or 6 612s or something like that you're just basically doing the same thing twice and you're double dipping it's not recovery at that point it's just another workout I would say that the biggest thing that you want to do is standardize your activity make sure that it's something repeatable and make sure you minimize the time cost and I got a few ideas for you guys before we move on to optimizing physical activity something that you can do and we'll start off with the easiest and we'll say wait what will cause or cost a little bit of money you want to build physical activity into time that you're spending already doing something else if you're not able to make the time to just slot out an hour per day to walk throughout the day so like 15 minutes here 15 minutes here 15 minutes so on and so forth if you have like a lunch break at work or something try to walk around while you're eating that may allow you to get four or 5,000 steps in during like a 30 minute lunch break or something of that nature if you have 15minute breaks after your 30 minute break again get up walk around move around especially if you're sitting in a desk all day that's an hour of walking if you walk at even a moderate Pace that's going to allow you to get 7,000 steps in more than likely and that's over 70% of the 10,000 steps that I recommend that you get in there you go if you're a gamer like me look man you get yourself one of them freaking little mini treadmills and you get your steps in while you're playing video games and when I'm Dorito blasting bro I'm playing video games for a lot longer than an hour bro just to just to let you know I've played uh Final Fantasy 7 rebirth for like eight hours the first day I uh played it so I didn't walk all eight hours but it's something to consider ultimately though when it comes to optimizing the physical activity you want to find something that's fun walking to me is fun I like seeing nature I like even if I'm not outside I just like feeling my body moving it doesn't have to be something intense and it still adds up like I said try to multitask if you can't make more time already but do what you can do right so if you can't do 10,000 steps even with all this being said and you can only get 7,000 in fellas that puts you way above the average American that probably gets in two to 300 steps in per day I'm I'm being so serious right now and like we talked about a little bit earlier it creates an opportunity to get in more quality foods when you're in a surplus and more food to diet on when you're trimming down or cutting is a really really good idea it's really really valuable so a few hacks that I'm just going to go through really quickly with your micronutrients and your electrolytes more colors is better add some texture to your meals pickled vegetables and roasted vegetables are like if if you're one of those guys with the I'm just going to call it bro you got childish taste buds you don't like the taste the vegetables if you eat them pickled or roasted you're going to like the way they taste and season them right like we said dedicate some of your increased calorie intake to micronutrients so like your fruits and your vegetables shakes are a really good thing if like you're like man I don't like pickled vegetables or roasted veget if you throw it in a shake with some bananas and freaking milk and peanut butter bro you're not even going to taste them so just drink them okay like we covered a little earlier you can get in most of your salt and everything else other than your magnesium um from your your food more than likely and if you absolutely need to you can supplement with the potassium with like a sports drink most sports drinks don't have your sodium and magnesium and and and salt in them but something like a prime I think has a lot of potassium in it even if it doesn't have all those things so what you don't get from the energy drink or the sports drink rather you can get from food so just because the the sports drink doesn't have it doesn't mean it's a big deal work life balance really important like I said we're hobbyists most of us some of us are competitors but a lot of us when we're not actively competing or eventually when we're not competing in something we're doing this for fun you are not just a lifter because when you're not able to lift you want to be able to look back and say it and talk about experiences that you've had in your life or things that you enjoyed or or did or times that you made for family and not all the sacrifices you made to put on muscle one thing I'm going to suggest is have at least one non-lifting hobby that you enjoy doing for me I really like creating art whether it's painting drawing sketching inking uh graphic design those are all really enjoyable to me obviously I watch anime I read a lot and I play video games and I like going on my nature walks those are all things that I genuinely enjoy just as much as lifting weights you're going to want to truncate which just means eliminate those time wasters so those hours on our phone where we're spent doing nothing that's time that you could be spent doing something that actually is benefiting your life bro I promise you looking at the 15th reel of the the jiggly Big Booty Judy is is not it's not benefiting you on any level bro go outside and look at the trees and smell the air and hear the birds chirp go to a pottery class or something like that man figure out what you like in life that's just the funny way of saying we all waste our time doing certain things eliminate as much time wasting as you can make time for your loved ones this is really important the older that you get unfortunately the more more that you're going to say goodbye to your loved ones as well so you don't want to take for time uh the time that you have with them for granted whether that's a Creator whose work inspires you or a loved one or a family member you want to make time to enjoy those things and include people in your hobbies as well so if it's even lifting weight you want to include people in work out with your brother work out with a friend or something work out with your spouse do your pottery with someone it takes a tribe and it takes more than one person to it takes a team it's a team effort no person's a one one man show I like to say you know you want to be able to include people and things because ultimately it's the experiences we have with people that are most important all of this doesn't transcend being a lifter but part of being a lifter to me what I think about is someone who is a rock star in all these things you have to be able to know what to say no to versus what to say yes to I say no to certain things I say hell yeah to certain other things man so if it's I have the goal of just generally putting on muscle I'm not competing I'm not an athlete or anything like that if someone offers me a freaking Slice of Cheesecake I will fit it into my freaking calories for the day and I'll just eat less of a carb and fat somewhere else bro I'm already eating a lot of vegetables I'm already eating food that I enjoy I'll just eat a little bit less I'm say no you going to say no to your grandma's freaking baked goods bro you freaking serious come on man be for real even if you're cutting man be like you know Grandma I can't have the whole thing but I'll have a bite come on man don't say no to that because eventually she's not going to be able to bake the pie for you man but when it comes to like getting wasted every weekend you know don't do that but create good boundaries that allow you to have a good balance of everything now in terms of creating habits we talked a little bit about things that you should be doing how to do them by now you've established some form of habits here's how you create better habits some things you do better than others look at what first and foremost you feel you can do better personally or something you know you feel you you fall short at or you're just not doing at all like for me for instance when I find a freaking new video game like when uh Elden ring shadow of the UR tree comes out I already know man I'm going to feel each and every day like I'm I'm walking One Step Closer to a freaking Oblivion because I'm going to stay up all day till 4 in the morning playing it until I finish it my sleep is going to be garbage then and I could absolutely do that better when I'm playing my video games this is advice that I can take myself so we're not all perfect you're going to want to find ways to incentivize doing the things that you're lacking at and doing them well in other words just make it easy for you to do it help me help you that kind of thing and even if you feel like you're doing everything well it is arrogant to say that there's nothing that you could do better there's nothing you could do better bro for a million dollars if I said if you could do this a little bit better what would you do for a million dollars you would man I'd love to but I'm perfect at everything that's Malarkey bro you can always do something better now something that I shout from the rooftops and that I've covered in every version of the berserk method up until now is the needs versus once analysis I'm not going to go into detail what the the basics of it are I'm going to give you a high Lev breakdown but I'm more so going to expand on things that I've added to it so extra things to ask yourself needs versus once analysis is all all about getting you to make proper decisions I'm combining this with the 10,000 foot view to give you to give you a better perspective but in short you ask what do I want what do I need to get there and what can I avoid because it's more of just something that I want but I don't really need it and I need to do these needs first to help you guide this and be real and not cope essentially 10,000 ft view am I doing this already yeah I am doing this so if I do more of it it's really just a need I mean it's just a want you know if you already have three or four different curls on your program and you see some mutant freaking monster from Europe like there was this European guy I saw whose arm circumference look the freaking same as his leg size it was a ridiculously chatty look don't get me wrong the Crash Bandicoot build he just made it look really cool but I'm like man I'm going to do some strip curls and then I asked myself am I doing this already I'm already training my arms this is just dumb at this point I'm not going to do that does this align with my goals or lifestyle so if you have the goal of powerlifting and you're doing your freaking Jefferson deadlifts why are you doing that bro why are you doing that if you only have an hour to train at the gym why are you doing all this extra nonsense which is just going to eat up more time and take away from the quality training that you want to get done will you have to compromise your enjoyment your fun to do this now sometimes this is necessary because the truth of the matter is is that some of us just avoid hard stuff because we suck at it and not because it's something that wouldn't benefit us I'm not talking about that I'm talking about this is something that maybe isn't checking a immediate box that you need to check and you know you're you're doing it because there's a perceived benefit but it doesn't really benefit me if you have to compromise your enjoyment to do it it's just not a good idea most of the time unless it's something that you genuinely just need to do and is it pract practical for me to do it long term when you have anything in the needs versus once analysis you need to be able to also say you know in the short short medium and long term how am I going to evaluate what I'm doing is this something to where I could reasonably evaluate it in the short medium and long term or am I going to burn out doing it in the short term if you answered like unfavorably to any of this it infers that it's something that maybe you don't necessarily want to include in your program and lastly before we wrap up and go to chapter two limb length and how it affects your training I have covered this in great detail I'm going to give you high level breakdown but just Empower you with a bit of Truth to just give people who are more so down in the dumps or just feel like they can't do certain things like squatting for instance really well if you have longer limbs but all longer limbs mean in my view is is that look man we have more room to fill out but you get more hypertrophy and overall stimulus from movements that Target those muscles well if you have shorter limbs it's the opposite it's less room to fill out not as much stimulus per rep longer limbs honestly bro are probably better from a long-term muscle growth potential perspective meaning that yeah it might not look better in the short term compared to some guy that whose arms are are four or five inches shorter than yours but when you fill them out you're going to look like a complete monster standing next to them and overall you're just going to look really big in general and be able to put on more muscle for longer because you got more to fill out the empowerment though comes into play with creating an effective hypertrophy or strength adaptation is possible regardless of how you're built we all have ways that we need to interact with movements to do them well and we can all get good at those basic movement patterns we can all create a squat that looks really good my squat naturally just didn't look good because of the way my hips and my legs are built but over time I created a squat pattern that looks really darn good in my opinion that allows me to really Target the quads very very well it took a concerted effort e and listening to things like internal cues and and form and paying attention to what I'm doing which we'll get into in the self- coaching aspect of things in the next chapter but it is possible some people is going to come quicker to others it's going to be a little bit harder but it's possible for everybody if you got two legs and two arms that work your joints are functioning you can do it bro wrapping up overall though your sense of self is very important if you have a a poor sense of self you have easily impressionable mind you're unable to look at things from a 10,000 foot view you're going to be susceptible to a lot of the bad advice that you're going to get on social media sometimes and again even with the good advice you're implementing something that would be generally helpful in a way that is not helpful for you because you're listening to more of what they're promising you or the personality than what they're saying being a lifter means man managing all of those things managing your food and everything you have control in you have control over what you do what you choose to do and how you choose to do it and be accountable with how you conduct your cons how you conduct yourself overall I'm going leave you with a quote from Dragon Ball move well study well play well eat well rest well this is the turtle School way Master roshi said that to uh Goku and Krillin and overall it conveys you just do everything you can with your body the best that you can and you'll you'll get a great benefit from it chapter 2 is all about coaching yourself and we got our our big jawline Chad guts here with the Berserker armor beautiful artwork I want to start off with creating great stimulus and how to manage it or audit it first and foremost at a basic level this is going to come with creating a standard for your form working with your leverages because leverages are rules there are not death sentences going to have some tips per movement pattern this is just major movement patterns just different things that I found help for exercises that I found helpful for different types of lifters and breaking down Advanced rep Cadence for times that it calls for it avoiding redundancy and then just some cool useful intensity techniques now creating a standard for your form this is one of the most common questions that I get when people reach out to me is is that you know what's what's the difference between like a performance outcome and a size outcome like size or strength basically it all comes down into the way that you standardize your form and what your goal is so regardless of what your goal is first things first I want to say that you want to push performance on either it doesn't matter at the end of the year if you're not getting stronger on your curls and a given parameter and given form you're not getting bigger it's just pure lunacy like you can of course improve your form and when it comes with things like squats you can always do them a little bit better go a little bit deeper and milk await for a little bit longer but ultimately overall bro guy that squats 315 for one is going to have far smaller legs than a guy that squats 500 for one it doesn't matter if you go all the way down you go a three second negative 3 second pause eventually you're going to have to put weight on the bar I guess is what I'm saying rep Tempo overall like your paw how slow you're going uh how explosive you are in the concentric and Ecentric it should all align with what your goal for the lift is you can have a lift that you're doing specifically just to get as strong as possible or lift it you're just using it to get asit good of a a strength adaptation as possible a lot of people like to think that like form and and paying attention to those things is only important for hypertrophy training for strength it is equally if not more important in my opinion to listen to your internal cues and we'll talk more about what those are but basically it's the things that we all mess up with on our our form for either size or strength the things that you have to actively think about to be able to do a rep well it's more important for strength in my opinion because instead of you managing a moderate or a lightweight we may have 7 600 800 lb if you're really really strong that we have to be able to make sure that we're moving well last thing I want to leave y'all with because this is a a new form of ego lifting i' I found is is wanting to lift so crisp and so well that we're not adhering to things like Progressive overload whether that's adding weight reps density form is a sliding scale and you have to allow for a little bit of touch and go give and take and either doing something a little less skillfully or more skillfully to be able to create good forward progression because if you can add two reps to something just by going a little bit faster on your Ecentric versus just constantly trying to slow down your Ecentric but you're never adding reps it is in my opinion that it's always easier to clean up the Reps once you got the adaptation down and you got them on the board versus trying to slide that scale too far in the opposite direction it's harder to progress from there I mentioned in ter internal cues though and this is something that I think is really important to think about and it comes into play with taking better notes and paying more attention while we're training and this is really what separates a bad stimulus from a good stimulus from a great stimulus no matter what that may look like for you an internal Q basically though is something that you think about during your lift that you typically mess up on and it's not always visible to others for example you could have a squat that on camera looks completely identical to another squat but you're not flexing into the Ecentric or holding tension at the bottom of your paws the same way between both reps those are things that you have to physically think about that if you cheat on them you're only cheating yourself because to everybody else it looks like you're killing it but you know that you're not because you can feel that something is wrong this isn't always stuff like Tempo it could be like something that you don't even really know what this is causing it from so like for example this feels garbage on my hips or Man I Feel imbalanced On My Feet even though that the rep moved really fast it just felt like garbage or man that moved fast but my abs feel terrible my brace was terrible it just felt crazy but it it felt like it moved for 5 seconds but it blasted right up this comes into play with something internally that you're not doing right that you really really need to pay attention to this is going to be those one or two cues to where like I always say that listen we can't think about a million cu's think about one or two that is going to improve your rep that's your internal que and to top it off your internal cues are going to change over time over the long term so you're going to have to pay attention the biggest most helpful thing that I could say is is that when you're trying to determine what is making a rep feel not great or what could make rep feel better is to just take better notes log book better log booking isn't just taking note of the weight and the Reps how easy was this how did this feel what felt off what felt good this is going to infer what your strengths and your weaknesses are with your form and this isn't even just inherent to strength work like I said internal queuing is really useful for your hypertrophy work I mentioned at the very beginning at our berserk method Icebreaker staple lifts bodybuilding calisthenics I can reach failure after pre-exhaustion with a a first press admittedly but I can reach failure on body weight dips and 12 to 15 reps and the Ecentric can look the same to someone watching it but in my mind I'm flexing like I'm trying to bust out of my skin the entire time and I'm holding tension in a way that I reach failure after 12 reps I just do that's not to say that I can't horse some Hefty loads on weighted dips I've dipped over my body weight and I I weigh in the low 200s for Reps for up to five or six reps it's all about that internal Que in though and these are things that we can apply even for hypertrophy work I do the same thing for pull-ups yeah I can do over four play weighted pull-ups but I can go to a failure with 15 to 20 body weight pull-ups if I cue Flex into the Ecentric holding tension those things that people can't see but that I can feel and that I know that I'm doing or I'm not doing so sometimes there things like that as well but overall working on those things that we know we need to improve on or those things where my upper back doesn't feel tight on bench you do that it's going to vastly improve the stimulus whether it's for strength or for size and you want to take note of those things but just some quick tidbits for the presses the um squats and the the HS when it comes to working with your leverages for presses we'll talk a little bit about both so on either end of the spectrum long and long long arm short arm fellas first and foremost more than likely bro if you're not able to bench something it's just because you're you're just not strong enough just get bigger just get more jacked bench press is the lift out of anything else any press dips weighted push-ups anything horizontal pressing it could be if you're a Johnny bodybuilder and you're just doing the the freaking Hammer string chest press if you're not able to load four plates on there and go to town on the Hammer Strength chest press and you want to it's because you need to get more jacked you need to get bigger one thing that helps with that though is a guided Ecentric it's not a slow Ecentric again it could look relatively fast to someone watching but you feel that you're controlling the bar on the way down you're lifting athletically so you're not going super duper slow but you're guiding it on the way down to make sure that your bar path is good obviously we've all heard ERS back what's more important to me a lot of the time is not over retracting our shoulders or over pushing our shoulders back but more so putting our shoulders down that that in my opinion is what really locks you into a good upper back position try that out if you've had problems with uh upper back on the bench press but again like we talked about before pay attention to the sensory feedback pay attention to what feels loose pay attention to what feels off you don't have to overanalyze every freaking aspect Ed the bench press if it just feels off what feels off about the bench press it's not every single Quee it's one or two things it might be your upper back positioning it might be your wrists my wrists feel kind of junky on bench press oh it's because my wrists aren't turned in the right way maybe I'll try a bulldog rip oh wait that felt a lot better I felt a lot stronger listen to your sensory feedback take note of that and use that to infer what you need to do like we just said generally speaking though Long long arm guys what I find is really helpful is having really strong shoulders so doing your seated overhead presses doing your incline benching but for your shorter arm guys I find that that extended range of motion work is really helpful just because you have shorter arms and your your work isn't as stimulative by definition because you're not moving the bar as far but if you extend that range of motion you get to reap the benefits of that but for long arm guys just to go back to them real quick before we wrap up and and move on is that stronger shoulders typically help you in a common sticking point where a lot of times as we fatigue through especially a a set that has a decent amount of reps in it so my differentiating factor in being able to hit six or seven reps with 315 on bench versus hitting eight reps is being able to stay in my groove I find that when my shoulders are strong I'm able to stay in the groove better more consistently that that transition from off the chest back to lockout comes in play with a lot of shoulder strength and I find that when you get out of the groove my buddy Sam said the same thing he just words it a little differently when your shoulders are stronger you can just brute force yourself back into a good Groove versus if you just don't have the shoulder Mass bro you're cooked you're not getting the rep or it's just going to be a lot more difficult for either goal though whether it's getting bigger shoulders or extending that range of motion a good uh two birds with one stone lift is incline benching it's it's very useful for both things and it really attacks both of those parameters on top of attacking a common sticking point in the bench press which is the mid-range so a lot of us have trouble we say say one or two ways off the chest or with lockout the incline bench exaggerates that and if you get stronger on the incline bench it's going to be that much easier to push through that sticking point on the bench breast so really good tidbit for you there quick breakdown on performance versus size benching look man ultimately a bigger bench with reasonable form is just going to make your pecs bigger and the form there's extremes to it but ultimately it's not all that different so for strength higher Arch and whatever your stronger grip is that's going to be good for performance you're going to rely heavily on leg drive and potentially heaving if that's something that you're good at um it allows you to get pop off the bottom of the bench and uh get a little bit more stretch reflex I find that heaving for me is a strong technique along with leg drive you may find that just leg drivve and a softer touch is stronger for you whatever that is whatever your form is when you're strongest is obviously the performance style bench but the size based bench isn't all that different it's just that we're not necessarily trying to get the most leg Drive we're just planting our feet on the ground or on the bench just to be able to give a little bit more more stability we might not even be necessarily pausing Touch and Go isn't necessarily worse or or or lifting just to lift more weight if you're controlling the weight on the way down you're doing that guided Ecentric you're doing a light pause or a light touch to the chest rather that may even be a little bit better for pausing if you're releasing all tension at the bottom when you pause and I find that a constant tension bench is just as good and it's it can be a great technique to use but overall we are using softer touches than the on the performance-based press and and and less leg Drive overall now working with your leverages when it comes to pulls again sensory feedback is really important so if you're rounding like crazy on a deadlift for instance to get more speed off the floor but your lockout is trash you don't need to do rack pulls or a crazy deadlift accessory you need to fix your position off the floor if your bracing sucks and it it it it doesn't benefit your speed off the floor work on your bracing get your abs stronger learn how to use your belt better it's more important here though because the weights that we're lifting are a lot more substantial and if something is wrong you have nothing like a squat or a bench where you take it out of the rack and you store up Ecentric force from the Ecentric to be able to help you lift the weight up you either pick it up or you don't so those those feedback cues in terms of our form and what we feel when we do the Reps is more important than on the bench press in my opinion but generally speaking anyone whether you're long or short arm you know T-Rex arms or short arms is going to want to use a guided Ecentric as well again just to make sure that you're in a good start position rep to rep I think that lanky lifters can fall into wanting to optimize their pulls just because typically speaking when your arms are longer you tend to have a much easier time on deadlifts than someone whose arms are shorter so it may be appealing to you to just do what you're good at and not ever put on any muscle mass or focus on doing that but eventually you're going to come to a point where you're not going to be able to to leverage Max your way into freaking deadlifting more you're going to need to gain more muscle we all know those guys on Instagram where the only thing they ever post is their Deb lifts because they're they're not good at every other lift don't be that guy you can be good at everything when it comes to the stocke lifters though something that I think benefits them really well and this is what I picked up from a a good friend and mentor of Mine Dennis Arnold freaky D you you'd know him from the 550 bench press video where he kicks the the wet floor sign and knocks over the bucket and starts yelling um he's in his uncle freak era now so he's a lot more mellow than he was then but something that I picked up from him for coaching guys that I work with that have stock your builds is that work working from an elevated range of motion lets you get in more volume because the truth of the matter is is when your arms are shorter you have more range of motion on the deadlift so it beats you up a little bit more but if you work from an elevated pool so like a wagon wheel pool or a below the knee rack pool or something a block pull let you get in more pulling volume rdls sometimes are a good option as well um but yeah working from all range is em motion and sometimes even working from a little bit of a deficit to challenge yourself to a greater range of motion is a good idea sometimes across the board though I find for either hamstring curls are really helpful because look the stock your guys need to have more muscle to lift the weight because they have more range of motion and the lanky guys just need to gain some muscle so they don't hit a plateau an RDL or a stiff leg deadlift or a back extension I find is is really helpful for both for for both of those goals because for the St the stocky guy will working a big range of motion uh with a exercise that uses less weight so they're not as fatigued from it which means they can do more volume and more frequency so you may be able to do like a deadlift and then an RDL as opposed to a lanky dude that can deadlift from the floor twice a week but that lanky guy is going to benefit from just putting on more muscle with an RDL as well now last but not least when it comes to squats lanky lifters should not cope and say that they there's no way that they can build a good squat pattern I'm going to suggest to you patience first and foremost the the Band-Aid fix of doing a machine instead of learning how to squat on paper studied in a lab might be fine but in my experience as a coach when I have someone that doesn't build a fundamental movement pattern like that it just creates a cascading effect to where it's just going to cause problems later on down the load uh later on down the road when it comes to loading certain ranges of motion that they're just not accustomed to and their hips not being accustomed to moving a certain way it's just not good in my opinion so take the time to learn everyone can have a good-look squat for anyone I'm going to recommend heel elevation just because it's going to allow you to hit depth easier it'll allow you to stay more upright and for the long arm or long legs fellas especially um you're going to work within a strict standard of form something I want you to think about is is that your your knees want to stay as forward for as long as possible so that you're not only just using your back a lot of lankier lifters have more developed backs just because that's usually how it ends up working now we're not talking about stance width or anything like that that comes more in the way that your hips are built so if you're um it's the way that I could put it if you're more what's it called when your feet are out I think it's duck footed and then in is pigeon toed that is going to infer like how how wide is going to be strong for you or how narrow you'll figure that out just simply by if you just right now stand up and jump that's going to be more or less the the stance that you want to have on a squat just to start with now you can adjust that from here but just to start with that's going to be a good position for most people if I get up and I do that now even just me thinking about doing that I kind of put my feet and spay them out where they're supposed to be at it's a little tidbit for y'all but something that I want you to think about is stack your upper back and your hips that's going to allow you to stay as upright as possible some people that'll make sense of pushing your chest up some people that'll make sense of uh brace your upper back into the bar and bend the bar over your back different cues are going to make sense to different people but if you try to keep the upper back and the hips as in line as possible sometimes that can be bringing the bar from high bar to Mid bar for me that helps really really effectively keep the the bar and the weight over the midline of my body and keeps me upright think about that even foot pressure though you want to think about equal heels sides of your foot front of your foot don't even think about those three things actually bro just feel the your entire foot in the ground don't even think about the constituent parts of it feel your entire foot if you can't feel your entire foot in the ground while you're squatting just move your feet until you do that right it's not rocket science don't overthink it what I will say though is that your depth is going to depend on your stance withd and how how you uh push your your knees out it'll look different on camera depending upon where you record from so don't over obsess on that you know ultimately you can feel it if you're going as low as you want to go or if you go a little bit too high so go more based off of the sensory feedback and and and doing all those other things well one thing that I'll leave the longer legged lifters with is is that more than lik right now you could get into a decent looking squat it's just you might not be using the amount of weight that you want to use it's just that when you add more weight into it then that's when the the back starts to come into play and it starts to look more like a shripper squat so be real about what you actually need to work your actual legs and not just move the weight from from A to B Tempo squats are going to be helpful for that lanky lifter for that reason because you're intimately aware of what your body is doing if you're going really slow now for stocky lifters it's kind of the opposite we talked about how lanky lifters have stronger backs and posterior chains on average a lot of the time it might be opposite for the the stocky leg lifter you have like a shorter legs longer torso you're going to want to build your back strength via your hinges rdl's stiff leg deadlifts back extensions whatever you like and can do consistently just get it stronger over time and it'll help on your squat because I find that it's never leg strength strength it is a limiting factor a lot of times because when you're good at squatting bro your legs are just your legs are just big right so if you can get into a decent you know toshiki Yamamoto looking squat bro like your squats are just going to be big but that back strength might be limiting you in um confidence and heavier loads what I'm going to say though is that P squats are really helpful for those gifted squaders who tend to Plateau because they tend to form Max like with the the the lanky guys the deadlift they form Max you may form Max bouncing out of the hole spend some more time in that bottom end range of motioning you'll find that you can get a great training effect and build a lot of strength just from not skipping the essentially the bottom third of the range of motion and hold tension at the bottom of that pause don't be one of those people that pauses and then they they release all tension or they they rebounce out of the pause and actually pause as well so like one Mississippi two Mississippi three Missi that's a pause bro if you need to pause like that and so you can be trusted to just freaking pause without doing that do that through Mississippi count also squatting without a belt and knee sleeves also comes into play with form maxing if you remove those things on a maybe secondary or third squat Day You're Building strength without all the form maxing that's only going to benefit you long term last thing is just having a technique squat if you're going to squat three times or sometimes even two times a week because you're getting such touch a stimulus from that first or even second time a week that you're squatting you don't need to go heavy every time sometimes just working on technique and feeling is is really helpful um for those more gifted squatters but in in short when it comes to Performance versus size though mostly for for size you're going to go with a slower Ecentric you're going to hold tension at the bottom of your squats you may use constant tension you're not going to rest paws as much as you can or as as much as you may want to which means like at the top of the squat you rest for like 3 seconds and then you you do another rep you want to avoid doing that um and then when it comes for performance just whatever it takes to stand up safely and efficiently that doesn't mean kicking your back into it if you have longer legs it's like whatever form you have that lets you lift the most amount of weight and depth and range of motion you do that I will say though when it comes to getting big legs there's two things that you have to do and there's only two things that you can do there's weight maxing and then there's form maxing and increasing strength in either of those things some people use a weight maxed range of motion which is parallel or maybe not even parallel and they never really aim to get any stronger and then they have stick legs and then we have people who form Max and they never add any weight and they have stick legs you have to pursue the the good full range motion and add weight from there or if you're going to go parallel or parallel thereabouts you got to be committed to some really heavy squats and I'm talking some serious weight on there I'm talking five six seven plates getting big legs but if all you want is big legs man you can get that with moderate weights higher reps and big ranges of motion with that slower Ecentric and Tempo it's just something to keep in mind now we talked about the basic standard of form I want to talk a little bit about Advanced rep Cadence this is just going to be something that I've talked about in the past in the last video I know I talked about this more definitionally you're going to be manipulating the rep speed as you approach failure I use this a lot on my new program dragonfist uh just released on Boost Camp it's a really good addition to your uh coaching self- coaching experience so it has really detailed notes you can take a look at it I might post it at some point for for um on a public Google doc but just to say that that's something that I use a lot on that program you're doing this with either slower reps or longer pauses as you approach failure and this what this does is is that with most programs you're going to be building up over a course of weeks to a heavier weight over time whether that's a heavy set of 10 five or single just depends upon your goals sometimes when it comes to like after we do our main squat work and we have like a leg extension or something or a split Squat and we're using that lighter weight we don't want to do a million reps or be forced to use a lot of weight because ultimately we just be fatiguing oursel more and that's not why we're doing the lift we're doing the lift to get some more volume in or more practice or imp improve our flexibility with the split squats or whatever the case may be when you go to you slow down as you feel failure approaching so as soon as you start to feel that burn then you start to slow down more and more every rep it makes so that you don't have to use as many reps to reach a desired proximity to failure so you could go to failure with six reps instead of sometimes 15 depending upon how you do it bro just something to think about like I said it's great for those assistance exercises or even if you have like a secondary day where you already went heavy once per week you don't need to go heavy again and just be redundant at that point and get more out of less weight on that secondary lift something that you could try it on today is on on a curl something like a tricep press down or an extension and a leg isolation try this on a leg extension or hamstring C you're you're really going to like the way that it feels take a quick sip of coffee so we're about an hour and a half in y fellas having fun we're going to be talking next about avoiding redundancy I talked a little bit about it uh just a second ago with regards to saying we just went heavy earlier in the week there's no reason for us to go heavy again avoiding redundancy is really important and it comes into play again with that 10,000 ft view you need to be able to look at things objectively but in short once you do a good job with one physical quality move on to the next one more isn't always better more with strength training isn't better you know once you do a good job with with heavy deadlifts you wouldn't then go do heavy stiff-legged deadlifts and then from there do heavy ordl and then from there do heavy pause deadlifts and then from there do heavy rack pulls or with heavy bench press you wouldn't do freaking heavy bench and then close grip bench and then dead bench press from the pins it's redundant that's your heavy loaded stimulus what I'm going to recommend is that after you work your heavy loaded stimulus you start to look at either doing an extended range of motion which could be from a dip uh deep split squats back extension or just your general assistance volume to get in more volumes so if you just squatted you can do some leg press if you just benched you can do some dumbbell press can even be something where you're increasing stability just as a hole on that main heavy loaded lift will use squats for instance I have internal rotation split squats here a lot of times because of the way FAS hips are are built their ability to essentially push their hips in and out isn't as substantial as someone whose hips are built differently from them so something that fellow that I work with Andrew that I'm having him do now on his program 700lb squatter really really strong guy is split squats where he's just focusing on that internal rotation you know it's a lift that he gets a little bit of extra volume he's already squatting ass to ankles so it's it's not really extending the range of motion but it's working on a physical quality that we didn't work on a good program is going to do a good job with multiple of these physical qualities at once and aim to do a good job with all of them last thing I want to wrap up with before we go into uh auditing our stimulus so making sure that we're on the ball is just some cool useful intensity techniques these can be used honestly man I just like doing these for fun you don't need to do them so if you don't want to do them you're just a very I'm meat and potatoes I don't want to do anything but this you don't have to but just in inity techniques that you can use you can slow your reps down like we said as you approach failure we just talked about that that's something that's useful for everybody I'm going suggest that for everybody for your assistant work a lot of times I'mma put it to you like this man I'm not I'm just going to keep it real I observe that you have strong fellas like um we'll use ssj Bob for instance they may see him doing whatever weight on a tricep exercise or a curl or assistance movement and someone will weight Chase on the assistance exercise instead of focusing on doing it well or get or or reaping the benefit from that exercise slow them reps down man use the exercise for what it's for if you want to chase weight load up the bench 585 for starters bro don't wait Chase on the freaking curls don't wait chase at the expense of getting the benefit of the exercise tangent aside rest pause training cluster sets I put the channel on to these uh last year I originally heard about them from uh Josh Bryant's world renowned coach he really likes using them for things like um push Downs accessories for the arms leg extensions curls calves you can use it for abs what it basically means is you do three four reps rest three to 4 seconds uh do three to four more reps you rest a little bit more do a little bit more reps and you continue that over and over again resting no more than like 10 seconds between clusters for we'll say 5 minutes you put on a a some Jam that get you fired up could be the last thing you do in your workout and you just get the work in really good for work capacity really good for getting in more work and less time lengthen partials after your full range of motion lift I know good friend uh Jeff uh is a really big fan of these with his arm work and with his uh back exercises and particular basically you just do a full range emotion rep with good form and then to get more reps and more stimulus you just adjust the parameter in which you do the movement one thing I'll say though is is that be careful with this it works for uh Jeff because of his particular set of skills and his particular strengths and weaknesses he has good endurance and he enjoys and chases pain in the gym the average person just doesn't like that man so I would never say Chase lengthened or or or sloppy partial reps at the expense of good reps or full range of motion reps you could even Explore for certain accessories maybe doing a lengthened partial so I find that for overhead extension sometimes a lengthened partial and all that means is that you're not go you're not locking out basically sometimes you're able to focus on the muscle a little bit but a little bit better not even using it as an intensity technique it's just something to think about don't dis disclude I don't know if that's a word don't take any tools out of your toolbox just look at them as potential opportunities to get in good work last one anyone can use this is Back in Forth training with a partner that means you go I go that should be self-explanatory auditing an effective stimulus this is going to be really important everything is going to come together with this uh before we go into our our check our new checky yourself checklist this was a a banger from the last one but record yourself if possible there's going to be some things that obviously when you watch the video dang I meant to pause and I didn't pause or this squat was extremely high I'm just not going to post this stuff like that man sometimes you don't feel it in the moment upon review it's obvious though take detailed notes of how your set feels like I said pay attention to what you're doing pay attention this is the biggest thing that I can give you this is the same thing my dad us I'm not trying to talk to you like you're my son I'm just saying this is where I learned it from he used to always say pay attention and there would be some expletives that would come with it but you know pay attention on what you're doing right so if you're driving your car and you're not pay attention you're going to hit somebody if you're lifting weights and you're not paying attention you're not going to do things the way you want to do them allow for that margin of error that doesn't mean get sloppy on purpose but that means just focus on doing well enough allow to get either a little sloppier or a little bit more refined or right on right on the point it it's going to average out to being what you're looking for last but not least if you just go too sloppy or you form Max too much retake the weights don't increase the weight from there don't increase the the the Reps don't build Upon A shaky Foundation and much the same for strength adaptation slow down your progression if you notice that your form is kind of sloppy on 70% you're not then going to go to 75% you're going to go to maybe 72 or 73 and and focus more on those internal cues and that that margin of error before you start to apply on more weight just course correct it's not the end of the world if you're not perfect but just try to be better last but not least uh think about it like this man if you asked a friend of yours that was very blunt what they thought about that what would they say I shouldn't have to explain that to you bro the checky yourself checklist I had this on the last video I I think a downfall of it though is that although the tips were useful they were really only um not surface level but just basic things and and not more everyday challenges that you may face as you continue on your weightlifting Journey so real quick this is more or less similar expanded upon what we had on last time the intermediate and Advance is more or uh is more new but for new lifters this is what I want you to think about the idea that as you advance you don't need to think about all these things as you're intermediate right just let me just get that out the way when you're intermediate you shouldn't have to ask yourself all these things you should as an intermediate lifter be checking yourself as an intermediate lifter you shouldn't have to be told am I eating enough every day am I hydrating am I prioritizing sleep am I handling my handling my non trining variables am I changeing my programs every two seconds because I saw some reuter do freaking special exercise on Instagram as a new lifter you just want to do your best with those non-training variables that we just covered that's all for the intermediate lifter this is where you start asking yourself more substantive questions so am I slipping up on those basic things so you might be doing good with your eating and your effort and not changing your program around but you're not sleeping enough you may be eating enough calories and protein but your food isn't of good quality you're messing up on basic things man you're you're making beginner mistakes as an intermediate lifter this is why intermediate lifters stay intermediate lifters and don't get exceptional results it's because they mess up on the basics so ask yourself what basic things am I messing up on if anything also am I ensuring that I'm taking good log book notes some of the sensory feedback stuff starts to become more and more important the more weight that you load on the bar as an intermediate lifter you're now starting to lift weights relative to your start point that are heavy enough to Jack you up if you don't pay attention to what you're doing if you're not paying attention while you're doing it if you're not taking cognitive notes of what felt good what felt bad what you could do better I have my notebook in my hand right now you know as I'm taking time stamps for everything but I can look through the same notebook and find detailed sensory feedback notes about everything it's just something that you want to start to pay more attention to as an intermediate lifter last but not least come on man how often are you doing something that you have you you have no business doing and you know it enough said now again with the advanced checklist the idea is is that you you shouldn't be checking yourself on a lot of this intermediate stuff you're asking yourself a different set of questions you should as an advanced athlete and if you're not doing all these things you're not an advanced athlete right so if you're you're strong and you eat like a charlatan you're not Advanced athlete you're not you're just you're some strong H you're a horse but you're not an advanced lifter you're an advanced lifter does all these things without needing to check themsel on it as an advanced lifter you have to check yourself on different things though are you messing up on the things that you don't feel like doing right so for instance if you know that you got split squats that your coach put in or that you put in because your hips feel messed up when you don't have them but you you phone them in or sometimes you do them or sometimes you don't do them start doing your split squats bro do you make changes before you truly see how something is affecting you I mentioned earlier that uh advanced lifter sometimes Tinker with their programs a little bit more because we have more experience to be able to cognitively or experientially know what something does a little quicker than a newer lifter or an intermediate lifter might be able to identify but that doesn't mean that we're going to see the immediate benefit of something a couple sessions into doing it you need to give it time next can you pinpoint what is actually moving the needle in your training I think because we we have the tendency to Tinker a lot sometimes we could have a million things that are working cool helpful physical qualities that aren't actually moving the needle next thing this is just I see this a lot in advanced lifters are you coping like you know you should be doing something I don't need to do that because of such and listen man yes you do next is more of like the ever betterment of our process piece that I talked on a little bit but how many areas of opportunities do you have where you can do something slightly better if you say zero you miss the entire point that was a trick question you should be able to say yeah I could eat a little bit more chicken in this meal or yeah I I should be salting more of my food because I find that I'm dehydrated later in the day because I'm not retaining my water yeah and I should be drinking a little bit more water too maybe I'll standardize the amount of water I drink and I'll eat a little bit more fruit instead of you know things that don't have water in them you you know I could do that a little bit better and yeah when I go to bed I think I'm going to I think I'm going to stay on YouTube for 15 minutes instead of 30 minutes it's a little bit better let me get to sleeve a little quicker you should be able to look at everything that you do and and and see that you can do things a little bit better even if you're mostly on point last but not least are you confirming your own biases I think that a lot of advanced lifters even if they start off as that like I call it the Seeker type where they're just seeking betterment sometimes when you get really good at something especially when you get better at other people substantially sometimes you start to think yeah my way or the highway I have nothing to learn are you learning or are you confirming your own biases with the information you take in in other words are you creating an echo chamber part of what we talked about comes into play with determining what type of lifter you are maybe you don't know we're going to quickly talk about each but determining what type of lifter you are is just going to infer what you need to focus focusing on on a mental aspect first and foremost I just want to build some muscle you're just a more laid-back type of lifter that may not need to take a lot of this stuff as seriously you may not need to adhere to your process as much as someone who wants to put on as much muscle as possible you you you you may have to evaluate if that's what makes sense for you next is the person that wants to const stantly improve themselves this is someone that is going to want to adhere to the process and not be so mechanistic with their thinking and and look at things specifically from that 10,000 foot view we all should be doing that as often as we can but I find the person that wants to improve themsel constantly often tends to look at those smaller details and they tend to be more of a tinkerer than someone that could look at things objectively much the same for someone that's easily overwhelmed sometimes people who are overwhelmed put more importance on those nuts and bolts than they need to and they need to look at things from an overarching perspective for someone that's constantly confused it's the opposite thing so they may understand like yeah I need to go to the freaking gym and and and work hard what's this guy talking about percentages for no I'm not doing that man or man that's confusing I won't do that sometimes looking at things with a more detailed look for this type of person is something that you to do you don't need to be told that go to bed on time I'm doing that anyway I'm working hard anyway I'm eating food that makes me feel strong because that's just what I do but you may need to thinking more about the programming stuff next is two of the worst types of lifters that you can be and I say worse because you're going to need the most either self- coaching or coaching or attitude adjustment I'm the best meaning you're essentially a narcissist basically and it's over you're you're a Doomer right so if you think you're better than everybody bro you you you're you're going to be humbled so think less in the capacity of you're entitled to your greatness then I'm good at this and I'm going to aim to get better and sometimes people need to be humbled sometimes it's not something that you could just be objective about because the truth is some people just feel that way about themselves they need to be humbled likewise with people that are that are just doomers and feel like it's over you need to be humbled but in the opposite direction you need to be shown that your actions good or bad have direct impact on what you get from it so you need to be shown that once you start to pay attention to these things and optimize what you can optimize and do what you can you start to get a better return from the effort that you put in I want to talk next and transition into creating more effective and and consistent in the gym habits you're probably doing some of these already or most of them but real quickly proper intensity trying hard enough but also not try Harding meaning if it's time for you to bench 225 for some sets of 20 don't load up 275 just to get an Instagram clip don't load up 315 just to get an Instagram clip if it's time for you to deadlift 405 don't load up 600 for an Instagram clip fix your form you know your form's messed up man you know that you're fudging your form because you're try Harding don't do that fix your form refueling and resting properly resting properly doesn't just mean taking enough rest it means not resting too much so don't take 10 minutes in between sets when you know you should be taking four refueling just means have like an intro workout it's just helpful to have snacks in your bag fruit like bananas um electrolyte drinks those are good paying attention good log booking which we've talked about a lot up until this point and we'll talk about a little bit more and last but not least not coping stop avoiding things that are hard and only doing the stuff that you're good at more effective log booking we've talked a lot about that just some high level points just to refresh your memory before we go into um some of the final topics in the self- coaching uh part of this video like I said this is the most important part of this video this is the VD part of the video where like I know some people are going to watch this from beginning to end but this is the type this is the part where I want you to watch this from beginning to end because it's important now when it comes to effective log booking like we said it's more than just tracking sets and Reps it has to be combined with good video footage or even looking in a mirror if you you you know you don't have something to record or you can't record in your gym when it's applicable so like some things you're not going to be able to look at into a a mirror while you bench press or on certain exercises like machines you're not be able to look into a mirror but you can look into a mirror when you um deadlift you can look into a mirror when you squat you can look into a mirror when you're doing your curls your uh extensions with a dumbbell more importantly you're going to want to employ that 10,000 foot view objectivity be detached think about how would I feel if my favorite lifter was looking at what I was doing what would they write about this from their perspective they would say that I went too fast here I slow down here I went too hard here next time I'll do better you're taking into account how easy your set was how clean did the set look how clean did it feel if it didn't feel clean that means your internal cues were bad even if it looked fast and it looked clean much the same if you're if it felt kind of bad or or not bad but slow but it it moved really slow then you're really messing up but if it moves slow but it felt fast that means you got good internal cues and you need to take note of that whatever you did in that setup is something that you need to try to repeat consistently when something goes well write it down when something goes really wrong write it down and read back the notes that you take to determine if you're taking good notes or not like if you're C like if you're actively compartmentalizing and coping in your notes scratch that Jank out and and keep it real something really big that's helped me have a great rate of progress as an advanced lifter and especially when compared to other Advanced lifters is picking that lowest tanging fruit you always have to go after that easiest win and avoiding biting off more than you can chew this is really important because it creates something that I call specifically mental momentum but momentum in general is very key and we'll talk about that in later section this is internalized one way of thinking of it is as listen if this was this easy this week next week I'm going to be way ahead of the curve and it's going to be smooth sailing up until the pr those lowest hanging fruits change over time though so your your lowest hanging fruit might be just generally developing yourself because you just got into the gym when you're Advanced your lowest hanging fruit could be your shoulders are not ahead of the curve like for example my lowest hanging fruits right now I would say are my shoulders and I would say forearm strength like grip strength and things like that I have other things that I'm seeing good rate of progress on but those are things that I'm seeing faster rate of progress on because they're not as developed as say I've put a lot of size on my legs on my arms just all my muscles my bigger muscles in general but the shoulders are something that although they are strong they're not as strong relative as I would like them to be and it's a low hanging fruit for me but you're always evaluating what those biggest areas of opportunity are whether that's in your process or in your muscle groups when it comes to identifying your lowest hanging fruits and and and log booking well and just running a good program and having a good rate of progress you want to identify your key performance metrics they're going to be what moves the needle for you most in your program so absent of everything else you need to be able to look at a list of like 10 to 12 movements that if you did nothing but these like if you just pressed for time you couldn't do anything but these lifts you could make great progress you wouldn't make the best progress you may make 80% progress instead of 100 but you can keep the needle moving forward it helps you to avoid fluffing your program so if you're hitting all your performance metrics it isn't just hit squat bench deadlift go home it's hit all your performance metrics which include a variety of movements that hit a lot of different muscles from a lot of different angles that hit a lot of different physical qualities you know and you may only need one or two things in addition to those things on your program per workout instead of having four or five things like a lot of new and intermediate lifters will fall into even even Advanced lifters do the same thing the truth of the matter is is that sometimes you only need that one exercise or sometimes no exercises in addition to the performance metrics that you do but determining them is just about your common sense though man so if you're running a program and it has I have for example here some some bench exercises that y'all can read but it we use squats for instance if you have barbell back squats leg press leg extensions [ __ ] squats hip induction what's moving the needle free the most use your common sense this is test I'll let you answer in the comments more than likely it's going to be your squats and your hip adduction your hip adduction because your adductors don't get maximally stretched on Squat and the squat because that's generally worked your entire leg already yes the leg press helps it gives you extra volume yes the leg extension certainly help it's working a part of your quad that doesn't really get worked on squats but if you did nothing but squats and hip adduction you would be getting 80% of that session's benefit so if you're stretched for time you can just do those two things or if that's all that you want is 80% you do those two things when it comes to your performance metrics though those standards of form are very important though so everything that we just covered about that is going to really need to get applied there when it comes to Performance metrics though we have a fear of missing out we feel that like we we need to do every single exercise in our program I used to get I'm not going to lie not a lot of things like annoy me when it when it just in general because I don't I'm a laidback guy not a lot of things annoy me but what really annoys me really gets on my nerves I hate when I do an exercise and I stop doing it to do something else and people are just interrogating me about why I'm not doing that exercise anymore like I thought you said this was good for that and this and that why aren't you doing that you're missing out on this I'm like man unfortunately I can't do every exercise I think is ridiculously chatty at once bro when it comes to that fear missing out you're going to want to employ the 10,000 ft view we're going to continue to talk about this is this something that I'm doing already is this as effective as something that I'm doing already am I already have fun in progressing in my training this doesn't actually attack any of my low hanging fruits and my low hanging fruits are just outside of the scope of this exercise in general my long hanging fruits like I said are probably shoulders and forearms so just to give you an example the very last two things that we're going to cover before we wrap up the self- coaching aspect of the berserk method is managing the good times and the bad times in your training and what a normal day-to-day session should look like what what are your expectations in terms of a day-to-day session we'll start with the good times good times good times the good times in your train training if you have a great session feel good about it don't get too big for your Brites though don't think that just because you had a good session that like yeah 250 felt great this week so instead of doing 260 next week I'm going to do 280 don't do that don't fudge your form next time to try to yeah if I did 250 this way what if I what if I did this I could do two two freaking 90 next time don't change the form to chase the higher weight or the higher rep counts or to chase a perceived outcome because then we're not adhering to our margin of error we're not adhering to our standard of form the good times is easier to do that because when you're up you're not thinking about things as logically you're thinking more emotionally try to keep that 10,000 foot view this was a good session I'm ahead I should try to stay ahead now what's a normal session some people might have the perception that what I just described the good session to be if it ain't that it's a bad session here's what a normal session is here's what you should expect and that you should learn to be happy with you should observe some general progression on most things when you train on some level if it's not weight it's reps if it's not reps it's in movement quality if it's not in movement quality you may have just had more fun that day or if you didn't progress on the movement at all you progressed on other movements in your program that's a normal session you should feel relatively fired up before and after right so you should be excited to train and you should leave feeling like damn that was a good workout you should never on a normal session feel like damn that was the terrible that's not a normal session it's not either only good or bad and a lot of people have the perception that if it's not the good times what I just described here that it's bad also you can expect some things in your training to be more challenging to progress on in others that doesn't mean that necessarily you're doing something wrong as long as week to week month to month you are observing either again you if you added a rep to the exercise you are doing a good job especially if you're more intermediate or Advanced and it's something that you can't really add that much weight to like a overhead press for instance yeah man how much how much weight do you expect to add to a overhead press year over year compared to a deadlift where you're lifting a third or a quarter of the weight just think of it that way even like a bigger deal if you're doing a curl which is like a strong curl I expect a guy that can curl the 70s with good form to have legit 20inch arms bro you would think with like a a good times only mindset that if you're not freaking adding 10% to the weight you're curling every time that you're messing up here's what a bad session would look like and how to manage it mentally don't beat yourself up I don't only mean that in an empathetic way like I don't want you to feel bad that you had a bad session or feel like it's the end of the world but also as I said a lot of people use beating themselves up as a reason to give up and make themselves feel better never give up bro don't cope all right don't try to make yourself feel better all right don't beat yourself up but don't use this as an opport to confirm a negative bias and to point your pinky up in the air and say I told you so I ain't good for nothing and I tried to tell you my genetics were terrible fellas the truth of the matter is that most people with terrible genetics they go to the gym and instantly see that it just ain't for them and they don't lift weights most people who lift weights regularly have average genetics right so take accountability for your rate of progression enough said again when it comes the bad times just like with the good times take that objective view the 10,000 fot view you had a bad session was there anything that you did before the workout in terms of your diet your non-training factors or during the session contribute to your performance did you maybe notice that during your warm-ups that your form was a little janky and the Reps felt weird and when you were on your last warm-up it felt kind of heavy because your reps felt kind of weird but you pushed for it anyway that contributed to your negative session on that movement that's something that you could have did better that you don't beat yourself up on but you keep objective about what you did and what you can do better next time I think I had a fell last week on um one of my programs it was for a Q&A say something along the lines of it was his PR weight and he'll know he is because I told him I was going to talk about this he said something along the lines that it was time for him to hit his PR set of eight and he got three reps and I said I would talk about this on the video and then he later said to me and he was being objective he said yeah there were the warning signs were there we just tend to want to force things instead of looking at why things are the way they are and what we can do better you know don't have that guts was a really big cul of this and berserk sometimes he didn't see what was in front of him before he lost it you know and once once something's lost it's not the same once you try to get it again bubbles of futility it's a great ch if you don't read any of Berserk read that chapter it's amazing um but yeah you're going to take note of what failed off don't make massive changes don't change anything at all you don't need to massively change your program because you have a bad session consider evaluating your checky yourself checklist whatever that is so if you're a new lifter check that new lifter checky yourself checklist if you're intermediate Advanced do that but again please do not make massive changes based after a freaking oddly specific real that they're presenting a problem that's kind of similar to yours because that's how you end up over tinkering so just to wrap up chapter two before we get into practical Training Concepts and that'll just be building on the nuts and bolts that we established and the Third Edition and just distilling it in a way that I feel is going to be instantly helpful for most people but wrapping up chapter two self- coaching is all about taking that 10,000 foot View and being detached from what you did it's about paying attention to what you're doing while you're doing it though so you're in the gym you're present in the moment but you're also not putting your ego into it right you're you're thinking about what would my coach think if he was looking at what I was doing what would Dan Green think about if he saw me doing it this way what would he say about it that's the Viewpoint that you want to have you're coaching yourself self- coaching is not about running the best program here's the truth of the matter bro I'm going keep it a green bean with you someone could take a program like Raider run it for the rest of their life and they they're smoking you on staying accountable they're smoking you on eating to support your training they have the same genetics as you and they will make much better progress than you if you run an individualized program created by a coach that you could pay whatever amount of money you want to pay for it you could research as much programming stuff as you want to research but you're not doing the the things that you're supposed to be doing outside the gym and in the gym you're not taking good notes they're going to smoke you they're going to MOG you into Oblivion bro it is what it is it's less about specific tools and how you do them last but not least allow margin of error check yourself before or you wreck yourself chapter three is practical Training Concepts and this is one of my favorite pieces of art um from berserk this is from the conviction Arc again if you don't want to read any part of Berserk other than the conviction Arc it it has a lot of the more popular thematic pieces that they touch on and if you're looking for something that is just legit great literature berserk as a whole is great literature but that part of it is like especially thought-provoking when it comes to practical Training Concepts I talked a little bit about this before but the guy that is is running a good enough program extremely well is going to MOG you all time all day every day methods are many PR principles are few maybe I should call it something other than the berserk method because it's more of like a set of principles than anything the berserk principle doesn't sound as as cool at this at this point though I'm not going to lie if I had a time machine I might have named it the berserk principles man even that sounds kind of lame I don't know but self- coaching is only going to do what it needs to do if all aspects of what you're doing are maxed out not just throwing a bunch of [ __ ] at a wall and seeing what it does program design is more of a mechanistic thing in that regard I would say it's more subjective and based on the person but again for us to be able to do that we need to be able to get an objective view of what we need and how we're going to do it with a 10,000 foot view this is all just a preface that please if you need help with the self- coaching aspect I still want you to listen to this programming stuff but you need to you need to fix your foundation and the way that you view things before you start to look at how you're going to design them you know mechanistically on a detailed sense and for anyone who needs to hear this programs take longer than a session or even multiple sessions to to to Bear visible results whether that's either you're putting on muscle or you're getting substantively stronger right so just because you you you could run the best bench program but if you run it for three weeks and then try to max out you you likely are not going to be any stronger you need to run it and run it multiple times to see an appreciable difference and as I said basic programming always works enough just do this this was one of my favorite and uh most formative YouTube Fitness videos that I've ever consumed I don't I'm G be honest with you man what what Eric said on that video didn't really it didn't really make sense to me bro I'm not going to lie but just the idea of breaking something down into something basic and just doing that and doing it well was something that like it it really really helped me conceptualize a lot of things in life so that's why I named this enough just do this for most people that and even the fellas it just skipped to this part for most people who are watching this video just eating well sleeping good doing your non training variables like a rock star you're trying hard you could run Raider which is a a program that you could run it on my Excel spreadsheet which is somewhere in my video playlist or or you can run it on Boost Camp I don't really care what you do if you run that program and you do all those things well you run it to a tea you don't change anything and you just eat well sleep well you try hard you have a good work life balance you're going to get way more jacked than your counterparts it is what it is the fellow who moves the big rocks is always going to MOG the one collecting pennies that's the honest truth so if that's what you want that's all you need to do you can learn how to self coach after that but while you're learning the basics just do that even outside of that the solution to the problem that you're having is more than likely extremely simple you're always going to want to pick that simple solution so I was chatting with my buddy Sam before I I put this presentation together because I wanted to make sure that I I stressed certain parts of this and and and downloading Knowledge from my brain sometimes I forget to include things in here that I wanted and I I watch it back and I'm like the video doesn't suck but like I'm a harsh critic of myself I'm like why didn't I talk about this like but um we were talking about this and it's like yeah dude if you just want bigger arm just find a curl that you like a couple curls that you like and train them as hard as you can as often as you can and you're going to get much bigger arms the guy that hyper analyzes their arm programming and and doesn't attack it with that simple and aggressive solution is not going to get as good results when it comes to anything programming related though by now you're you're better at looking at things objectively I hope so if you aren't please go watch the uh the self- coaching part of the video from beginning to end but by now when it comes to implementing things mechanistically or as I said on a detailed manner think problem versus solution when you're implementing something new to your program or you're running a new program you want to think again problem versus solution what am I trying to do like what problem am I trying to solve I for you know we could say for instance lifter a he could say I have uh 14inch arms I want 16inch arms I should run a program that has me training my arms hard and often and because I want to train them hard and often I'm going to try and intensity techniques for my arms and do these exercises for this long problem versus solution the solution is very simple you want bigger arms you just train them more often you want to ask yourself as well how does this program make it easier to do things that I'm already doing or or or streamline them in another sense does it do either of those things does it make the program more fun does what you're adding to the program make it more fun if it doesn't do those things then it's not necessary to add it to your program just because it seems smart on paper we got a lot of beginner and intermediate lifters that can rattle off tons of just basically just waffling about things that they heard you know Dr Mike say Greg duet athleen x uh the the the the Jeremy guy with the freaking fancy editing they could rattle off a lot of booksart knowledge and things that sound smart but they have no idea how that practically applies because it doesn't there's no they they're not fitting the problem with the solution they're fitting a solution and just applying it haphazardly now when it comes to the problem and the solution and making individualized changes there's some guidelines that I have that I want you to use they're very simple first and foremost you have to have the base of a program that works generally well first again Raider Beast Slayer Dragon Fist these are all programs that you can find that I've made any free program for the most part that I've written is generally on a foundational level went WR written well enough that it'll get the job done before you make any individualized changes to it though you need to have that base there and you need to have ran that program for an appreciable of time to know what you actually need right so if you have the goal I want bigger arms so I'm going to take this program that I haven't ran yet and I'm going to change it to add 10 more sets of arms than it has now I it's too much volume it didn't work for me I guess I'll do a different one how about if you ran the program you found it wow I'm my arms are growing I'm only doing six sets and I don't need any more than that right now you have to run it first to see what you need and it has to be for an appreciable amount of time which means you run it to its completion at least once or twice now when it comes to making individualized changes just keep in mind that you have a budget you have a maximum amount of things you can do in a session and still and it still be productive you have a certain amount of volume or intensity or number of exercises that you can do before you go over a budget you can increase that budget but you have a budget you you're going to have a limit to what you can do in the gym when it comes to making the actual changes though I I have three things that I want you to go by your goals the fun factor and then exploring things that you may be interested in or exploring new Staples if you can do more of something and recover from it in general this is a good change that you can make to a program this is something that you can do this could be in relation to your goals for instance if you have the goal getting bigger arms and you notice that like hey at the end of the week you know I've I've gone two days without training my arms I feel like I can train my arms on Saturday so I think I'll do it three times a week and wow three times a week works great for me it worked good two times a week but three times a week is working even better when it comes to doing something fun if it's just something that you find cool or it makes you look jacked while you do it and you can fit it in your budget it doesn't over fatigue you it doesn't take away from the meat and potatoes of what you're doing and it doesn't go over that budget go for it add it in like I said this is a hobby it needs to be fun for you if it spices things up for you and it doesn't really affect things one way or the other go for it bro you don't always have to do something because like it's it's optimal you just do it because it's fun now you're you're moving those big rocks still you're still doing the things that are getting you the good gains but listen man if you want to do some freaking odd lifting and it's not taken away from your regular squats and deadlifts go for it it's not taken away from your hack squats or whatever you're doing go for it and also if you're curious about something inherently when it comes to good program design there is enough leeway in in terms of how things are laid out that if you just wanted to say explore like a new cool new ab exercise or a cool new forearm exercise or or pull a rope or something like that you're curious about it just try it and go for it and see how it works but don't go overboard when you add things when it comes to the training budget though I want to go into more detail with this in short it's how much total volume you can potentially do like we just talked about and how many exercises you can do how intense you can do you have certain dials that you can turn in your training and how far that you can turn them that's what your training budget is representative of the thing when it comes to your budget though is just just because you can do more or you can maximize your budget doesn't mean that you should do that no one when they I'm looking at my wife now just because you can maximize a budget doesn't mean that you should sometimes people just like are are Big Spenders but that doesn't mean that you should you should do that you should leave leeway in your budget just in case you need to get something else she's a big spender um but when it comes to your budget it does increase over time your work capacity your ability to do more exercises more volume and more intensity does tend to increase naturally over time with regards to your level of physical development provided that you're just not neglecting doing higher rep sets in your training a training budget that has room for exploration is going to be important because ultimately like we talked about at the very beginning the buyin is extremely important and the buyin and that small novelty and not the massive sweeping changes is going to be you know part of the side side quest thing that we also talked about things that keep you incentivized and spice up things and make you appreciate the basics more now when it comes to increasing your training budget some people are probably trying to think about ways to to hack the system and and and be able to be able to be an ultra marathon runner and climb Mount Everest and bench press 700 lb and listen most people won't need to actually actively try to increase their training budget because as we said it's going to naturally increase as a consequence of you progressing in your training and sleeping well enough and things like that mostly I would say there are two groups of people that I could think about fellas that are really overweight or really detrained from just doing multiple reps in a set can benefit from increasing their training budget conditioning is going to come into play with doing that there's a couple different cool ways that you can do that you can do intra session which means in the middle of your session during your session or you can do it post session which means after your session intra session so during your session you don't even really have to do anything fancy you can do super sets which means just say you have a press and a pull you just go press then pull instead of press rest press rest press rest then your pulls press pull rest press pull rest that's a super set cluster sets we talked about those quickly four reps rest three seconds four rest four reps rest three seconds that's a freaking tongue twister my goodness you know another thing I just noticed fellas I didn't really say golden tidbits a lot I had people clocking me on my freaking golden tidbits the last time I'm going to start saying it more next Golden tidbit just low rest on small movements so you small movements being tricep press Downs um curls things like that to where form does break down a little bit more than we would we would like to ideally it's not something like a deadlift where if your form breaks down substantially you could hurt yourself a post session method that I really think anyone would enjoy is just interval work or interval sprints on a bike so you go fast fast 30 seconds go slow for 15 30 seconds go fast so on and so forth until you're tired you know you you can do conditioning for fun that being said and I actually have that written here but when it comes to doing that like we talked about at the beginning with setting goals the person who chases two hairs tends to catch neither meaning if you're doing two things that are totally different from one another we're not talking about catching two hairs that are running in the same direction we're talking about chasing a hair that's running left versus one that's running right you can't run left and right in the same direction at the same time bro it's impossible you know unless you literally create another clone of yourself and each clone runs after the hair then then you can chase two hairs at once but if you're a singular human being listen man you can do conditioning for fun but if you're trying to run freaking Ultra marathons and and deadlift 700 lb I'm sorry all due respect people who say that they can you know they're they're hybrid athletes that's cool and all that I'm not saying that doesn't exist but you could do either of the things that you are good at better if you focused on one versus the other and I'm not saying it's wrong for you to do that but again if you have the goal of doing one thing you do that thing and if you want to do something for fun know that there is a limit to how far that you can get in that before there has to be some take and uh some give and take and what you're doing when it comes to the frequency in which you make changes to your program I like to go by a 4-we rule four weeks is long enough that one you give your your change an honest shot because you need to be able to give an honest shot to what you're doing the changes that you make in general it it should never substantially alter the course of your program so it at best it should it should supplement something that is already working but if it's something that didn't work well it shouldn't negatively impact the rest of your program or sheesh if it does you should especially ask it after four weeks right because with four weeks you have enough time especially if you're properly integrating into your your training program where you've exhausted like your newbie gains on it your neuro games your neuro efficiency all right so when you add something in totally new you're going to get really good at it really quickly or better at it really quickly after 4 weeks if you've observed good forward progression after that so on week five you're like yeah this is still working for me this is working good then the change is good if you're not there's two things you can do you can audit yourself meaning this didn't work well because I wasn't bought into it so I didn't train it hard and didn't really push it the way it was supposed to be pushed my form was garbage I don't really care about it that could be a reason in of itself that you don't need to have it in your program maybe you know if you're not b into it there's no reason for you to be doing it you're doing something that's working really well but also that's also maturity piece so you have to kind of again not COPE in that regard and Coach yourself I'm just giving you some food for thought but if you did it the way it was supposed to be done and you did it effectively and it just didn't work the way you wanted it to you can consider taking it out you don't need to do it you're doing something overall with your program that works really well you don't need to do this don't do it I also have a tier system that I like to um conceptualize when it when it comes to making changes so if if I have a athlete that I'm working with that says you know you know what's up P can I uh talk to you about our next couple training blocks just some things I want to try and they come to me with some [ __ ] bro I'm like no man we ain't even gonna be able to do that but we can do this other thing that you talked about so let's talk about that the higher the tier the better of a reason you better have in your mind for making this change starting with tier zero changing your program entirely you you better have a really good reason for changing your programing it has to just fundamentally like you're doing everything that you can to make this program work you're running it properly you've selected proper exercises you're eating enough you're sleeping enough you're trying you're running the program with the progressions the way that they're supposed to be ran and it's just not working for you it could be a [ __ ] program you could need to change it but it could be you that needs to change tier zero you better have a darn good reason tier one not as substantial but still pretty substantial is changing a main performance metric you shouldn't be changing what your main performance metric is so like year over year as this increases I'm getting bigger or stronger I have Squad St work I have that written that way because of like the SpongeBob Meme where he's he's he's talking like a a fool but yeah man just don't don't cope right so are squats not working or are you not making the squats work for you is is hack squat not working or you not making it work for you is bench press not working or you not making it work for you right you better have a good justification to massively changing a performance metric so for instance um a while ago I made a video talking about there was a period of time where I wasn't going to be bench pressing as a main um performance met I was going to explore calisthenics and I gave my reasons for wanting to do it I had already built a lot of bench pressing strength and I wanted to try something new and explore other things and part of the give and take was me saying hey man my chest and triceps is ahead of the curve this works well for me let's do that let's change it and again that's very different from someone who's new and I talked about this in the video CU you don't want to cope when you do these things that's very different from someone who's new sucks at bench pressing doesn't like bench pressing oh yeah I can get by with rings it's not what was communicated so tier one big big justification you better have tier two is almost important as tier one but changing a progression model on a performance metric you need to be following the program the way it's written at least a couple times before you decide if the progression model is working or not especially if you're new or intermediate because often times new and intermed Med lifters tend to have unrealistic expectations as to how quickly something should be working right so the progression model should stay the same most progression models work just fine we don't need a fancy progression model part of coaching comes into play with working with someone who who is checking a lot of the big boxes but just can't be objective about certain things in their training or just doesn't want to think about certain things right but if they were to run any of my free programs they' still get pretty good results right that's because all progression models work well enough sometimes we can pick the best tool for the job but most progression models work well enough tier three is is less important but still pretty important changing your assistance exercises around listen if you're constantly changing those assistance exercises around it's not the end of the world because we're still doing a good job with our performance metrics but maybe you need to check that last 10 to 20% and you're only getting about 10% because 5 to 10% because you're constantly changing those assistance exercises around and not maximizing the benefits tier four is more of like a maturity piece in a lot of a lot of experiences I've had just observing things like people adding more volume when they don't need to you don't need to do more volume just because you want to do more volume volume is a dial that you turn to keep the gravy train rolling if the gravy train is rolling at the speed of light bro why are you adding more fuel into it just you're already you're already grooving bro tier five is something that you don't need to have a great you know distinction or Reason to to add it to your program just exploring a new movement for fun you're checking all your major boxes through tier zero and four you know give your s some sort of justification for doing a fun movement but it doesn't need to be something profound like changing your program last thing that I want to cover I believe before we talk about more of common mistakes that I see with lifters and then just um some good progression models that I want you to try is creating momentum in your training we talked about creating mental momentum this is physical momentum the idea of this is is that momentum is important for creating forward progression and you need to be able to see it you need to be able to see where you're going to be able to get there if you're going nowhere you need to be able to see that too and that means that there's something wrong with what you're you're you're doing there's something wrong with the way that you're interacting with this program whether it's you're going too hard too quickly your non-training variables are in are not where they're supposed to be at but if you're running a good enough program and you're not making progress on it it's not because something is out of your control there's something going on and you need to be able to do a 10,000 ft View and see where you're interacting with it at you need to be able to take that accountability because that momentum is important and the more advanced that you get the harder it is to create that momentum because your loads are getting heavier it's a lot easier to push a a freaking bosu ball across the gym than it is a sled but you can still do it it's just a lot harder but it's also more important when you're Advanced because again you can push the bosu ball kind of suboptimally and still push it across the gym but if you use bad technique and you're not pacing yourself while you're pushing the sled you're not going to push it as far as someone who's pacing theirself out well when it comes to creating momentum for the new lifter I do not want you to overthink it follow a well-written program to a te you don't more than likely need to Tinker with it past if you find certain exercises on the program to be chattier than you just do the ones that seem cooler to you but more than likely just run it to a te don't even change the volume just push yourself push yourself to capabilities that you don't think that you're capable of because I find that with a lot of very new lifters you're a lot better than you think you are right push yourself don't obsess over your form meaning have that margin of error because I tell you what the new lifter that focuses on good enough form within a margin of error versus one that hyper assesses on form and doesn't ever add any weight one gets way better results than the other that's the honest truth you're going to focus on establishing things like your proper adherence to your non-trading variables and what your program is asking you to do and start good log booking start yeah this felt good uh I don't really I'm not really sure why my upper back felt this way on squats but felt pretty good maybe I'll look at my video and see what I did oh it's looking like I pulled the bar into my upper back and I I kind of put it here as opposed to there I'll do that next time too start to pay more attention to what you're doing as well and again really really key in on those non-training variables do a good job with that and you're going to get great results and become an intermediate lifter relative to your start Point faster than you think now when it comes to the intermediate lifter I'm going to be honest with you bro there are a lot of pro programs right now that if you ran them to a te you can that you only need to do what's on the program to to create good momentum as I said most progression models are written in such a way to create that momentum so you just need to follow it to a te it's more so about not being OAB boonga with what you're doing anymore meaning there's certain things you can fudge as a new lifter like with with diet and sleep I'm not telling you to do that I'm just saying that it's a reality that most people who are falling in love with the pro with the process don't do everything perfectly right away you have to be able to start where wherever you're at so you know you might not always eat high quality protein sources and you don't need to always do that as a new lifter but as you get better that's something that you need to start paying attention to you also need to keep in mind with your goals your goals are going to need a a certain level of uh adherence to that process right so if you have the goal of continually improving yourself you need to be able to look at what you're doing and improve your process in that regard when it comes to making changes though as an intermediate lifter we don't want to change things too often because it's it's that weird stage where we're strong enough to know what we're talking about but we're not so strong that we we know everything you don't want to change everything but use your experience as a new lifter and your preferences to guide that those changes like yeah I like doing press Downs better than extensions and extensions feel bad on my elbows and you know even if I warm them up really well extensions don't feel great and when I do them and I tweak my elbows I can't go hard for three weeks until they get better usually so I'm just not going to do them that's the type of stuff that I'm talking about one thing though is becoming acquainted with pacing yourself is really important because I said you're stronger now right so the gains are coming slower and not only that the sessions of f you more so if you're redlining it more often it's a sprinting analogy I like to use if you're sprinting as hard as you can you can feel like you're putting in work but eventually you go from moving fast you're putting on weight putting on weight putting on weight till now you're going nowhere now you're now you're trying to run fast and you're forced to stop follow the program to a te you're strong enough to throw some weight around but don't get cocky whether whether that's you you injure yourself or you bite off more than you can chew and you have to run the program over don't get cocky and fix your form we all have things that we don't do well we could be a strong lifter with intermediate or beginner form that's just is what it is man there's horses out here that MOG really Advanced lifters into Oblivion but their form is garbage just is what it is couple more things that I want to talk about is um creating momentum with regards to the intermediate lifter is if you are writing your own program create your long-term plan and stick to it this could actually apply to the advanced lifter as well um Advanced lifters more than likely know how to create momentum but if anyone could use a few pointers so this could apply to Advanced lifters as well but if you are writing your own program as an intermediate or Advanced lifter creating that long-term plan that is sensible where you can see where it's progressing from A to B and and where you're resting at in terms of Del loading and things like that is important because it gives you something to just go in and perform and then you you focus more cognitively on your internal cues and following the plan well and sticking to it now when things go wrong you use your experience as late intermediate early Advanced lifter to be able to troubleshoot that and keep the plan on track use your tools to be able to say man I tweaked my elbow a little bit I I don't need to deload but I found that when I do this exercise I get extra blood flow in the elbow and it makes me feel a lot better A lot quicker and it lets me get in my full workout and still train intensely so I'm going to get ahead of that now and do this so that I can go back to doing what I did originally without needing to derail overall what you're doing and especially when you get really really Advanced and and even as you're climbing up the ladder as an intermediate lifter you want to constantly ask how can I do this better even if I'm if I'm I'm doing this good how can I do it better I'm getting a lot of protein some of it is from kind of tilapia and I know it's like a good protein Source but they're they're Bottom Feeders bro what if I ate what if I ate this organic chicken breast H or or what if I ate I don't I know it's not me eat but I find when I drink this this plant-based protein it doesn't make my stomach hurt like chicken does maybe I'll drink that instead you can always think about have that self- dialogue with yourself because again you're coaching yourself how can I do this better when it comes to being excited again we're talking about this for now the third time creating those side quests in your program to keep you motivated or really really cool and really really important so it could be something like at the end of my work workouts I'm going to farmers walk my dumbbells for as long as I can before I need to put them back you know it's challenging it's fun and I want to see how far I can get it or if I can walk to the edge of the gym two times without putting it down that's a cool sub goal that'll keep you motivated and like we just mentioned a little bit before again when you get hurt get back to attacking that plan with maximum intent with regards to okay yeah I tore my hamstring could be something like that yeah well I tore my hamstring I can't do rdls but I find that when I do this stuff it's keeping them the the the hamstring mobilized and I checked by my doctor already to see if this was okay and he gave me some things to try I'm going to make sure I do these and I'm still going to do what I can with my lower body stuff that so it doesn't aggravate the injury and I don't atrophy and I find that when I do that it kind of makes it feel a little bit better and it decreases the pain a good amount so all that to say when you hurt yourself attack the recovery plan with maximum intensity and don't ignore things because often times catastrophic injuries do not come out of nowhere they come from the small things that compound into medium things that compound into bro pay attention to me things that turn into injuries so I want to talk about a few good progression models per level of advancement what is a good progression model I've said that most of them work a good progression model is fun predictable effective repeatable practical of course you can observe good forward momentum and it fits well in the ecosystem of the rest of your program so meaning 20 rep squats typically do not fit well in the ecosystem of a full leg day typically you do that and that's not to say you can't do that because I think there are benefits to it but for most people something very extreme like that is not going to be something that fits well the ecosystem of a lower body workout just for instance now effective progression models for new lifters it's going to be simple things and and fun things as well so double progressions you've seen this in all of my programs which are all customizable most of them for for free dragon fist is available for a small subscription cost on Boost Camp uh per month I think it's $15 a month or something like that but if you didn't want to spend any money just run freaking Raider the double regressions are in there I'll give you a quick breakdown of what it is but you give yourself a set and rep range so three sets of 8 to 12 reps you add reps each week until you get to 12 reps each set once you do that you increase 5 to 10 pounds You observe we go back it's fun it's predictable it's effective it's repeatable it's practical and you can see good forward momentum as a new lifter you can also do cluster sets do a quick rundown again again you do for example four four reps rest a few seconds do four more reps repeat that until 5 minutes or so past with a cool song in the background they get you fired up you're just maximum monster mashing the weight down having fun um and then once you get a certain amount of quality reps in over the course of weeks you you can add a little bit more weight or add weight to make the cluster sets challenging when you feel like you need to partner training is really effective as well because it keeps it it allows people that don't push themselves well on certain things to push themselves so if you're tired at the end of a workout but you got your buddies just a freaking Energizer Bunny and he's mogging you on the Press downs but you're not going to let him MOG you are you of course you're not um but yeah those are those are most of the fun things and and predictable fun things you can do as a new lifter you'll find each of these things other than the partner training um in Raider and you'll learn everything that you need to learn about uh these progression models in that program as well so again Raider you can find that in the description on Boost Camp it's my most popular program it's getting ran by I think four 4,000 people on Boost Camp alone I don't I don't know how many people are running it on the Excel spreadsheet which is what it came out on first um but effective progression models for intermediate lifters little bit different again once you're intermediate your ability to progress session to session is diminished on most things these progression models are all about pacing yourself out a little bit more Dynamic double progressions again good for new and intermediate lifters actually and you can find it on all of my free programs but a quick breakdown is just like with the double progression you're increasing your reps and your sets in a certain capacity but the only difference is is that when you get a single set to between eight and 12 reps and you get it to 12 reps you increase the weight on that set and you keep the other two sets the same until you then reach 12 reps and you progress your sets individually that's why it's Dynamic it's really simple linear periodization quick breakdown and then I'll give you a resource to to look at you can look at my Beast Slayer program on Boost Camp it has a full breakdown but essentially you start off light end up heavy it could be light sets of 20 over a course of weeks you end up at a heavy PR set of five or three or whatever your your you want your heaviest set to be it lays out everything in a predictable fashion so you see what weights you're hitting when you're hitting them how many reps you're hitting them for Johnny bodybuilding is just a form of linear periodization I got the name from Eric bhog and he called this freaking Johnny bodybuilder on Instagram who was trying to bully him a Johnny bodybuilder and and basically said that look man I'm a D1 wrestler and you're just some freaking Instagram guy I whoop you I think I that's the that's the implication that I got I'm not trying to get Eric in trouble that's just what I personally got from the video it's the video is called um I forget what it's called someone can freaking tell me but um I think in the video he's like how do you not understand you're coping right now that's all it is I think that's the video that I'm thinking about but I got the name from him because it was it was just something funny he said it's linear periodization except for we are applying it to nontraditional lifts so typically with linear periodization you tend to apply that to your heavier movements that you're you're you're better at that you need to Pace out more but in jotting bodybuilding we take those same things and apply it to like rows heavier barbell curls heavier tricep extensions JM presses um things of that nature dumbbell presses RLS things like that but it's essentially the same thing and again you can find a full breakdown in Beast Slayer which can find for free on Boost Camp top sets and backdown sets I used to call this my simple progression method at a high level top sets and back do sets are really simple you have a heavier weight that you do for we'll say eight reps then you chop some weight down and then you can do eight reps or you could just rep it out you could do between eight and 12 it just depends upon how much weight you take off is going to infer how many reps you can get but it's really good because it allows you to get that heavyweight stimulus in and then immediately jump back and and get those uh get those reps in I differentiated it a little bit by um kind of combining this with the dynamic double progression wherein you'll keep that top set and back down weight the same um and then week to week you'll just increase the weight of the back down sets but I made a video talking about that which you can find I think it's it's called um literally my simple progression method it's got a picture of Lua xun's back on it I made it three or four years ago last but not least for intermediate lifters the best progression model is just generally going to be becoming okay with hitting weights that are lighter than what you think you should be seen lifting when it's necessary right so we're not saying train like a a small kitten we're not saying we're not saying train like a freaking feline you know you want to train like a mutant but there's going to be times where perhaps you need to have the kitten weights on the bar right and you just lift it for a lot of reps right so for example a 315 bencher they always want to be known to be a 315 bencher they don't want to Grapple with the idea that yeah you could get in good a good workout with 185 if you're doing sets of 15 or 20 and you can get a good workout with 200 225 250 is like it should be a a somewhat heavyish weight for you right because 250 is what 80% of 315 I don't have a freaking calculator in front of me but I think it's about 80% of 315 somewhere around there 75% 275 is a significant portion it's like 85% I think and once you get into the 275 range now you only hit like you might get six reps on your first set how many reps you think you're going to get on your second set maybe five if you fudge your form start to fudge your form a little bit you might get three reps and it's going to be a struggle on your third set no lift those weights that you think you're too good to be seing lifting become acquainted with that become acquainted with it until your light weights just become impressive to those around you if it's an outside thing outside perspective thing this applies to the Advance lifter too because as I said you know a lot of us get in our own heads when we get Advanced like I can't be saying doing this bro you kidding me this Johnny one plate over there is lifting more than that load up the bench no first and foremost bro you used to be that Johnny one plate as well and second of all if that Johnny one plate he could catch up to you bro if you don't get your game together so let's just talk about these effective progression models more than likely as an advanced lifter you know what a good program looks like already you know how to create momentum I think progression as an advanced lifter with their accumulated knowledge is less about the tool and more about making the tools work for us so I think attacking those lwh hanging fruits and keeping that rate of progression as fast as it can be in that regard is something that's going to be more important because when you're always attacking your lowest area of opportunity especially as someone who has hypertrophy goals in mind you're always going to feel mentally like you're making great progress even if overall you're making a lot slower progress than you did three three years ago I think a helpful tool for your progression I'll say is paying a lot more attention to your internal cues and your form because where crappier form as a newer lifter isn't the best you can still get away with it and intermediate lifters can there there's a level where if you push hard enough you can still make some progress but as an advanced lifter if you're not doing form that is avoiding obvious injury because you're lifting tremendous weights is efficient it's snowballs a bad rep is not going to get better as you add more weight right and if we're not chasing the best stimulus that we can that could be the difference between you putting on that pound of muscle and you not putting on that pound of muscle that is what it is bro that's the truth you could try hard you can do everything how you're supposed to it could be the difference between you making gains and not making gains it is what it is bro so you're going to want to pay attention to those internal cues when something's ahead of the curve it's been helpful for me to put that on maintenance or or not even no so much maintenance all the time but pushing less aggressively on it so like my chest is way ahead of the curve I don't necessarily need to be pushing max volume on that so like on my bench programs for instance I don't personally do as much volume as I tell people to do if they're running that bench program cuz my chest is already hypertrophy to a big extent so I may focus more on volume elsewhere but when you put something that's ahead of the curve on not on standby but you're pushing the the gas pedal less it allows you to push the gas pedal harder on something that's a low hanging fruit and as an advanced lifter that's going to allow you to feel like you're making really good progress as well so keep that in mind bro last but not least for the advanced lifter before we get into the common lifter mistakes and then w up and going into the Berserker Manifesto and finishing up here about 3 hours in find creative ways to fit in more effective training frequency Eric buen hogen is always making these freaking weird videos lately about um the crazy intensity techniques that he used to get more squatting in or his his crazy uh power pole apparatus that blew his back out like find fun stuff that allows you to get in that good effective training in more often it's not a deadlift it's not a regular squat but it's it's doing something like it's it's something you do on a secondary day or a tertiary day to get in some extra volume and get in a good workout because often times that's all you really need on a secondary or or tertiary third workout day if you have one I have some common lifter mistakes that I'm going to wrap up with here um before we go into chapter 4 and how to fix them going hard too often going too easy too often these are easy to fix if you are just looking at them from the 10,000 foot view but how do you fix them if you go too hard on a session let's just say you go to failure when the program wanted you to go a little bit easier and use a little bit less weight next week you just go a little bit easier than the program even told you to here if it told you to do eight reps maybe you just do six or seven and then next week you can follow the program accordingly much the same if you're going too easy it's always simple to do a little bit more than you need to just do a little bit more next time it is what it is record ask a buddy does this look too easy to you bro yeah man you could have did like 12 more what three reps in reserve bro you could have did like 12 more another one is switching exercises too often sometimes you just need to be able to look at your performance metrics and and see this is doing a good enough job on its own maybe I don't need to add this in in the first place but if I'm switching it too often am I giving it that four-week rule if you're not giving it that four-week rule just keep it in your program whatever you have in your program now if you switch swapped it in recently keep it in for another four weeks see how it works for you week five if you start to observe some forward progression going on week six week seven you exhausted those neural gains in weeks one through four it's working for you keep it in why are you changing it switching programs often same thing run the program as written do what your coach is telling you to do if you're your own coach listen man if if you can't listen to yourself how do you expect yourself to listen to somebody you're paying bro you can't even you can't you don't even have self-control so start to exercise that being a bookworm we talked about this a little bit but that Bookworm at the gym that is a it clearly is not implementing the things that they're talking about if you know a lot of things but you don't know how to implement those things those tools are useless they just are training like someone who is nothing like you is a big one so if if you have someone who is built I'm talking about morph in terms of their morphology so like their the way their bones insert their joints their limb lengths the their training advancement if if if you're a Wilt Chamberlain and you're trying to squat like freaking luia Jun you are always going to come up short compared to your expectations because they're built nothing like you when you really should be looking at a Zack tender you should be looking at someone like that that's that's lanky like you are squat like he does and your squat will start to look better and train like they do and you may notice that yeah this works really well for me too versus if you train like someone who has inherently different strengths and weaknesses for you you're developing in ways that are not natural for you so you're not going to see the same benefit you'll see some level of benefit some exercise is better than no exercise it just is what it is you could get up and and just lift weights for exercise and just get tired and you will be infinitely ahead of the average person in the western society that just sits on their behind all day but if you want to get good results in in a macro sense and not a micro sense you're going to need to train adequately ego lifting form or weight fellas listen if it's been months and you're slowing control slow slow and you haven't added any freaking weight to your freaking bench press or your squat load up the bench same thing with the bench if you're loading up the bench but your ass is coming up into the air you're you're you're freaking bouncing the bar off your chest trampoline style you're freaking caving your chest in to get this weight fix your form ego lifting can go in either direction I actually saw a cool video from a good friend Faz lifts today talking about trends that he's seen in that regard so um this will hopefully get posted on Friday but yeah I'm I'm watching it on a Thursday I think it's this today but um last but not least matching not matching your process with your training level and this isn't so much saying that like if you're a new lifter and you find that it's easy for you to do things that a new lifter should be doing that you can't start to try to log book better like an intermediate lifter or or start to be ahead of the curve in that regard I'm not saying that that's a bad thing at all it could be a bad thing if you're not able to do the basic things and you're wanting to yeah I'm going to freaking do all this stuff that luia Jun does or or freaking David gogin does and meanwhile whole time bro you don't even eat protein in your meals you're just eating straight ago waffles it's like fix that first before you do that but more so I'm talking about if you're an advanced lifter and you're finding yourself falling into the habit of just not doing basic things you're not matching your process with your training level if you you are at any point an advanced lifter and you you do things wrong for long enough you're no longer an advance advaned lifter in my eyes you're irresponsible you're you're training like a charlatan you should be doing better and you know you can do better you know and I'm not talking about like our goals change over time I'm not talking about a guy that squat I'm not calling a guy a charlatan for squatting 500 lbs and working really hard towards it and then deciding like yeah I think I want to run longdistance running so I'm not going to go as hard in the weight room anymore and suddenly now you're squatting 365 instead of 500 I'm not calling him a charlott I'm I'm calling a guy that like squats 500 and wants to squat 550 and you're not eating and sleeping the way that you know you can and you you're able to do those things that's a charlatan wrapping up chapter 3 more than likely when it comes to a lot of the nuts and bolts especially if you're running a program that I ran or if it's from like any from one from 3dmj so like Alberto Nunes uh Jeff Alberts uh Dr Eric Helms even from fellas who you know necessarily our training methodologies don't agree most of the times like Dr Mike for instance you're doing something where the method is good enough to where you're already on the right track more than likely you more than likely only need one or two small changes at any given time to improve or jumpstart your forward progression the specific tool or the method or the advice that you get isn't as important as how you you choose to implement it how you choose to use it this is why the 10,000 foot view is important the 10,000 foot view is what you pay someone else to do for you if you're able to do this yourself you don't need to pay anyone [ __ ] ever you don't need to full disclosure fellas I offer coaching I I um I have one program on Boost camp where you have to pay a a subscription cost to access it along with extra functionality on the apps and other programs that other creators also put behind the subscription but if you didn't want to do that man and you mash this 10,000 foot view you won't need to watch a single one of my videos from that point on you won't need to pay me a single dollar for coaching you won't need to pay a single dollar for anything master that this video is about teaching you how to fish now some people need the extra help or or or just really want it for whatever reason so that's why the option is there for them to be able to do that but the truth of the matter is man if you're willing to invest the time 3 hours you're willing to come back to this three three and a half hour video and and study it over time and run a program and and be accountable with your progress your your in your process there's nothing you can't do you know practical Training Concepts are not this this this cure all that we think it will be so this magical method is not going to jump start your progress in absence of those other things everything has to work synergistically all right here's where we're going to have um more of what makes the berserk method the berserk method this is the Berserker Manifesto so everything else is representative of how I coach people how I think about things how I want you to troubleshoot how I do things what I find to be important how I like to progress things but these are things to where like when I look at this and I see people make their training programs and I see them post them on Instagram I'm like you watched my video didn't you this is something I would do so first and foremost when it comes to this whole topic of size versus strength I'm going to give you the honest truth about this I'm going to start with the main talking point against this because the truth of the matter is strength training is size training so if you get stronger with certain parameters that we'll talk about you're going to get bigger and if you're not getting stronger within those parameters you're not getting bigger no matter what you tell yourself you're not getting bigger the main talking point against that in my mind is that it's always well you know getting stronger in absence of this and that wait let me stop you there I'm not telling you to get stronger in absence of form that Target your muscles I'm not telling you to get stronger in with um in absence of adding reps I'm not telling you to get stronger in absence of all the internal queuing that bodybuilders tend to use to get more out of less weight I'm saying that with those things in mind if you are not adding weight over time it doesn't matter what internal queuing you're using it doesn't matter what you want that thing to do you're not going to get bigger I'm not telling you to kick your hips up in a squat to be able to lift more weight and get your legs bigger from that you're just adding weight to add weight at that point I'm saying that within a good Olympic style squat that if you add 50 pounds to it your legs are going to be bigger you had 25 lounds to it your legs are going to be bigger 100 pounds your legs are going to be bigger I'm saying that within a bench press that you keep within a standard of form if you add 25 30 40 40 45 60 pounds to it you're going to be bigger there's no way to get around it and if you're not getting better either in terms of the load added or in terms of the the weight for reps that you're doing you're not getting stronger now there's a couple parameters that we need to keep into play because some people are going to hear that and they'll weight Chase in absence of everything else that we need to talk about we need to Target the muscles effectively we need to use form to where when we do this exercise we we feel that the muscle muscle was worked if you do a bench press and you don't feel anything or you do a dip and you don't feel anything you're not targeting your muscles effectively there's something that you're doing that is making that happen whether that's having too much weight on the bar not going slow enough on the Ecentric not guiding it down enough maybe not holding your lock out something like that you're doing something there's some internal queue that you need to pay attention to you need to Target your muscles from different angles as well so getting a big bench press on its own is not going to make your chest as big as it could be you're going to want to do your dips and your your your dumbbell presses and your incline bench presses you're going to want to do shoulder presses as well right so you're working the target muscles from different angles and with different exercises having performance metrics from different angles that you're getting better at and again we work with a margin of error on form you can on say a bench press for instance go a little less controlled on an essent if it means adding three reps because you can always clean those reps up again before you rinse and repeat or add more weight after that but it's a lot harder to work with an exercise if you're constantly ego lifting with the form if you're constantly slowing it slowing it slowing it slowing it slowing it down you're never going to add any weight you'll create a standard of form where you have to use such slow form that you've turned an exercise like the squat for instance which has a high loadability and thus a high degree of progressive overload potential and good rate of progression on it into an exercise where you're not able to progress on it as frequently and it just doesn't Thrive as well in that opinion there's a balance for everything and you have to work within that margin of error you have to also create momentum within this idea of strength training and size training whether you want to get bigger you want to get stronger wrer it doesn't matter what your goal is it could be to make more money it could be to be more comfortable talking to people you have to be able to create some form of momentum it is what it is everything that you do in this type of program is going to need to lead to an increase in performance and it will lead to a increase in performance meaning if you get better at your weighted push-ups your weighted dips but your bench isn't going isn't going up your chest is still getting bigger we're not looking at any individual performance metric we're looking at the totality of everything as long as these things are trending up year over-ear we can have our moments where maybe the bench press isn't going up at the same rate of progression because percentage wise if you crunch the numbers and go into math nerd mode sometimes you have to make a certain percentage Improvement just to even add one rep to your bench press after a certain point it is just it just what happens after a while but if those other things are trending up you can trust that you're getting better as a hypertrophy training but in short a jacked lifter that moves a heavy weight with intention and as great technique as they can and with performance increasing in their mind over time is always going to be bigger than someone that just because this amorphous discussion of um what is what is hypertrophy training what can lead to hypertrophy training if it doesn't begin and end with progressing in your form to a certain point working within that standard of form and then adding more weight and more reps we're not talking about anything now image training I talked about this on the last couple videos but I'm going to be real with you I kept it brief because I I didn't want to come across as insane because a lot of this stuff you learn more experientially instead of um the word I'm looking for instead of reading up on it I don't know what the academic word for that is but you learn it through experience instead of reading it it makes sense but I'm going to talk about a few things experientially to make it make sense to you the biggest thing is that this isn't crazy to anybody but it it's helpful if you just Envision success for yourself now this isn't to the delusional capacity that I talked about with the clout Goblin lifters that need to Humble themselves at the beginning of the video but it's more so that if you want to good workouts you need to Envision that for yourself if you go into a workout I hate lifting man I I I need I need uh I need roids I I mean I'm not going to lie to you sometimes that's funny and that can get you fired up but if you genuinely are saying those things to yourself and ironically um you're not envisioning success for yourself you're envisioning the way a good squat feels the way a good dip feels the way a well performed curl feels and a a well performed leg ension you're envisioning those things and you think about the process of what getting to the gym looks like for you not only in the gym but you know eating your first meal and envisioning your meals physically fortifying you bro I'm talking about literally like as I'm drinking my coffee right now I'm feeling the freaking coffee fire me up I'm feeling like it's swelling my muscles when I eat my Gyro Bowl I'm feeling like I'm absorbing that animal into my muscles and I'm just [ __ ] freaking swelling up like a grotesque mutants that smells like a horse stable because no one that's a mutant smells good not that I actually stink or anything like that bro but I'm just saying like talking about yourself that way like you're a freaking mutant and you're some horrible diabolical rabid animal that's going to the gym to destroy weights is is you have to Envision that success for yourself you have to talk about things that way I go to the gym and I'm not going to lie sometimes I have crap sessions but I never go in there thinking it's crap I'm like yeah this was bad overall but this was really good and you know this was Roy I'm not going to lie I'll come back next time and crush this other stuff specific things that I think you can do um to help with your pre-workout ritual is is literally just talk about them like they're they're fortifying you like roids I'm not going to lie man like some of us are taking roids I'm not taking roids man you're just going to take my word on that I I know it's the internet and people can say whatever they want to but the closest thing to roids in my book is my Gyro Bowl it is what it is and that's why I'm gatekeeping it because I can't have y'all uh enjoying the anabolic property I'm just kidding I I just keep forgetting to release it but when you literally talk about your pre-workout rituals like they senu beans like they're freaking hopping you up like you're just going to go in there and Crush weights I'm going to eat this freaking beef and rice and jeez and I'm going to go in and I'm going to load up the bench and I'm going to freaking crush a PR you need to be able to this is all stuff that sounds crazy but the people who this makes sense to they've had these thoughts so talk start to talk about things that way and I hope talking about my experiential experiences helps you conceptualize a little bit and if not it's the end of the video I can sound a little bit crazy [ __ ] it you made it 3 hours in more importantly though logic or not more importantly though but more logically knowing how to zero out and Implement everything that you've been thinking about in terms of your internal cues talking about yourself and envisioning success and being able to think about that and Performing the lift well without thinking about anything else going on around you it's a very important skill and it's something that you have to acquire over time it's just something I want you to start practicing this is going to sound counterproductive but of course you're going to have songs that activate you it gets you ready to work out gets you hyped up you have your PR songs you have your volume songs you have your songs you put on for exercise that typically you don't usually like doing sometimes music is literally just about putting you in a meditative State though so literally music is just sometimes noise that you have in the background that just helps you not think about things that are going on around you just something to think about and sometimes training without music is a good idea too you know honestly sometimes if if it's a day where either because of working on something like the berserk method for instance which just takes a lot of my time I have to maybe go to the gym much later than what I would want to or with much less sleep or much less food and I just feel cruddy for whatever reason sometimes not activating yourself allows you to train yeah you're meeting yourself where you're at is was what I'm saying if you're already feeling like crap sometimes hyping yourself up is just going to create a bigger mental fatigue cost it's going to be harder to bounce back from so sometimes training without music in that capacity I'm talking about like you're just you're pooped I'm not talking about oh I'm a little tired I was just at school and you know I'm a little tired no listen to your music bro I'm talking about like if if you have you've had grownup responsibilities that are just crushing you right now and you're like I'm here to be here I'm going to crush this work out but I am not feeling the best sometimes it's just good to not Elevate yourself with the music I have something that I put to words and just wanted to call the Mastery method with lifts I try to treat exercises more like skills and less like lifts and the way that I think about it is the more skilled you get at something the better return of investment you get with it so if you're a better Carpenter you build better houses you build make more money provided you can Market yourself well some people are honestly shitty at stuff but they can Market themselves well and they're successful but all other things being equal if you're more skilled and more valuable you can charge more money you get a better return of investment in that same line of thinking we don't swap our skills around unless there's a great reason for you to do that right unless you have a really good reason to swap that skill that main performance metric in we're keeping it in for as long as possible before we need to swap it out because when you run programs you'll notice that with mine for instance some exercises don't change and others you can change every so often even with the exercises that I allow you to change I'm keeping you in there longer on average than I've noticed other coaches and people make Fitness content typically do that's because the longer that you do something the better you're able to get it because the longer you're able to chip away at it and that's the Mastery method when it comes to adding things to our programs I tend to look at what will help me cultivate those core skills what's going to help me get better at what's moving the needle I want to talk a little bit about exercise selection in that regard um I think I'm going to start with the beginners though I was going to do a highle breakdown and kind of talk about it them all at once but starting with the beginners I'm going to be honest with you man most templates a lot of this is probably not what some beginner lifters are wanting to hear some beginner lifters are probably wanting to hear me talk about these revolutionary methods and progression models and exercises no brother the truth of the matter is is that the self- coaching portion of the video is most important and that's the portion that you need to get to that's the portion that you need to pay attention to but practical exercise selection most templates as they're written are going to work well enough but the berserk way is that of of course do stuff that is fun explore do stuff that's fun that's when I I put for now meaning like while you're figuring out what you like give yourself some leeway with selecting things I guess is what I'm saying so if the workout is written with an exercise I think is amazing but it gives you the option of doing something else that sounds cooler to you do that you might like it better but keep note of what you like and what you don't like but guess this is going to allow you to infer what your variations are going to be when you're intermediate and advanced so what you do now is important for the future you know every choice that you make has an echo as Gogeta said in uh Fusion Reborn to Janemba before hitting him with the soul Punisher or the Stardust breaker sorry it's called Soul Punisher in budhai 3 that shows that's I'm showing my age with the with the freaking video game references but more importantly what I want you to do with your exercise selection is what ever you do pick create your good habits with your form and create that standard of form that you're going to hold yourself to now when it comes to intermediate lifters and Beyond meaning like Advanced and very Advanced lifters you can start to select your movements when it's applicable for things other than just getting bigger or stronger so this is things couple that I'll rattle off this exercise so PEC flies make me feel strong off the chest on bench uh I don't know if they necessarily make my chest bigger but they're working my pecs from a deak stretch and when I do them I feel more confident on bench press and I feel more pop out the bottom this back extension makes it so that I don't lose my breath on deadlifts because I'm able to get in basically more work capacity basically I'm working the hamstrings to be able to work harder for longer and I don't lose my breath on deadlifts because I don't lose strength or position on the deadlift cuz my hamstrings are stronger these split squats when I do them I feel more stable on squat when I do them not only because kind of trains my hips to be more flexible but also I'm able to push my knee more over my toe so my my quads are stronger so I'm able to push out the bottom of the squat better and overall my adductors get stretched more which allows those to work more too so it just feels more stable I mean squats do build my legs but this just makes them feel more stable man when I do Bandit bench press I know you know most people aren't you know they don't like this exercise typically but generally speaking when I do it in when I have it in my program and I do it well and I I have it in it makes me more confident on all my presses not only just bench press overhead press incline bench I'm going to keep doing Bandit bench press or I'll do it this cycle I just gave you valid reasons to have a variety of movements in that I don't necessarily want the beginner lifter to start start to think about but for people who are intermediate or Advanced this is something that you can think about now don't confuse that with Maring working multiple physical qualities uh and and confuse that with bulletproofing bulletproofing is is kind of a meme in my opinion I'm not to say that's not to say that there aren't things you can do to reduce injury risk but if we start to select things for reducing injury risk instead of training adaptation whether that be strength size or any of these other benefits we talked about we start to do less training and more bulletproofing and then you're not getting any training adaptation any movement that you pick regardless of any of those reasons I just gave should still on some level get you stronger or bigger it's just mostly doing something else now when it comes to ordering exercises this is more of like a practicality type of thing which we'll talk about with uh exercise bloat and getting quick sessions in as well more practicality stuff sometimes for whatever reason we have to do movements in an order that we don't want to do them in we'll talk more about that on this section here um in the adaptability section but when it comes to ordering your exercises you always want to start with a good foundation so say do your your heavyweight weighted exercise first then right after that you're moving right into your lighter movement that prepares your your joints for whatever hypertrophy work that you're doing so that way if you nail these two things if you say have to do them out of order because a machine is taken or you're you're busy so you just straight up have to skip something you're able to get to more of those meat and potato stuff that you're able to do and be ready for it without having to rewarm up again and then after you do that do your main hypertrophy work and then your floater exercises and we'll talk about what I mean by floater exercises now floater exercises is is a term that I came up with to just mean something where it's those last finishing touches that you do that other people don't do where it's your last five 10% you sprinkle them throughout your workout in places where it makes sense and you just use your common sense about where you're going to do that so you don't superet deadlift with conventional deadlift with uh cable rows you just don't do that right um You Don't super set bench press with tricep rope push Downs I mean you can but it's not going to give you the result that you're looking for more than likely which is to train both of the things hard and adequately but they're exercises that can get sprinkled at multiple places throughout your workout whether it's ABS cabs anything where I want you to think about expanding our our viewpoint on this versus what we we said last year was is that your idea of what a floater exercise is or what you need to do at any given time should change over time so for some people training your abs often is going to be something that's important to them at one point in time versus another point in time where their abs are developed maybe they do some ABS they still smash them but maybe it's your now your cab your your tibs that aren't making your squats feel the best because you're unstable at the bottom and you've determined that yeah I need to I want to work my calves a little bit more or wow my forearms are looking kind of small compared to my upper arm I'm going to work forearms now that last 10% is always going to change over time and it should change over time if we're doing what we're able what we should be doing the truth of the matter is is that a lot of people are scared of losing muscle and this is where we avoid exercise blow I like to call it like a bloated program that just way too many exercises in it or a bloated session even it takes very little to maintain a muscle I'm going to be honest with you man like for instance a floater exercise for me was neck isolation for a while because I just I wanted to get a a thicker more Stout neck I got to 18 and a half close to 19 in uh neck circumference and I haven't trained neck in probably four months bro and my neck has maintained just from doing heavy rowing heavy hiping just heavy training in general muscle like that that you build just doesn't evaporate you would have to completely stop training for it to evaporate right so at a point in time you may have did 12 sets of squats or 12 sets of ABS rather now you're doing three sets four sets a week but the idea is that once something is no longer a low hanging fruit just attack low hanging fruit more quality of life stuff we talked about what you had to do if um you had to reorder your exercise selection and we'll talk about that more in specific here but sometimes life is busy or for whatever reason you just don't want to put in the time and you want to get most of the results in absence of anything else you should be able to look at again these key performance metrics that you're going to do and still be able to make forward progress even with doing this quick and effective Berserker style method right but basically you hit your main performance metrics for two sets each one top set one back off set and then that's that's it you move on sip of coffee you superet your most important assistance work so on an upper body day that might look like hitting two sets I actually did this yesterday two sets of bench press cambert bar Ben bench press then I did two sets of pull-ups uh super wide grip weighted and then I did my arms and I super seted everything else in the program if you double up on any any movement pattern meaning you do like two curls and then two tricep exercises consider just doing one movement pattern because again we're looking to do what we need to just move the needle forward not to move it as forward as fast as possible but we're busy we're not able to do the most that we can do on this day or maybe we just don't want to at this point but we still want to continue to make progress just do that one movement pattern and do it well now if you're really crunched for time you're doing the super sets and the less sets you can consider doing Drop sets as well which means do one regular set drop off some weight with no rest and then do another one another thing that you can do is you can as we talked about earlier this is something my program dragon fist does a lot on Boost Camp you slow down the rep Cadence on those accessory and assistance exercises as you approach failure to be able to literally get to failure and less reps and then subsequently um finish the workout quicker because you're finishing the sets quicker and after that dude you just unwind go for a nice work go smash food now for whatever reason whether it's busy gym someone's on the machine they won't let you work in for whatever reason which we'll talk about in a second or your your you're new at the gym you really don't know where stuff is at sometimes you have to do things in a different order consider before you do things out of order swapping in a movement that is relatively the same as the one you originally had planned so I'm going to be completely Frank with you brother if your program called for tricep rope press downs but someone is using the Rope attachment and the gym only has one there is not a substantial difference between you doing that and then you doing a straight bar press down provided they both feel good on your elbow just swap that one in you'll still be able to make progress I have bench sages have done this for decades there's literally someone in most gyms that you can think of or or or look at this is just some 40-year-old guy that has a jacked upper body and stick legs but they have the jacked upper body because they understand that it's not so much about the details it's about moving the big rocks they don't train legs but they train they train the heck out of upper body and that's why it's so big you know because they don't sweat the small stuff now when it comes to working in I've never encountered someone where look fellas I know a lot of a lot of people are scared to approach people at the gym some people are scared to be approached but if you're friendly you smile and you're just approachable when you approach them and you ask to work in I've never had anybody say no people don't bite so just ask them to work in you'll be good to go and if it's something that you find consistently that someone else is using because it's just a certain hour of the gym you go at and they go to the gym at a certain hour and they just get there before you and it's consistently that you're not able to use that rope attachment consider adding in that straight bar press down or whatever exercise that you pick to swap it out with as a main staple instead of that rope push down maybe that's not practical for you now if you can't replace the exercise you can certainly just do something else in the program that maybe works the opposite muscle group so say if you're supposed to go bench triceps biceps just go bench biceps biceps triceps and then do that by then if the fella is not done on the cable station just ask to work in at that point bro I don't know to tell you or or or or politely let him know just by putting your gym bag down and and getting ready that needs to move his move his boots now when it comes to programs um that I recommend before I wrap up with the the last few things um just some general tidbits and what the perfect lifter looks like for me I'm going to plug my own programs yes because the berserk method has many programs that are designed around its framework Raider is really good for new lifters and lifters in in general with general fitness goals so if you just want to be healthier get bigger muscles Raider is a great program it's really easy to follow it's really easy to learn on as well good exercise selection it's my most popular program Beast Slayer is for lifters that have a good 10,000 foot View and can coach themselves really well but they just need something fully customizable and something that is laid out in a way for them to have good long-term progression from beginner to intermediate to Advanced someone of any experience level could could um run Raider as well but I find find that they would get better results on Beast Slayer just because as you get more advanced sometimes you want to be able to have access to more nuts and bolt stuff and it's just nice that it's on there with Beast Slayer and it's also customizable to any strength goal as well so if you are that guy that has specific strength goals you're able to turn it into that kind of program and then lastly dragon fist these are all mostly upper lower programs by the way Beast Slayer is a hybrid program dragon fist is a hybrid program but the majority of it is predicated upon upper lower just so you know Beast Slayer is Upp or lower with one full body session uh dragon fist is up or lower Push Pull legs Raider is just up or lower both are um between four and five days a week though so it's not a big time investment either especially dragon fist because it has quicker workouts but dragon fist is me taking Raider which is taking that approachable learnable program that is effective but also combining it with more coaching notes as well so it's it's a Midway between people who don't quite have the time to invest in self- coaching quite yet or don't want to invest the time or want to coach and can't afford one or don't want to pay for one it gives them an opportunity to be able to get something that's as good as working with a coach as you could possibly get for the price so that's in the description on Boost Camp you can get two weeks free on the uh premium subscription you're not buying the program or anything you you pay for the premium subscription which improves the functionality of the app and gives you access to other premium pro programs but if you find that you don't like the program for whatever reason or you just don't want to continue to pay for premium the app is totally usable for free most of my programs on it other than dragon fist or free and they're all amazing so wrapping up some uh General opinions that I that I formed and and golden tidbits that I just I didn't feel fit anywhere else but I just want to kind of want to put here as something fun so just challenging a few of my ideas from last year with some of these but um it's very popular in the fitness Community to kind of take a pile on uh bro splits I think bro splits can be pretty good honestly you know as we said so much it isn't the tool that's being used as opposed to how you're using it so if it's that bad is it because the tool is bad or you're just using it wrong you know but bro splits have a lot of benefits so it's really beneficial to just go into the gym and have like a shoulder day like I'm going to crush shoulders I'm going to intentionally hit shoulders and then I'm going to let them rest and come and get hit them again hard um you'll find that on bro splits on your chest days you may be doing um bench press so you're work you're still working your shoulders two times a week and on a shoulder day you may be doing uh incline bench press since that works the shoulders to a large degree and you're still working your PEX on that day so you can still get your frequency in the only thing is is that it's for people that really really like going to the gym um I know Chris Jones physiques of greatness had his way of running the BL bro splits with less of a per week time commitment by basically turning it into a nine day split if I'm not mistaken so he was hitting um all of his muscle groups within a period of 8 to n days I could be you know bro if you're watching this I'm just going off memory I haven't watched your that video in a long time but if I recall correctly that's what you did but there's as I said there's ways of getting in frequency the only thing is you need to be in the gym a lot and when it comes to working legs you're working them one time per week unless you choose to just have two two leg days for whatever reason like you work legs twice but um there's no real reason why you couldn't get really jacked on a bro split the truth of the matter is right now for instance if I got rid of my second leg day I could still grow my legs so there's no reason why logically that I couldn't also make progress on a bro split if I wanted to do that now I just don't want to be in the gym that many days per week I don't want to go to the gym six seven days a week I'm G be honest with you physical physical activity is good every day but I'm not trying to commute to the freaking gym every day and all that man so but it there's no reason why it wouldn't work some shoulder training discoveries I have found that it's it's really really good to invest in a good Vertical Press even if your goals are to get like a bigger chest or bigger bench press or something like that just because I find that it's something that you're going to have to end up attacking at some point anyway if you make it an area of opportunity or something that you neglect I have found specifically though that I don't think that singles training as a hypertrophy Enthusiast or a bodybuilder if you tend to compete aren't necessarily useful but I could see the use case for sometimes doing singles for other upper body movements but I found that singles are more finicky on shoulder presses for whatever reason so I would much rather that if you use a shoulder press as a main performance metric you keep it no less than five reps and really as high as like 8 to 10 and really High Reps work on it as well so like sets of 20 I found Dan Green always used to do sets of 20 on the old animal Pack videos and I found that that works really well for me on the seated military press That's might been my favorite shoulder Builder and I'll tell you what good cautionary tail for you I was getting really good at the seated military press relative to where I started so to put it in perspective shoulders have just always been a weak point for me because I neglected them but I got it to the point where I was hitting uh 200 for for for a good amount of reps and 225 for a good amount of reps and then I thought in my head man I want to do a single and I just failed the single completely and rage quitted the lift so that's in terms of main performance metrics I think that the most helpful shoulder isolation if you're going to pick one I would do lateral raises just because I find that if you're doing a lot of pulling you're getting a good amount of rear delts it's not to say you can't get more but we're talking about what's going to move the needle the most of most people I think that a good shoulder press and lateral raises or upright rows even maybe on a cable or whatever is comfortable on your wrist and your shoulders it's a good shoulder training Discovery I wanted to share with y'all calisthenics for bodybuilders the real talk though now I'm I'm known or was known at the beginning of my channel for doing really heavy weighted pull-ups like I was the dude that was upper body Max because at the time that's mostly what I was focused on so I do the heavy weighted pull-ups and weight it dips and I do think that there's Merit to that in getting bigger but what I found is is that if we use good bodybuilder form we create that standard of form where we're flexing on the Ecentric we're maybe pausing at the bottom and we're keeping tension the whole time and we're keeping tension at the bottom of the lift as well you need to use so little weight that you would be surprised especially on pull-ups how little weight you need to get in a good workout to put it into perspective four plates on a weighted pullup is something I could do any day of the week no sleep in fact when I hit that PR with uh PR with Omar esof at his gym it was like past midnight was extremely tired no food I just said watch this bro I need something for a clip can you just stand in it real quick so it could clickbait people because they see you in it we together and I just did it real quick four plate pull-up is any day of the week occurrence for me so anyone that has anything negative to say about it I ain't no Jabron I find that form maxing on the pull-ups and on dips and it's some to somewhat on some extent on squats is also really beneficial I'll say on pull-ups if you're adding more than 20 to 25% of your body weight you're probably sacrificing the form for weight and on dips I'll say maybe I'd say 135 is where if I'm doing really good slow challenging form and it's the first exercise I did and I'm not pre- exhausted that I could I could get in a good workout with that and I've done over two 200 pounds on weighted dips for reps you know so that should been my Takeaway on the calisthenics that's my real talk you can take it or leave it that's just been my experience and my opinion but I hope it's some good food for thought I would challenge you to do really good slow and controlled form with two plates on weighted pull-ups I would I would want to see and and not be a lightweight I'm not saying that out of derision I'm saying like you weigh 200 210 220 pounds and you're doing two plates with the same slow and controlled flexing the whole time pausing at the bottom holding tension at the bottom I'm not saying you don't exist there's going to be some stud that's like yeah man easy work but the average person maybe start to re evaluate that if your goal is size I want to talk a little bit about my major training successes and then a lot more about my shortcomings now major training successes uh anything that I have wanted to improve in I have improved in um whether that's you know horizontal pressing I I finally started to focus more on the bench press again and I improved my bench press I'm currently sitting at 315 for 8 now I'm working on close scripp and improving my performance in that because I just feel like I need stronger triceps and shoulders um and I also as I said got really strong shoulders as well I and oh and my leg training my leg training has continued to progress my legs are at a point where I can take a picture and and start calling myself a horse cuz my legs are legit big now and they never used to be big which I'm really happy with arms have continued to come up but in terms of training shortcomings I have actively avoided doing incline bench which is embarrassing because in the last video incline bench was something that I talked about was something that I I want to make a major goal and I I don't I don't want to be a man that says they're going to work on something and they don't work on it so that's a slap on the wrist in 2024 uh I definitely need to work on my incline bench more just because it's my lowest area of opportunity my lowest area of opportunity honestly isn't even my shoulders anymore it's a a low hanging fruit but my lowest hanging fruit is that incline bench there's no reason why it should be as weak as it is you know it's it's not a good ratio at all you know for for reference it was 315 for eight bench presses pretty between six and eight reps is something I could hit on a day-to-day basis on a day-to-day basis I could hit I'm going keep it real with you 225 for maybe some sets of eight and that that ratio isn't acceptable to me it should be 250 260 270 for some sets of eight you know if my physical development was was where it should be at relative to where I'm at in terms of other things that I want to do I'm already ahead of the curve on this but I'm still going to talk about it I didn't work my forearms the way that I was supposed to or way I wanted to but lately I've been really good about hitting my reverse curls with good form the past two months or so and hitting my wrist curls the past month every time that I'm supposed to I'm having fun doing so the only thing that I really need to tighten up on is the incline bench you know everything else has been doing good I'm doing a lot more good than bad but like I said I wanted to hold myself more accountable with the shortcomings training without music is good sometimes I talked a little bit about that earlier I'm not going to talk about it again um I talked about the positive selft talk thing but having fun is key what does that mean um sometimes it's it's it's funny to um maybe just exaggerate sometimes like man I'm so close to just freaking just going off program and and loading up the bench and just going for the pr now I freaking hate lift just speaking ironically don't talk about yourself unironically in that way but sometimes it's just it's funny to make a joke but um that's just more image training weirdo stuff last thing I'm going to leave you with before we get into the perfect lifter Community is great I talk talked about this before having a group of people who you bounce ideas off of is great but one thing I've observed and and a few different communities is is that don't let things become an echo chamber don't let your sense of self come from the collective berserk talks about this with the bonfire of Dreams where guts is reflecting on Just for people that don't know about this guts is the main character that's his name he's reflecting upon his experiences and his military unit and he sees that the people that he's been fighting with have their hopes and their dreams that they're putting aside for the hopes and the dreams of the collective not even just for a person but for the good of the collective they're putting aside their personal feelings and their thoughts and their their everything I'm always a person where I have my modes where I can be personable and things like that and I enjoy I enjoy kicking it with the Bros and and learning and things like that but at the end of the day I always find myself wanting to cultivate because I don't want to slip into that that group think I don't want to slip into doing what the collective is doing because the collective is doing it I want to dance to the beat of my own drum I want to Trend set I want to do all these things I want to be me at the end of the day baby because whether I'm with a group or not I'm me and I can stand on my own having that individual strength at the end of the day is important as well and that's just something I want you to keep in mind whether you're in the military whether you you have a corporate job whether you are a content creator whether you're a part of a sports team don't identify with the collective what what is your contribution to the world and how do you feel about yourself just keep that in mind bro now the perfect lifter for me talk a little bit about this before we finish up a perfect lifter for anybody should be an idealized version of yourself in the future so like when I was a child I can proudly say that I have become the idealized version of myself I'm I'm a good man I'm a good husband I I'm physically built the way that I want wanted to be like like the cartoon characters that I used to watch I do something that I'm happy with I I have people in my life that love me I have many people in my life that I've been very honored to have the opportunity to spend some time with before they um before they passed away and people that I have the pleasure of spending my time with now whom I love and I cherish an idealized version of yourself as the perfect lifter is is all of those things it's the physical it's the spiritual it's it's the mental it's the it's the it's the ego and by that I don't mean like being full of yourself I mean you've harnessed your potential in such a way where anything that you want to be you're moving towards that and you're starting to see that in yourself that's what I should that's what I'm talking about when it comes to when you're cultivating yourself into that ideal version of yourself and that doesn't mean like fake it I'm not saying that at all I'm saying that you have some traits that are in you that you want to actualize that's all I'm saying it's uh Carl Young called it individuation I think you can read up on that I won't get into like the philosophical mumbo jumbo but there's the individuation and then there's the the Shadow Self I think and then you integrate that into yourself it's it's a bunch of mumbo jumbo but read up on it you think about what would this version of me do sometimes in life I didn't always do that and like of course we all have our moments where we fall short of our own standards and expectations but always think about that even if you do something wrong or don't do something quite the right quite the right way or quite the best that you know you should have you still reflect upon that we're not perfect we all make mistakes but you don't you don't allow your [ __ ] to stink right everybody's [ __ ] stinks at times we all have areas of opportunity whether it's a lifter a man or whatever you should look to someone real in real life to give you inspiration to reach that for most of us that's our fathers growing up it could be a a ridiculously chatty cartoon character as well you should have multiple people that you look up to in some regard not only that idealized version of yourself but people who help you recontextualize what that idealized version of you should be so maybe an idealized version of you is good with managing money that's something you didn't think about till you met uh a good friend at work who was a little older than you that was really good with money but ultimately physically talking about anything outside of the the mental and the spiritual the perfect lifter for me is strong they look good they're good at everything in the gym whether it's form it's being good at every exercise they're fast and they're athletic that's not to say you're the perfect athlete or anything like that or you're you same Bol but I'll tell you what bro I can run pretty fast you know I'm not in my peak in terms of conditioning but my fastest I ran a mile and a half in 7 minutes and change which is uh faster than a mile in 5 minutes I think it's like four minutes and 40 seconds I could maybe run I could maybe run a mile in seven minutes now bro which is not bad by any means but it's that's orders of magnitude different from my Peak but I I'm still pretty fast and I've always had pretty good endurance and a good set of legs but overall the perfect lifter for me is just a complete monster they're a monster bro it's like guts or or Zod from berserk it's like Super Saiyan Goku from the Namek Saga with the planet size shoulders it's just a complete thick head to toe beast and that's all she wrote for the berserk method 2024 I really wanted to take my time with more of actionable things for you and Food For Thought pieces and self- coaching pieces because I really wanted this to be the best version of the the berserk method yet because it's really important to me each and every year that I put together something special that's worth your time and it's worthy of the Legacy that I'm trying to build I'm trying to build something that is in honor of now two men who have passed away canaro miora and Akira Toriyama and and honoring their their Works which have contributed to my formative years and a lot of you guys' formative years as well especially dragon ball and sharing those works with you as well so not only offering my own peace and throwing my own hat in the ring but sharing with you two things that really really I love and appreciate berserk and Dragon Ball Z that can sound however is going to sound to you but I also really believe in giving back to the community as well because as I said y'all allow me to lift weights for a living and I want to give you something really special so I really appreciate you you each have your own special potential not only as a lifter but as a person and lifting should be about cultivating that within yourself you know we all have our insecurities we all have our things that we're not great at or that we're not great at doing or things that we're coachable at and these videos are all about making you more coachable in in those regards so that you can do those things for yourself and eventually do that same thing for someone else so it's been a blast fellas we're 4 hours in if you have any questions please let me know please use the list of resources in the description to get yourself on a free program and if you have any questions about how to navigate a mistake that you make please come back to this video re-watch the parts that you need to read or rewatch the parts that you need to listen to to recontextualize the things that you're doing wrong it may seem like a catastrophic issue or or or mistake that you've made but a lot of of the times it's just something small that you need to do or a 10,000 F foot view that allows you to see that hey it's not a catastrophic failure I'm just not eating enough or wow I'm just changing my exercises around too much or wait I need to focus on this instead of that a lot of times is that and that's why I don't full disclosure most people that try to reach out for coaching you know I say this funnily but I tell them hit the bricks I I talk to them and I see what they're in it for coaching but a lot of the times you don't need to be paying me a luxury price for what is essentially a bill like you're paying me for a coaching is not cheap right your question I could either answer in a comment or I could direct you to this video or any of the videos that I've made or if you absolutely need it you can buy buy a program or something it just is what it is but like I said it's been a blast fellas I will see you in the next one have a good day