Dr. Bret Contreras
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They focused on the big basics and they would repeat movements
And in women as well.
So stay in a healthy body fat range.
Maybe it's like 10 to 20% for men.
Maybe it's 15 to 25% for women and just recomp.
But if you're not in that range,
If you're lower, then you need a bulk to be in an optimal hormonal profile.
If you're overweight, you need to lose weight.
So bulking and cutting is a strategy.
But when you're in your healthy range, you don't have to.
There's not much evidence.
And if you do do it, do mini, mini bulk, mini cut.
So those are two important questions.
Okay, question one.
I was the first person to make this a thing because I had so many women come to me back in like 2009, 2010.
I think my first blog post was 2010.
And I made two YouTube videos on how to grow your glutes without growing your legs.
It's tricky because most of the best glute exercises are leg exercises.
The goal is gaining strength.
So you have to cut all of them out.
If you want to grow your glutes without growing your legs, the nice thing is the plot can study.
And then a couple of subsequent studies, this Bartholomew paper shows you can grow your
glutes, similarly effectively as like squats and step ups, for example, through hip thrusts.
So you can do hip thrusts, you can do kickbacks, you can do 45 degree hypers, you can do abduction, but you can't do all the squats and lunges and even the, you know, stiff leg deadlifts and stuff like that.
So with every person, it's unique.
You want to minimize those and just focus on most of the isolation lifts.
And you can probably do more volume for those.
So here you could just do hip thrusts and kickbacks and abduction three times a week and you might do four sets of each because they don't make you real sore.
And there's so many ways to do this.
But you require a separate strategy if you don't want the leg growth.
But I will say many women think that they don't want the leg growth because they have fat on their legs.
And once they lean out, they actually like the way their legs look.
So a lot of people improperly throw themselves into that category.
If I have some people deadlift hard twice a week, they might get back pain, even if they're using good form.
And then the second question is, can you induce hip dips through weight training?
Hip dips.
Which are?
They're the hollow point formed from where the glute medius meets the glute maximus.
No, not really.
It wouldn't stick.
That'd be pretty amazing.
But like it's a hollow area.
But they'd probably have to be flexing, but yeah.
That it would stay put.
Yeah, it would stay put if they're laying on their side.
But I've talked about this for a long time.
I will tell you, if you get lean, you have to have hip dips.
If you're lean, there's no muscle there.
It's where the glute medius comes down, straight down.
The glute max runs diagonally, and there's a hollow point in the middle where there is no muscle there.
So when people come up with these hip dip workouts, they're full of it.
You can't grow muscle in an imaginary space without
You get lean enough and, you know, so like the solution is to get fat put in there or hopefully you store fat there.
But once you get lean enough, we all have hip dips.
What if they're really weak, have really weak hamstrings in isolation, and I start giving them seated leg curls, and it transfers to their deadlift.
So learn how to embrace them.
The funny thing is you think of like Ronnie Coleman from behind flexing his glutes, like posing.
Yes, you see this butterfly shape.
The glutes are like a butterfly shape.
But his hip dips don't look bad because you got these giant vasties, the outer quads that
But with women without those outer quads, it can look unsightly, but that's because we've programmed to be worried about it.
Learn to embrace it and say, I like the hip dips.
It means I'm lean.
It means I'm strong.
It means I'm muscular and athletic.
And it's just something that is hard to avoid if you're training properly and getting lean.
But can you make them worse through strength training?
Yes, in my opinion, because you make it more pronounced and you get leaner.
So if you're really worried about it, try to maintain a higher body fat percentage and maybe don't train as much glute medius and frontal plane hip abduction.
Do seated hip abduction instead of like what we did yesterday, which was more upright, because maybe growing the glute medius and minimus, especially the middle and anterior divisions.
But I will say all of my clients do plenty of abduction work and they look fine.
We've known that spot reduction is a myth since like the 90s.
The seated leg curls doesn't put stress on their low back.
Research showing that, yeah, you can do all the crunches you want.
It doesn't target fat loss in that area.
You can build muscle.
And so you can have site-specific muscle growth, but not site-specific fat loss.
Fat loss comes off from the entire body, which you do through caloric deficit, through eating less, moving more, or any combination thereof.
But also through recomping, because if you gain five pounds, if you weigh...
200 pounds and you gain 10 pounds of muscle, lose 10 pounds of fat, you know, you've just lost 10 pounds of fat.
You get stronger.
You're, you're, um, 5% less body fat levels.
You're going to have less fat, you know, like, so it's through, you can do it through, like, that's not to say you shouldn't ever train your abs.
It's just to say that your abs tend to look the best when you're, you're leanest, not when you're training your abs the most.
by identifying weak links.
So theoretically, it doesn't just depend on the hips.
It depends on how the femur... Because I wrote about this in my book.
I just think people get like, should you train differently for your glute genetics?
And there's a lot of transfer between the different lifts.
Maybe if you feel like you're kind of like a...
So I don't believe you need to repeat the same movements all the time.
Well, I would say if you tend to get beat up with your low back, then hang.
Do static hangs or even hopefully you progress to one-arm hangs where you can kind of do one-arm hangs where you brace yourself on the – use the non-working arm to hold yourself in position.
But if your low back is stellar, then you can do shrugs.
You can do farmer's walks.
Walking is kind of hard at a gym to do, just walking around with the dumbbells, but you could just stand in place and you could do shrugs.
When you can't do any more shrug, you just hold it for time.
You could also just hold the last rep of your last set of deadlifts for time.
All those things help out.
And I also think you should switch it up every month.
They all add up to improving your grip strength.
I would say what we talked about yesterday, the one set to failure.
Who does it?
Who does one set to failure, two full body workouts a week, one set to failure?
For each body part.
Yeah, on like six to eight exercises, like six to ten exercises per day.
You get the workout done in, you know, 45 minutes.
So you're training an hour and a half a week and you probably could get –
And that's one thing I've had a lot of success with.
80% of your gains than you could through training for three times that much time.
It's very time efficient, it's just no one ever does it.
I don't know anyone who does one set.
Everyone does multiple sets, but it's a very efficient way to train.
it's a very fun way to train because you come in with a goal.
You're like, I need to try to beat my record.
Well, the only thing I would say is shuffle the lifts around, shuffle the order around and shuffle the variations around.
Because as we've mentioned, you can't just keep gaining strength for years on end.
With my system, I've had a lot of success.
It doesn't work that way.
We talked about this yesterday.
It gets to a point where you're, I got to a point where I suck at squats, but I was doing 225 for 30.
We have like a
I was doing my best stiff leg deadlift.
it was 405 for either 20, I might've gotten 22.
And then you get to a point where like, what am I going to do?
Go for 25.
Yes, you can go heavier weight, but like, it gets to the point where it's daunting.
It makes you nervous just thinking about the exercise.
So at that point, you kind of got to learn to, you know, that's your body may be telling you you're about to get injured.
a squat and bench press month.
So maybe you, yeah, he switched the exercise or start doing more volume, but it's a,
It's a strategy I wish more people knew about because a lot of people quit lifting because they think they have to do it for periods of time in your life where you get stressed out or like times are tough.
I got to work harder or put more hours into work or this responsibility comes in.
Then the next month will be a deadlift and chin-up month.
You can do brief workouts and they're very effective just doing 45 minutes a couple of times a week.
It'll help more people stick to weight training because they realize I don't have to be in the gym five hours a day.
Love it.
No, you always do all the movement patterns.
It's what you do first and what you focus on.
That's what you're going for the PR on.
But I'm not trying to have you get stronger at squats every single month.
Well, let me offer my thanks right back.
You are a pioneer.
You have helped me with your protocols and through your focus on health and neuroscience with practical tips to help us all.
I can't tell you how many people that I know follow you.
And when I told them I'm going to come on your podcast, they're like, what?
And if you don't like barbell squats, you can do, you know... Hack squat.
It's like...
I finally made it in their eyes, being on your podcast.
It's really cool to have you ask me to come on because men tend to invite guests on their show for what they want to learn.
And you have probably 50% female listeners and they're all about the glutes.
Even if you aren't all about the glutes or you don't care if you grow bigger glutes, a lot of your followers do.
So that's where I'm glad to come in because, yeah, we'll read in the comments most of the men will be like, just do squats and lunges.
And it's like the women can write back, do you do pec deck?
Do you do lateral raises?
Do you do curls?
Then quit being hypocritical.
We can isolate the glutes.
We can add in more volume as long as we can recover from it.
It's only going to make our glutes even bigger.
And I'm glad they got to be exposed to my methods and my material.
Hack squat, leg press.
So thank you for inviting me on.
I would always love to –
Come back in the future down the road as we learn more and share the wealth.
So thanks right back at you.
It could be a single leg movement.
It's the movement pattern.
From the side view, does it look like a squat?
That could be a squat, hack squat, lunge, belt squat, leg press, V squat, step up, Bulgarian split squat, a lot of different things.
It's a buffet.
People can pick what works best for them.
From the side view, does it look like a squat on one or two legs?
They all work very similarly.
So I want you getting stronger at those, but not every month because the next month I might switch to deadlift, but they all have different rules.
So here's what I kind of realized.
Have you ever focused on, you say you don't want, your chest and back, you're not trying to grow maximally.
But if you, let's say you're just trying to get as big as humanly possible.
Have you ever said, I want to see if I can work my way up to 20 chin-ups?
I haven't, but even in a single set, no, I have not done that.
Well, if you did do that, your back muscles would probably get bigger, right?
But you'd be like, okay, I have this chin-up goal.
I want to get 20 chin-ups.
How am I going to get there best?
I'm going to start doing more chin-ups.
Maybe you don't like chin-ups all the time, so you do heavy supinated pull-downs.
I've realized they transfer.
There's like a one-to-one correlation.
I never realized that until the last couple of years.
supinated, treating it like a chin-up.
You can recover quickly from those.
So you can do chin-ups or pull-downs three times a week.
But what else will help your chin-ups?
Training more biceps.
When I have my female clients start doing barbell curls and easy bar curls, their chin-ups went up.
So it has its own rules.
When you focus on like the chin-up month, you can hit these movements frequently.
You can recover from them.
But what about deadlifts?
If I said you're going to focus on deadlifts this month, I don't know many lifters that can deadlift really hard twice a week.
They beat you up, especially when you get strong.
So you might have, you might, if you're hitting three full body workouts a week, maybe only do heavy deadlifts once a week.
But the other time you're doing a more like a hingey, like a stiff leg deadlift or a good morning, real strict, not going crazy, you might leave some reps in reserve or you're just really strict so you don't get as sore from that.
And then the other day might be a hamstring, you start out with a hamstring movement or something.
These lifts have different rules that you figure out over time.
And it also depends on the individual.
Some people can squat three times a week.
Some people can't get away with that.
They'll develop hip pain, knee pain, low back pain.
So there's kind of this art of how to design programs that allow the masses to build strength.
But whenever you work with someone individually, you have to, you stray from it a little bit.
But anyway, I do believe hitting a muscle three times a week
is a little bit better, but it's more risky.
You can spin your wheels.
I don't want to say overtrain because overtraining syndrome is something, but we all know what it means.
It means stagnating because you're not properly recovered.
You're spinning your wheels.
And it's really hard to recover from three times a week.
So that's why the safest bet is hit a muscle twice a week.
But I think if you know what you're doing, you can do three times a week.
First of all, what you're saying about most people, you're insinuating that people have different recovery genetics, and there's research on that.
Some people experience way more muscle damage than others, and some people have a recovery gene.
They just recover quickly?
Yeah, it's an old paper I read.
I don't have that gene.
I don't have it either.
And I'm very envious of people who do because...
The listeners, you'll probably have people split in half, people going, I can do these crazy marathon workouts and the next day I'm not even sore.
And other people like you and I go, I get so sore.
I wish I could.
But here's the thing.
You could train it three times a week.
You have to adjust the variables.
If you're always training when you're fatigued and beat up, you're never going to get stronger.
So you might have to adjust the variables.
You and I might not be able to do as many sets as we could when we were 23.
You know what I mean?
Now that we're approaching 50, we have to do a little bit less volume.
Maybe we can't train three times a week, but we could train twice a week.
But everyone's unique.
But in general, everyone can recover from two times a week.
But you might not be able to recover if you do, you know, touch and go deadlifts, you know, to failure being like where you're maintaining really good form.
But some people can just round their backs and keep going.
And then the next day you feel like you got hit by a bus.
And a lot of times it's the muscle damage.
But it might not just be muscle damage.
It could be connective tissue.
It could be fascia and other –
you know, structures too that are just, if they're damaged, it signals the central nervous system, hey, don't maximally recruit these muscles.
So if pain inhibits muscle activation, damage, it's probably a wise, you know, evolutionary strategy for the body to say, hey, chill, you're not recovered yet.
Let's limit the gas pedal.
How much, you know, let's put the brakes on a little bit so this person can't keep hurting themselves.
But you want to be recovered, so you sometimes have to adjust the variables, which are exercise selection.
That's probably the most important.
Volume, effort, how hard you push yourself.
These are your tools.
Program design is an awesome tool.
And there's an art to this.
We have a lot of science, but there's an art to combining them all.
And that's why strength training is an applied science.
That's why it's fun for me.
There's an art to this.
And you can't just read a research, like a review paper and be like, oh, here's how...
Here's how everyone should train.
But could you recover from hitting a muscle three times a week?
You mentioned that you want your hamstrings to grow.
You know you could do two sets of lying leg curls three times a week, especially if you stopped your sets two reps shy of failure.
Lying leg curls don't beat you up as much.
It's when you throw in the stiff leg deadlifts, the good mornings, even seated leg curls the way we did it yesterday where I enhanced the eccentric and made it harder on the way down and really made you upright in that seated leg curl position so you got a stretch on the hamstrings.
That tends to create a little more damage.
So some of these exercises that give you the most bang for your buck and they're the most efficient.
These exercises, they sometimes aren't the best exercises if you're training on a muscle frequently.
And I like to say walking lunges are probably the best glute exercise there is.
The problem is they're too good.
If you really go to failure where you can't get another step with a, you know, they can beat you up a lot.
If you do three or four sets to failure and then you're trying to train legs two days later,
There's no way.
Like you'll be so sore, it'll be counterproductive.
That's why I like step-ups more than lunges, not because I think they're more effective.
They're just more conducive to training a muscle frequently.
And this doesn't get talked about enough.
There's an art to training frequently.
So when men, we grew up in the, we're almost the same age.
We're both 49 right now.
We grew up where bodybuilders trained legs one day a week.
you know, everyone trained, you had your body part split routine where you train a muscle one day and then you damage the hell out of it and you need a whole week to recover.
The workouts back then were like four sets of squats, four sets of stiff leg deadlifts, four sets of leg press, four sets of leg extensions, and then maybe two types of leg curls or something.
And then you'd be annihilated for the whole week.
Can that work?
The bodybuilder's got big legs back then.
I think better results are seen when you don't go so crazy.
So you're saying, okay, my girls train, my programs and my glute squad, I have one in San Diego, one in Florida.
They train their legs.
They train lower body three times a week.
They do one squat pattern, a squat lunge pattern.
Per workout?
Yep, one and three sets.
But when I train them in person, it's typically two sets because I push them harder and we have a goal in mind.
And also what I've realized is I typically only push them really hard during their first exercise because I realize if I sit there and hover over them for all four exercises, well, three of the exercises are hard.
One's a squat lunge pattern.
One's a hinge pull movement, meaning a type of deadlift, stiff leg deadlift, good morning, or a 45-degree hyper or reverse hyper.
And then you have your thrust bridge pattern where it's either a hip thrust or a glute bridge.
And we have lots of different hip thrust tools, but those don't create as much muscle damage because you're training the glutes in a shortened position.
Dr. Andrew Huberman, it's a pleasure.
Anyway, they don't, the squat lunge hits your quads
glutes and adductors.
The hinge hits your hamstrings and glutes.
The thrust mainly just works the glutes.
And then you throw in an abduction movement at the end, which is glute medius or upper glute max.
And that tends to be... You can recover from that.
Also, I want to mention women can recover a little bit better than men.
Thank you so much for inviting me on.
The research is mixed, but having trained...
men and women my whole like for literally like 30 years now I will tell you women recover better like I don't need studies to tell me that they can do a little more volume also it might matter if you're on a specialization routine meaning
The pleasure is mine.
Men, we're hitting our traps.
We're hitting all three heads of our delts.
We're hitting all the muscles in the body.
So a lot of the women, their upper body workouts, if they train full body, they might just do a compound or multi-joint upper body press and pull, and that's it.
A lot of them, yeah.
They don't care as much as men do about arms.
And they're going to get decent arm development focusing on one upper body press and one upper body pull, but do that three times a week.
We might do 36 sets a week for glutes.
And you think, oh my God, that's so much.
It's 12, 12.
I mentioned the four patterns.
So you've got your squat lunge, hinge pull, thrust bridge, and then your abduction.
And those can be in any order.
Sometimes we prioritize the squat lunge, sometimes the hinge.
And it makes it fun because it's fun to PR on your favorite type of squat or hack squat or lunge or whatever.
And then the next month we might prioritize a hinge.
But you're always doing all three of them.
But you're going for PRs on one of the movement patterns each time.
And then you mix it up throughout the... That's my system that tends to work well.
There's a million ways to do it.
But anyway, you can recover from that because it doesn't...
beat you up so much, but there's rules to it.
You alternate with the squat lunge pattern.
You alternate with a bilateral and unilateral because the unilateral tend to get you more sore.
Bilateral is double leg or double, like two limbs at a time.
And then unilateral single arm or single leg.
Like rear foot elevated.
So the rear foot elevated split squat or the Bulgarian split squat, they tend to get you more sore in the muscles.
And also vertical hinges, meaning deadlifts and good mornings where it's vertically loaded compared to like 45 degree hypers where you're kind of at an angle.
The 45 degree works you a little bit more at shorter muscle lanes, not as much in the stretch.
So you can recover from those a little bit easier.
With my system, we tend to alternate.
You don't try and do RDLs and good mornings three times a week.
That would be overkill.
There's so many ways to do things, but that's how you make it recoverable.
And then if you have a client that's like, I'm beat up all the time.
I feel like I'm not recovering.
Let's reduce the sets.
Okay, I don't want you training as close to failure.
Let's switch the exercises.
You're doing Smith machine reverse lunges and they're annihilating you.
Let's see if you can do
a glute dominant step up where you're leaning forward.
And it works for all the muscle groups too.
It's like delts.
I prioritized delts the last year and I feel like they grew.
I wanted to do more delt volume, but if I just do dumbbell ladder raises all the time and I'm always going for progressive overload on them, I start heaving, I start, it starts kind of irritating my joints a little bit, but I've found that cable ladder raises don't beat me up as much.
But I will use dumbbells, machines, cable columns, even bands.
You can do band exercises.
Those work you most in the squeeze position.
They don't create as much muscle damage.
So you use this knowledge to maximize your recoverable volume.
MRV, it's this concept of maximum recoverable volume.
You want to do as much volume as possible, but still recovering from it.
So yeah, that's the hard thing about working with people online compared to in person.
Online, you kind of have to have a generic cookie cutter approach.
In person, you can individualize it and assess where they are.
If I have a beginner, yes, I agree with you.
They benefit from more volume to have the motor learning and gain the coordination.
Also, you should like, I remember standing in the mirror when I was like 15, 16 year old flexing.
And I'm like, I can't, how do I flex my lats?
How do I flex my, if you can't flex your muscles, how can you flex your muscles against resistance?
Like super important point.
So you can use what Mel Siff back then is a legendary sports scientist.
He passed away too soon, but he wrote the book Super Training.
But all of us strength coaches back in the day, that was our Bible.
And he called it loadless training.
But yeah, you want to flex and squeeze.
But then after a while, you don't need to do that.
You can use that.
You can feel that muscle doing any movement if you want.
Men probably have an advantage when they start out because when we're going through puberty and you're like, oh, wow, my body's changing and no one was looking and you're in the mirror.
I remember.
Every dude flexes his biceps.
His biceps.
And you're like...
You practice flexing.
Well, that's training.
That's resistance training.
You're flexing your muscles.
You're providing the resistance, you know, and there's some evidence that you can gain muscle that way.
There's a classic study by Brittany Counts.
With the biceps where one side used a dumbbell, the other arm just body weight, just like concentrating, using no load, four sets of 20, flexing your arm throughout the range of motion, trying to squeeze your biceps.
And interestingly, this arm grew the triceps because you're using your triceps to provide some of the resistance.
The no weight arm.
Yeah, the no weight arm.
That's pretty wild.
Yeah, so you can, but then how... I'm not suggesting that's the training people stick with.
Yeah, if you can't feel your muscles, you know, if you can't flex your... It's kind of hard to like, how do I flex my delts just standing here?
But like, yeah, you start tweaking the body and contorting and you're like, oh, I can feel my delts when I do this.
Flaring your lats, that took me some time back.
you know, 30 years ago when I started.
And then you start to realize, oh, and then another thing, sometimes you go to a gym that doesn't have a lot of equipment or you're limited in loading and you're like, you know, I'm going to do lat pull downs and you figure out, wow, I feel my lats more doing it this way.
Lifting is a lifelong journey.
You can always be improving your form.
You can always be learning new skills.
But in the beginning, yes, you want to learn how to flex your muscles.
You want to learn how to perform the exercises with good form, gain the coordination factor, the neural gains.
Then over time, most of your gains in strength will come from the muscle growing from hypertrophy.
So I would say two times a week full body would be like the minimum.
Well, this was like proposed by this researcher, Vladimir Yanda, Janda, whatever, and kind of got trickled down.
I know Stu McGill, you've had him on the show.
He started talking about gluteal amnesia.
And then it gets a lot of backlash because people are like, oh, you really have gluteal amnesia.
Your glutes don't activate at all.
But what we're talking about is some muscles, and I learned this from doing EMG electromyography testing back in the day.
I'm like, man, when people walk up stairs, their quad activation is through the roof.
When you just stand up from the couch, quad activation through the roof.
Glute activation doesn't get very high during everyday normal movements.
Now, you could see results training just one day a week.
So they're probably more prone to atrophy and disuse.
The muscle will shrink.
You're also not activating as much.
Why would the neural gains be as efficient?
And then probably there's a genetic element too with your anatomy and with your sport history and stuff.
um so there's kind of like neural think of it as neural programming i know glute activation gets a lot of flack from people because it got so popular back they low load glute activation it's funny because i'm a personal trainer but my roots come up as a strength coach um i wanted to i wanted to work with athletes earlier in my career and i think that's what differentiated me from
Imagine if you, you know, and if you tracked your weights and like if you had a coach that was – that knew what they were doing, you could get good results just lifting weights one day a week.
All these these bodybuilding coaches have a different mindset.
I have a more of a functional outlook on things, but also we were doing low load glute activation back in the day.
And there were all these coaches, the popular strength coaches were doing it in the early 2000s up until the late 2000s.
What's low load glute activation?
You're using lower loads, body weight or bands.
And you're just doing like, you know, movements trying to, you're not going to failure.
It's not a working set.
You do it in the general warm-up, you know, your dynamic warm-up.
You might be able to do 100 glute bridges, but you're doing two sets of 10 trying to really squeeze the glutes and feel them moving you.
Lateral band walks, things like that.
So we were doing that in the early 2000s to wake up the glutes.
And there is evidence of this, though.
There's probably 15 studies on it, like key studies.
A lot of them show no benefit, but a couple of them show definite neural gains.
Like one study just in one week that people doing like an hour a day of isometric, like on all fours, you put a band around the knees and you did like...
Kind of this weird movement where it's like hip extension, abduction, external rotation at the same time, kind of lifting your leg out to the side.
Sort of like a dog peeing?
Yeah, almost like a fire hydrant, but also extending.
It's called a fire hydrant?
The fire hydrant.
Oh, because it's like a dog.
You're on your fourth and you lift a leg up.
All right.
But they want it to be isometric because they thought isometric, you're focusing, you're using the brain.
It would be a brutal day, but –
So they try to do like 20 minutes, three times a day for a whole week.
It would be full body.
Like that's crazy.
20 minutes of isometric holding?
So it was like as much as you can tolerate, but three times a day for a whole week.
They did the study in one week.
But in one week, they showed significant... I don't know all the terms because this is the... You would know these terms.
You would know the neural side of things.
The motor cortex... One way or another, there's a strengthening of the neural connection.
You'd hit mostly, you know, the big basic multi-joint movements.
Yeah, the brain, the air in the brain, the motor cortex responsible for activating the glute saw increases in just one week.
But it's obvious.
Like, it's obvious you can improve that side of things.
So... But then...
Here's the thing about what we're talking about.
People get carried away.
You can get sidetracked.
MRV can distract you.
People get obsessive with the number of sets.
The main thing is, are you gaining strength?
And I don't mean all-time PRs every single, like, especially if you've been lifting for a lot of years like you and me.
Can we keep going up in strength?
But you set a baseline.
on week one, and can you gain strength for three weeks in a row after that?
And then you switch.
Then you start at basically, can you gain strength?
Are you kind of moving up over time?
You know, you said it yesterday, there's going to be a jigsaw, what did you call it?
But if you stuck to that, you would see a lot of gains and you could keep seeing gains for, you know, theoretically an entire year or two.
A saw, but it's... Up into the right sawtooth pattern.
Sawtooth pattern, but up into the right.
Over time, are you making gains?
And that's where I've been heavily influenced by a powerlifting coach who passed away, Louie Simmons.
I really like the idea that his...
His powerlifters were like, you know, platform ready year round.
They would max out year round.
I'm going, how do you max out on squats, deadlifts, good mornings year round?
They'd have one max effort day a week, and then they'd have a dynamic effort day, you know, where they focused on speed or like reps, but it wasn't going crazy.
But their max effort day, they'd switch it around a lot.
That's how they could compete year-round like that.
And a lot of what I do is influenced by him.
All of us strength coaches back in the late 90s, the early 2000s, he was our primary influence.
You could talk to all the popular strength coaches back when I came up.
They would all say they were influenced by Louie Simmons.
But he did things a certain way.
For now, I'm going, okay, it makes sense to me now after studying biomechanics.
He used a lot of bands and chains.
That's a little bit easier in the stretch position, a little bit harder in the end range position.
He did one max, everybody's rotating the lifts every, you know, several weeks.
If you want to maximize your gains, you need to hit a muscle probably twice a week.
And so that's what I do.
But I don't, I'm not just preparing my clients for powerlifting.
I love the squat, the bench and the deadlift.
I also love the military press, the chin up and the hip thrust.
Those are my big six lifts.
But we also use leg press.
We use whatever machines, tools, whatever suits the clients well.
And I help my clients figure out what their favorite exercise are and they evolve over time.
Here are the tools, and we try to set PRs over time, but you switch it around.
Because what you talked about in a previous question, this old nautilus and hip philosophy was, you know, hit a muscle infrequently, hit it hard, recover, blast it, and try to get one more rep or go up five or ten pounds.
There's some evidence that maybe three times a week is best, but that's hard to recover from.
It sounds great in theory.
It just doesn't work out in real life.
That's the thing.
If you just repeat the same exercises, say you and I just said, look, let's, you know, say we worked out tomorrow together.
Let's set our baseline with deep squats and stiff leg deadlifts.
And whatever we hit, we hit.
And then we're going to go up either one more rep or you're up five or 10 pounds.
You know, even if we maxed out and said, OK, we're going to try and get one more rep each week.
You won't get, you know, 52 more reps each year.
You won't get five more pounds each month.
That's 60 pounds in a year.
You won't keep going up 60 pounds.
Maybe you can the first year, maybe the second year, depending on the lift.
But after a while, then if that were true,
In 10 years of lifting, everyone would be doing 600 plus pounds on every exercise.
It doesn't happen.
And that's what people don't talk about with progressive overload.
You got to talk about this because you can't just keep going up.
It doesn't happen.
And then it's frustrating when you think you have to progressive overload and then you don't get one more rep.
or you don't get five more pounds or you don't set a PR and then you start getting contorting your form and you start getting joint pain and nagging injuries and then you start going backwards that's one thing you definitely want to avoid we talked about this yesterday is avoiding this pain cycle avoiding this nagging injury cycle how do you keep making gains without being hurt without being and that's where you got to use more variety
But I would say for the majority of listeners who are eager to get started, you get so much of your results from the first set.
The first set you do.
The first work set.
The first working set you do.
And then, you know, adding more volume, adding more frequency, it's not linear.
My top six are squats, bench press, deadlifts.
military press, chin-ups, and hip thrusts.
And if you do those six lifts, so it's like, I loved powerlifting, but if you just did the three lifts, your shoulders might not be maximally developed.
Your lats might not max.
You might be leaving some room for glute growth on the table.
And so this, in my opinion, you're going to develop all your muscles with these six lifts.
All the variations of those.
Great, okay.
Let me tell you a lesson I learned.
In 2020, we have the quarantine, right?
We're all so bored.
And stressed.
I have a gym in San Diego.
And it's like, I remember like week one of the quarantine.
I'm like, okay, I can do this.
I'm lucky I have a gym.
I can go to the gym.
I don't have to do these silly body weight workouts that we're telling everyone to do.
I can actually still use all the machines and the free weights.
And I had my client, Allegra, call me, coach, you know me, I'm gonna go crazy.
You know my mental health.
I have to be lifting weights.
I'm like, well, come to the gym with me.
Who's gonna know?
And then California was pretty hardcore.
But I'm like, I don't want my – I know it was like a sensitive topic because people were dying back then.
How tragic.
But I'm a very social person and I'm like, all right, I'm going to let my clients come and train with me.
Well, long story short, 2020 was, sad enough, probably the best year of all of our lives.
We'll say it was the best year.
We lifted weights all day long because you didn't have to – you weren't so –
focused on your career back then and posting to social media, you were just trying to survive each day and you weren't even allowed to post on social media about like your workouts and stuff because you weren't supposed to be in a gym.
So my clients would come to me for two, three hours a day, six, six days a week.
I was in the gym all day long and all of a sudden I'm like, Jesus, my clients are getting so freaking strong.
They're insane right now.
They're so strong.
So that's when I thought up the idea of strong lifting.
It's like power lifting is the three lifts.
Strong lifting is the six lifts.
those six lifts I just mentioned.
We're going to start competing.
And I did this like psychological trick where I'd have my computer up and I'd have the spreadsheet and I'd have all my clients' names and all their strength.
And they'd start looking because I gave awards out like the...
So if you got the absolute best or the relative best, strength divided by body weight, at any lift, and then we had the total lift, and then we had strongest upper body, strongest lower body, strongest presser, which were squats, military, and bench, strongest puller, which was chin-ups and, you know, deadlifts.
So strongest lower body, strongest upper body.
We could mix it around.
I had like 55 awards I'd give out.
But the point was the women would go – like my clients, like Amanda would be like, Carly just hit a PR.
I got to beat her.
Like they got competitive with it.
No, I would say we did –
kind of like the lower, upper, lower, upper, lower, because they wanted to come in every day.
They were bored to death.
So we'd have three lower body days, and we would do probably a variation of each, but some days it would be like we're trying to squat really hard.
Some days we're trying to deadlift hard.
You can't squat, deadlift.
You could hip thrust hard three times a week.
That works you in the squeeze position.
It doesn't beat you up as much.
But as we started getting stronger at deadlifts, we realized some things.
We were doing touch and go, meaning you bounce the weight up.
You don't reset.
You don't set the weight down, reset it, then lift it up.
You're stronger when you do touch and go compared to reset reps.
I remember my client Ashley Hodge hits 315 for 18 reps.
And like Dominique gets it 315 for 11 reps.
In my online programs, I always recommend three sets.
And it's the environment's crazy.
We have their PR song going on.
You know, what song do you want to hear?
It's, you know, blaring it at max volume.
And you have 10, 20 of your lifting partners, your colleagues around going, come on, you got it, come on.
The videos back then were crazy.
And they're hitting these crazy PRs.
And then they say to me, coach, I don't know.
Cool, I set a deadlift PR, a touch and go PR, and then I'm sore for my next week and a half is shot.
It can take, when you're really training that kind of psychological arousal, when you're training that hard and doing like some lifts, like that hack squat you have at your place, it's more horizontal.
When I train people in real life, it's typically two sets.
You can keep going with it.
If I'm there going, come on, Andrew, you got this.
Keep going.
You get in some zone.
There's some lifts where you can just keep going.
And then it annihilates you so bad your knees are sore for a week.
So we kind of realized then we're not going to train with that.
We're not going to yell at each other.
We're not going to train with music.
It beats you up too much.
We're not going to do touch and go.
We're going to do reset reps and we're going to do lower reps with stricter form because they beat you up too much.
So we learned during that when we were training for it, we learned some stuff can beat you up too much.
And you don't know that until you've
hit it until you've worked that hard and you got really strong most of the listeners you know Ashley Hodge weighed 130 pounds and hit 315 for 18 now she's even stronger but you don't most people never train that hard
But it's... And I would say most of the world does four sets.
Most people need to train harder.
Then there's the category that people who train too hard.
What we now know is that Arthur Jones, back in the day, the Mike Menser approach, hit once all out set to failure.
That probably is the most efficient way to train, the most economical way to train.
You're in the gym.
You can be in the gym 45 minutes twice a week and make good gains.
The problem is it leads to injuries over time if you don't swap, rotate the exercise.
And you don't have to perform every set to failure.
In fact, there's some evidence now emerging that you can get just as much hypertrophy, similar strength gains, but like you might want to leave a rep or two in the tank and do a little more volume.
You know, like most people just generically do four sets per...
So everything's very nuanced.
But when I moved away from San Diego, I moved to Vegas.
Now my squad is left to train on their own.
Well, I was always there to watch them, you know.
And so if I'm training you, Andrew, and you're like, coach, my low back feels a little off.
And then I'm like, okay, we're not deadlifting today.
Or if you're like, my knee feels weird today.
Okay, we're not going to squat today.
We're going to do this instead.
I'm there to swap it out.
But if I'm not there and you push yourself through it and you do that for a few weeks, now it becomes a chronic problem and it takes a long time to go away.
per exercise.
So now my clients are getting, with me not being there, they're getting injured more often.
They start developing nagging, low back pain and things like that.
It's just kind of what... And most people do bro splits.
So now I've learned to, I still love strong lifting.
But you can't just keep getting stronger at the main barbell lifts week in, week out.
You've got to introduce more variety.
So we now cycle things around and we stray, but it's still about progressive overload, but we incorporate more machines, more, like you said, overhead press.
It could be dumbbells.
It could be Smith machine.
It could be barbell.
It could be seated, standing.
But you can pick a lift like what Louie Simmons would do back in the day.
They do body part splits.
You can pick a lift and get stronger at it for a few weeks, you know, for a month and then recycle it.
So we're always using progressive overload, but you can't always just go set all-time PRs every week in the gym.
It doesn't work that way.
And that's the hardest thing to instill into people is this topic of progressive overload.
What does that look like over the long haul?
What does it look like over a 30-year lifting career?
What most of the world does isn't always what's best.
And there's nothing wrong with doing four sets.
It's just that people aren't focused.
They just kind of go through the motions.
You'll say...
you know, hey, Andrew, what's your workout?
And if you go, well, I do, you know, bench press, I do 135 for 15 and then I do 185 for 12 and then I do 205 for eight and then 225 for five.
Well, I watched you lift yesterday and you do a good job of that.
So there are people who use sloppy technique and you come in and as a coach, you know, oh God, I got to really clean up the way they lift, their form, their tempo.
Then there are people who are really, really strict and you're like, okay, you could benefit from... You typically with women, you'll see this with...
Like people who are real big on yoga and Pilates and then they come to lift weights and they think everything needs to be so slow and controlled.
And this is going to be a shock to the listeners.
Tempo doesn't affect hypertrophy that much.
You can have like a one second repetition.
And an eight-second repetition, and it builds muscle similarly.
And it blows people's mind because they go, what?
You don't have to control the negative?
You can't just let the weights crash down, but as long as you are controlling the weights on the way down, also the lift matters.
Some lifts are less range of motion.
I used to laugh at it when I'd see people.
This is how you know who's really a coach and who's not.
When you see them prescribe an exercise and you're like, do this with a two-second concentric and four-second eccentric.
six seconds per rep and it's like a shrug imagine what that would look like shrugs are like explosive you know one second per rep if that you know some lifts are just quicker and then if you see that they prescribed a set of 12 and it and it's a you know six second per
Well, that's what you do every week.
Six times 12 is 72.
That's a 72 second set.
And then you're telling them, and it's a, say it's a step up.
So you got one leg, then you go right to the next leg.
And then you're saying rest one minute.
You'd be breathing so fast.
You would not have a productive second set, but I digress.
Then why would you grow?
I think tempo matters mostly for longevity.
If you're just like being very erratic and so explosive and not controlling the weight, you have a big better chance of getting injured over time.
Why would you adapt?
And so I think tempo is more important for hypertrophy in the long run.
Why would you see results from that?
By preventing injury, my clients, they will do hip thrusts explosively and people will say, you got to control the weight on the way down.
Well, there aren't a lot of, there aren't tons of studies on this topic, but it appears that they're wrong.
You can explode up, you can lower it slowly.
I mean, lower it quickly, or you can go a lot lighter and really control it.
So a lot of people just go through the motions.
It makes more sense to me to try to explode at the bottom and like really, but you want to control it, but you want to use that explosion because you're trying to create maximum force in the stretch position, the bottom position, but then you still want to use full range and control it the whole way and maybe have a brief little pause at the top.
When you have a plan and you're utilizing progressive overload,
But, yeah, people get too strict on tempo.
And those are the same types that when they're so focused on tempo and form and feeling that you don't use progressive overload.
Like what you just said, you don't even count it.
You don't even know how many reps you did, but you saw results this way.
So a lot of times people see results just from doing something different.
You and I talked about how when you were in your teens learning how to lift weights, you were influenced right away by Mike Mentzer.
So you right away learned how to get your all out of one hard set or like, you know, low volume, low volume training.
So we can talk about volume, frequency, all these things.
I was the opposite.
I learned from Arnold and Arnold and Mentzer were like opposing.
They actually didn't get along in real life.
So I read Arnold's encyclopedia and I'm like, I got to do all this volume.
So I did high volume training for eight years.
When I was like 24 years old, I started doing low volume training.
Once set to failure, it took me a while to get good at it.
I sucked at it initially.
And then you get really good at pushing one.
It's a skill.
You get so much better when you're only doing one set.
You get really good at getting your all out of that one set.
You mentioned that then you saw good results realizing I can benefit from more volume doing more sets.
But the main thing is, are you progressively overloading the muscles?
Same with when you said I'm going to focus on making the last reps harder, not using momentum or body English to squeeze out a couple more to make it easier.
And you definitely see gains that way, but it's this concept where something that can get you gains, then it can limit you eventually because your focus is now on... So you're relying on your mind.
You're relying now on your mind to use progressive overload, meaning...
You're not going to progress with weights.
You're going to try to produce increasing amounts of muscle force through a mind-muscle connection, through an internal attentional focus.
And you lie to yourself.
It's the same as if I don't have my logbook in front of me.
And I go, yeah, I hit 315 for six last time.
Are you putting more tension on the muscles over time?
And then I get it for seven.
I'm like, yeah.
And then I get my book.
And I'm like, oh, my God, I hit it for eight.
I forgot.
I could have probably gotten more.
That's what I like about taking notes and writing it down.
You lie to yourself and you limit yourself.
And you're like, God, if I knew...
Somehow, if I knew that I had hit eight before, I probably could have hit nine.
But the set still felt hard.
But we're capable of a lot more, but you've got to be reminded.
That's why for my clients, I give them autonomy.
So say we're doing hip thrusts first, and they say, Coach, what should I do?
I want them involved in on it.
I think things work better when you get them involved.
And that's how people grow.
So go, okay, which hip thrust do you want to do?
At my gym, we do hip thrusts.
rotisserie hip thrusts, ramp hip thrusts, and thruster pro.
You won't know what those mean, but which hip thrusts do you want to do?
So it's like you can geek out on the variables, which I love to do.
Or say it's, say they're doing a squat.
Do you want to use the glute builder squat machine?
Because it's really good.
Or do you want to do a Smith machine squat?
Do you want to do a barbell squat, box squat?
Do you want to use the T-bell and do the squat that way?
Which squat do you want to do?
And I let them choose.
And they go, let's do a rotisserie hip thrust or let's do a T-bell squat.
All right, what are your records?
And then they say, well, I've done, you know, my record with the T-bell squat is I've done 100 for 16.
I've done 125 because we load up 25-pound plates on that.
I they are very involved in the process and I go, OK, which do you want to beat today?
And I give them some autonomy.
So, yes, a lot of my the coaches listening to this would say, so you only have them go hard on one set.
But if your program is working, then you're getting stronger over time.
You should have them go do three or four sets and then the last set go hard on.
But that can work well.
And there's also some evidence that you can trade off volume and effort, meaning if you left three reps in the tank but did an extra two sets, that might be equal to doing a couple less sets but go training to failure.
There's some evidence of that.
But I'm just saying my system, I want them focused on progressive overload.
And when they have autonomy and they say, okay, coach, I think I want to go for the 125%
for a seven, I want to get eight.
All right, let's do it.
And then you're focused on it and then you go all out, you hit eight, great.
You don't need four sets to do that.
They set a PR, now I'm not going to follow them through the rest of the workout.
Now get your volume in, but you achieve the goal.
Everything else is icing on the cake.
You achieve that goal.
People don't understand how hard it is to continue to keep using Progressive Overload.
Most people stop.
after a year or two.
They just quit paying attention.
I think you've done that because we get older and you're like, oh, I can still get awesome workouts.
You need to take notes, have a logbook or an app that keeps track of your progress and you have a goal in mind.
I can still improve my physique.
But what you're talking about is using my muscle connection to increase muscle force, putting more mechanical tension on the muscles through your mind, but your mind plays tricks on you.
It's not objective.
What is objective is the load on the bar, but that can play tricks on you too.
where you're setting PRs but using sloppier form, not controlling it, using a different tempo or a different range of motion.
So that happens too.
That's why you've got to have this yin and yang, the external and the internal, like the progressive overload with the mind-muscle connection.
Those two are the yin and yang that keep each other in check.
And those two pathways are necessary to optimize hypertrophy over the long run.
What you're describing is using progressive overload.
You're just keeping the same weight.
But I used to make, I remember writing an article like 10 different ways you can progressive overload.
And that's just confusing people.
No, there's two main ways to progress.
You use the same weight for more reps or more weight for the same reps.
But in a way, you are using progressive overload because you're using the same weight, not necessarily getting more reps, but having more control over it, which does produce more tension on the muscles and can lead to muscle growth over time.
And I don't think most people do that.
So it's like if I have one of my female clients and we're doing a leg press or a hip thrust or something and say their main goal is to grow their glutes.
It's just it's not as objective.
It requires you to come in fresh and work your hardest.
And you can
There's no studies on this topic, by the way.
It would be cool to see one group focus on just on the numbers, quantity, and the other group focus just on the quality for a whole year.
And maybe in your first year you might tie, but over the years, like, I don't know.
Either beating the reps or the load, because I think people can get too caught up on quality to where they never go heavier and they're cool.
Well, this is your area of study, so I trust your answer.
But people will agree with you.
It'll be divided.
If you put up a poll, what do you guys think about this?
You'd have 50% say quality.
and then 50 say quantity because the and and over the long run quantity leads to injuries and we don't talk about this enough because it's like the the typical bros in their 20s that are like just squat deadlift and you know okay how does that pan out 30 years or 20 years from now when you've been you know lifting like you don't they don't even understand they haven't gotten there you have to have the nagging pains you were like
should I deadlift today or should I do single leg RDLs or like a seated leg curl?
And my goal for the day is for you to set a PR, PR meaning personal record, on hip thrust.
And they've done 315 pounds for eight reps.
And I said, okay, I want you at least tying eight, but...
Nine or 10 would be good.
In the beginning, you can gain strength.
I think what you're talking about is so important.
Like yesterday we were in your gym working out and, you know, you took a shower and came out in a towel, peeled down.
You have ripped abs.
Some people don't know this about you.
You look amazing.
You're 49 years old.
You've been lifting weights since you were 16.
Same here.
We talk about newbie gains.
We've both been lifting weights for 33 years.
We started when we were 16.
We're both 49.
You can learn a thing or two from us.
You know why?
Because we didn't fizzle out.
You gain strength every time you come in for the first few months.
you know we didn't fizzle out over over time and that's what you get a lot of gung-ho people that are like train five six days a week spend two three hours a day in the gym they don't last so there's this what's best for short-term hypertrophy what's optimal you can we can geek out over what's optimal but the main thing is what's going to keep you motivated also you're not you're not going to
if, if you train, even training five days a week is tough.
My, my, my clients will typically have like typically on Friday, if they hit it too hard on Monday and Wednesday, and then they're trying to hit lower body on Friday.
It's the greatest time to be a lifter.
And there, this happens to a lot of them, coach, I'm beat down today.
I'm just going to do kickbacks and abduction and keep it light.
And I go, that's fine.
Guess what?
They come back on Monday, crushing it.
They had to do a wimpy workout, uh,
And then they take Saturday and Sunday off.
It's so funny.
In fact, you get spoiled and then it's depressing when the newbie gains...
They come back again on Monday ready to rock and roll.
You have to make adjustments when you're training frequently.
When you're training one or two days a week, you don't have to make that many adjustments because you're recovered.
The more frequently you train, the more adjustments you have to make.
You have to auto-regulate based on biofeedback, meaning like you just got to listen to your body and –
stray from the plan but what you're saying is you start feeling overwhelmed you're not as psyched when you start trying to lift four or five times a week because you also like to be functional you sprint you run you have a life and you've learned that three days a week is what the optimal frequency for you and your lifestyle is
end but if they reach the goal if they say I have them warm up and then they hit 315 for 9 or 10 that's the goal is done that's what I wanted and so do you need a second set yeah you can do a second set you can also a lot of my colleagues would say you shouldn't go to failure your first set because then your second set you'll be fatigued and you should you could do four sets where your fourth set is to failure and
And you look amazing.
And so you figure that out.
Most people don't ever figure that out.
They don't think they just are these wrote, you know, robots going through life taking and they don't think for themselves.
And so that's what I encourage people.
You're going to see way better results training two days a week.
But you're psyched up.
You're recovered.
You're feeling you want to you're itching to go to the gym.
Compared to if you train six times a week and you're always sore, you're beat up, you're dreading it, you don't use progressive.
You just go through the motions and it's just to check off a box.
And you're not going to see many gains that way.
So you're absolutely right that you're psych.
I always say we talk about anatomy and physiology and we ignore the psychology component.
The psychological component is huge.
And that gets ignored.
And I try to help people tune into that as a, as a coach.
And I try to stray from, like, I have my system, but I've, I've had great gains, you know, like with people straying far from the norms.
I remember this client Sammy I had in 20, 2013, and
I'm like, she's the strongest one of the group.
I started training six bikini competitors all at once.
I didn't even have a gym at that time.
I trained them out of my six floor condo in Phoenix, Arizona.
I smuggled equipment up to my sixth floor when the security guards were distracted.
And I had like six pieces of equipment and they got so strong.
I think Sammy probably doubled her glute size in six months.
But I'm like every month – I only train her twice a week, Monday, Thursday back then.
And I'm like every Thursday her workouts suck.
And I'm like, oh, my God, she's gaining so much strength, but every Thursday workout sucks.
I'm going to just give her one set to failure.
And one set to failure of like – so she'd do like five or six sets on Monday, five or six sets on Thursday, and the other girls would go –
Coach, why does she only have to do one set?
And I'd go, you can do one set if you want.
I think you want to do more.
I don't think you want to do one set.
Most people want to do more volume.
But I'd say it's because she's so strong.
I remember I had this 106-pound kettlebell they were deadlifting.
160-pound kettlebell?
No, no, no, 106 pounds.
But she quickly got to where she could do it 50 reps.
So I had to buy a 203-pound kettlebell.
It looked like a cannonball because I didn't want to have a barbell in place.
No, I know.
And I look back because you still see the video on YouTube.
It's hilarious because the bench was against my TV stand.
And I had travertine tile.
And I'd pick up this Easy Bar and sit in their laps.
And they do hip thrusts.
You see in some of the videos like this red envelope, like the Netflix, back when we used to order Netflix DVDs, that's how long ago this was.
But if they were to drop the weight or their feet slid out, I would have cracked my tile.
But anyway, I saw great results just having minimal equipment.
But she could gain a lot of strength, but she did best with single sets.
And there's one study I remember on the ACE gene, the angiotensin-converting enzyme gene.
I don't know what the hell that has to do with strength and volume, but there were different alleles.
This is not my field, but different...
different phenotypes or whatever.
This was years ago when I read the study, but it seemed that some people do better with lower body doing single sets versus multiple sets.
Interesting.
And that study was like 12.
That study was, I think, a lot of years ago, maybe like 10, 15-year-old study.
But there's probably a genetic element to how many sets is optimal for us.
But she saw that if I trained, if I had to do three lower body workouts a week, she spun her wheels.
Could I have said, we're going to do three, but we're going to do more sets, way less effort.
But who likes stopping five reps shy of failure?
It's hard to do when it's easy and you stop.
People like training.
Serious lifters like training close to failure.
And then if someone just generally doesn't like I know there's genetics to that exercise enjoyment.
You know that there's genetics of everything.
There's a lot of ways to do things.
I was blogging back, you know, like 2015.
I started, I was like looking at everything.
There's a, you know, genetics of pain tolerance, genetics of exercise enjoyment, genetics of
And every coach has their own system.
Muscle damage recovery, there's obviously look at, I remember I wrote this article for Teenation back in the day.
And there were some fascinating studies back then.
They took the top responders versus the non-responders and they compared their physiology.
And this is, again, this is like 15-year-old research, maybe 20-year-old research, but it was like,
My system that I've had success with is kind of like focused on gaining strength over time so that you don't require so many sets.
The top responders had better satellite cell efficiency, meaning the satellite cells are like stem cells that lay – they lay quiescent unless they're called upon through stimulating gains, you know, mechanical tension or whatever.
Some evidence that metabolic stress and muscle damage can signal them, but like –
And they're called upon when you hit a hard workout.
And then what they end up doing is the satellite cells, they have nuclei in them and they fuse and there's steps to it.
I can't remember the exact steps, but they fuse to the muscle cell and they lend their nuclei because muscles are multinucleated.
They don't just have one nuclei, they have multiple nuclei.
And there's this myonuclear domain theory that you're
muscle size is limited by the number of nuclei in it.
So the top responders, say you start out with 50, a muscle cell has, we'll just say 20 nuclei and 20 satellite cells.
I'm going to butcher the hell out of this.
But anyway,
After training for 12 weeks, I think the study looked at training arms two or three times a week.
And some people, like newbies, trained arms like two, three times a week and didn't even gain arm size.
Like these are people that you look at them and you're like, they don't even lift or they don't know what they're doing.
They just might have really poor genetics for growth.
But the best responders, like, you know, I remember one of them like doubled their strength and like,
In fact, I would rather – I like my clients training three times per week.
dramatically increased their size by like maybe like 20, 30, or maybe more.
I can't remember the percent increase in muscle size.
So the non-responders start out with 20 nuclei in the muscles and 20 satellite cells, and they end with 20, 20.
the top responders would end with 30-30, meaning now they have 10 more nuclei, but they also somehow have 10 – like the satellite cells replenish.
They have 10 more satellite cells, and that seems to be a big difference.
There are also like mechano growth factors, a splice variant of IGF-1, I think, and there's like myogenic growth factors that have different names like myoD.
They have different –
it's not people think testosterone is so important and growth hormone and all this stuff, but it's, there's so many things that are important.
Full body three times per week.
There's so many pathways, so many, if you study muscle physiology, I don't, I just send them off, send these studies to my friend, Brad Schoenfeld and hope he reads them because I don't understand all the,
Full body three times per week.
all the pathways, there's so many of them, they tend to have acronyms, you know, the JNK pathway, the RED pathway, the FOX, you know, these pathways that only the muscle scientists, but we don't know, we don't have a grip on this, but there's genetics to every aspect of it.
There's genetics to your anatomy, your muscle bellies, how you're going to look, there's genetics to how you're going to respond.
There's genetics of everything.
And so what you've tapped into is how you can keep the goal, the goal, keep lifting weights to where you enjoy it and don't make it something that feels like a chore or something you dread.
L-U-L-U-L.
And that doesn't get talked about enough in this whole concept of long-term hypertrophy, long-term gains.
Lower, upper, lower, upper, lower.
has a lot to do with remaining injury, not having these crushing injuries, not being in pain all the time.
And we talked about this yesterday.
I've never heard anyone discuss this, but I think it affects your NEAT, your non-exercise activity thermogenesis, where you don't move around as much.
With a rest day in between?
if you have nagging pain, my knees hurt right now.
I can't do squats right now.
I love, I love training quads hard, but I just run up the stairs.
But like right now I have some knee pain right now as I'm sitting here.
So if I think of standing up, I'm like, eh, maybe I'll just chill here.
I'm not going to get up.
Monday through Friday, lower, upper, lower.
If you have low back pain, you don't want to pick something up off the ground.
Take Saturday and Sunday off.
Step it through because you're speaking fast.
Lower, upper.
L-U-L-U-L.
Lower, upper, lower, upper, lower.
Keep in mind, 74% of my followers are women.
I'm the glute guy.
So most of my...
followers are women so they women and men have different they can train the same way for their gains there's a lot of kind of experts coming out now saying women and men need to train totally differently they don't need to train differently as per like the the variables and stuff the
So I think there's so much truth to this and not just with working out, but like even nowadays, if you're an entrepreneur on social media, you feel guilty the rest of your life because you could always be doing more.
But it's like, what's sustainable?
You could work.
Now we can work.
especially you, how many comments you must get, how many DMs you must get, how many emails, how many opportunities there are.
Like I realized for me with my career, I'm like, if I lift weights, if I train clients for a few hours, if I read research at night for a couple hours and make a social media post, that's a busy day, you know, and respond to the comments and stuff.
I did good.
And we need to pat ourselves on the back.
That's hard to sustain day in, day out, week in, week out.
Because you can take on too much and then you fizzle.
What's realistic?
What's realistic?
And I've had to learn, quit taking on too much.
And quit feeling guilty that you do this consistently.
You have something sustainable.
The thing is they have different goals.
A lot of women want their glutes.
They prioritize lower body more than – whereas men want more upper body.
So then our exercise selection is going to differ and our splits are going to differ.
The glutes do three main things, hip extension, hip abduction, hip external rotation.
They also do posterior pelvic tilt, which is like hip extension, but I'll explain all three roles.
if you're sprinting your leg is out in front of you you power it down you know your foot touches down and you accelerate forward that's hip extension front to back the thigh is up it's moving downwards most people are aware of hip extension it also does hip external rotation which means think of a baseball player you know about ready to swing a bat
If we do split it up, they want typically three lower body days and two upper body days, whereas men would want probably the opposite, three upper body days and two lower body days, for example.
They're going to rotate and the hip rotates laterally so you twist the body laterally.
And then abduction is simply raising your leg out to the side like you're doing a jumping jack.
When you're bent over though, you can also do hip abduction.
That's like doing the seated hip abduction machine.
So the squeezing in, you're adducting.
Those are your inner thigh muscles.
And you can think of adduction as adding to the body or
Whereas abducting, you think of the word taking away from the body.
That's where you spread your legs outwards against resistance.
So when you're upright or leaning forward, then you involve the gluteus maximus more and a little bit less of the gluteus medius, or it might be the posterior fibers of the gluteus medius, not to get too complicated, but...
But basically the glutes do – the gluteus maximus mainly I would say does – hip extension is by far the most popular.
And then hip external rotation is more in sports.
We don't have a lot of exercise that involve hip external rotation.
There's a couple of good ones, but they're not very common.
And then hip abduction –
especially transverse plane hip abduction or the horizontal plane hip abduction like the seated hip abduction machine is effective too.
So it's a very versatile muscle.
You don't even have to focus on pelvic tilt.
That's a more advanced concept.
Same with like transverse plane hip abduction.
Mainly if you just know that the glutes
pull the leg backwards as in sprinting, or if you're in a deep squat or lunge and you stand up, that's hip extension.
Anyway, there's so many ways to do things.
It also raises the leg out to the side and also rotates the body outward, not inward, outward.
And those are the roles of the glutes.
And then how you create a proper program design
is an interesting topic because most people in the past, they've only focused on hip extension.
In the past, it was always just- Squat or deadlift.
Squat or deadlift or lunge.
Back in our era, it was squat, deadlift, lunge.
That's all people did.
Those are vertical hip extension exercises and they're very, very effective.
The thing is they also grow the legs very well.
We could go on and on for an hour about the different ways to do things, but many roads can lead to Rome, but you do need to make sure that you're gaining strength over time if you want a muscle to substantially change.
So if you're a male and you want to grow the legs, yes, have at it.
What if you're a woman that doesn't want a lot of leg growth or you're just trying to maximize your recoverable volume?
I've noticed a very important phenomenon happen over throughout my career being the glute guy.
In the 90s, you remember it, in the 90s, it was people just did squats, lunges, deadlifts.
That's how you developed your glutes.
And then I come along, and earlier I mentioned these strength coaches that were doing glute activation.
And the glute activation wasn't squats, deadlifts, lunges.
We were doing glute bridges on the ground.
We were doing fire hydrants.
We were throwing bands around, doing lateral band walks.
What we were doing was using the glutes from different vectors.
So instead of just going up and down in the sagittal plane, like what we've always done, we were doing lateral and rotational stuff and also working the glutes from front to back.
So I started this new terminology because we always had the planar terminology, which was sagittal plane, frontal plane, transverse plane.
And I said, think of vectors instead.
You have axial loading, which is your vertical squats, deadlifts, lunges, step ups, split squats, good mornings, etc.
Then you have your anterior-posterior loading.
That's front to back.
If you're doing a back extension, you know, a horizontal back extension, if you're doing a glute bridge, you're loaded from the front, pushing forward, like pushing front to back on the body.
So that's anterior-posterior vector.
And then you have your lateral vector, left to right.
And then you have your rotational vector, which is...
rotational force.
I created this, what I called rule of thirds.
And I just said, this is a way to maximize your recoverable volume.
A third of your exercise selection should be vertical in nature.
Those are the hardest to recover from.
They also build your legs.
Probably the most efficient exercise because they work so much muscle mass.
These are your variations of squats, deadlifts, lunges, split squats, step ups, good mornings.
Then you have your horizontal movements.
These don't beat you up as much.
They don't work you as much in the stretch position.
But you can't have that increase, that PR can't come at the expense of decreased range of motion or sloppy form.
They work you in a squeeze position.
These are your variations of hip thrust, glute bridges, back extensions, reverse hypers, 45-degree hypers, and to an extent, cable kickbacks.
They don't beat you up as much.
And then the remaining third can be lateral rotary.
These don't beat you up at all.
They're your hip abduction movements, your cable column, putting the ankle strap on or using ankle weights or putting a band on or whatever.
But these are your, basically what we did yesterday, that glute medius exercise at the end.
They're lateral.
They build the glute medius and minimus and also the upper subdivision of the glute max.
But they don't beat you up that much.
They're not so hard to recover from.
So that's where I said you can do, you know, with that movement pattern checklist we said earlier where you pick one squat lunge, one hinge pull, one thrust bridge, and one abduction movement.
You could do three sets of each of those.
That's 12 sets.
You do that three times a week.
That's 36 sets per week.
People would say that's overkill.
But I was learning from the strength coaches back then, and we were doing similar workouts to that three times a week.
All the popular strength coaches, they would do...
a a knee dominant movement and a hip dominant movement meaning a squat lunge variation and then a hinge variation and they people could recover from it well you i knew that the athletes could could do that three times a week they're recovering i'm like if the athletes can recover from it then if you add in a thrust bridge movement and an and an abduction movement it's not going to be too much more especially because we were doing abduction and and uh bridging movements in the warm-up
That's probably the number one tenant of strength training is progressive overload.
So kind of how I became popular, I invented the hip thrust.
I remember just going, these movements are awesome.
Why don't we load them up?
Why don't we make them harder?
Why are we doing them as glute activation in the warmup?
Why don't we do them as a resistance exercise?
I'm like, these guys are brilliant.
They're using bands and body weight stuff, but why are we doing wimpy movements?
Why don't we push the envelope on these?
Because I don't like doing high reps.
You don't either.
We hate high reps.
I want to do low reps.
I don't want to do...
And the listeners need to understand that because otherwise you're just going to be spinning your wheels.
So something, how can I load up that bridge pattern?
And that's how I came up with hip thrusts.
And then I'm like, how can I load up some of these abduction movements?
And I came up with more movements to load up abduction.
So then I said the rule of thirds, a third of your movements should be lateral rotary, a third horizontal, a third vertical.
You can recover from it, but you're also, people will say that's 36 sets for the glute max.
No, 12 of those sets are more for the glute medius and minimus, which are different muscles, right?
They're different muscles than the glute max.
So it's really 24 sets for the glute max.
There's some overlap there.
But the point is, I've learned that people can recover from this system.
Now, it's not to say you can't make gains not utilizing progressive overload.
And I learned a lot.
I have to credit these strength coaches back in the day for helping me come up with those ideas.
And then I transitioned that into the bodybuilding world where people attacked me and said, there's no way you can recover from it.
And I'm going, trust me, they can recover.
But the women listen because they're like, I want to train my glutes.
I want to build my glutes more so than, you know, these men are telling me train five days a week, train upper body four days and legs once.
I want to train, I want to listen to this guy and train.
It makes sense because I would always say back then, someone said you need to put, you know, an inch around your glutes in the next month.
You know, or you can win the – I'll pay you a million dollars to put an inch around your glutes in two months or whatever.
Are you going to train glutes once a week?
In fact, we talked about this when we were working out yesterday, how to use the mind-muscle connection.
No, you're going to train them three times a week.
Same with arms.
Yeah, if I said, Andrew, I'll give you a million dollars if you put an inch around your arms in the next two months.
You're going to train them once a week?
No, you'll probably train them –
Every other day.
And you'll realize the sweet spot where you can still recover from it.
So the people listening, I mean, really what they listened to was they saw my before and after transformations.
But ultimately, how do you know you're
placing increasing demands on the muscle over time.
I think the reverse lunge is the best for the lower glute max, but it's almost too good.
So if you're going to train it three times a week, I would say don't do reverse.
Let's do good.
Okay, so once or twice a week.
Yeah, so if you're just going to train glutes once a week, reverse lunge is your go-to movement.
We don't have a lot of research on should you do a deficit, should you do Smith machine, should you do dumbbell, but
They're all going to be effective.
Deficit means stand on a box to get a little more range of motion.
But I like step-ups because they don't tend to get you as sore.
So if you're training three times a week, you could do step-ups probably all three times.
Your barometer should be like, you know, the loads and the sets and reps that you're doing.
But we used to do high step-ups where you're more upright, foot is up higher.
That's going to work more quads.
I think the most glute dominant way to step up is to lean and just go to a thigh parallel position, meaning the thigh is parallel to the ground.
So you reach back.
I think that's the most glute dominant way to do them.
So stepping back off the box so that the thigh that's still up on the box is parallel.
parallel to the floor.
And you lean, you reach back, control it all the way down, tap the foot down, then come up.
But you also have to remember, if you train glutes Monday, Wednesday, Friday,
If you do train glutes three times a week, you have an extra day for recovery on the Friday.
So that's where I could say, do two sets of reverse lunges or walking lunges on the Friday because you have an extra day to recover.
A lot of times when I'm training my clients, they'll go, coach, what else should I do?
You're done.
You did good.
You got to train in two days.
It's a different art to training glutes three times a week.
I mean, think if you had to train pecs three times a week or biceps three times a week, you wouldn't do these marathon workouts.
You'd know I got to have a good session in two days.
I can't do too much.
This system works well, but it can be overdone.
It needs to be.
individualized and tinkered with so that you can keep coming back and being recovered for the lower glute max I'd say best movement is probably reverse lunge but it can be too good it can make you too sore sometimes it makes people's adductors adductor magnus super sore and then two days later you have a crummy workout if that's the case don't do reverse lunges do step ups instead
squats and RDLs and leg press fit in.
It's a single leg, leg press, especially glute dominant with your foot higher up on the platform work good for that category as well.
For the upper gluteus maximus, we need more research because I've thought probably hip thrusts are probably the best for that.
According to EMG, electromyography, but EMG doesn't perfectly predict growth.
What I like about hip thrusts is that you can do a lot more volume.
Lately, I've been just prioritizing hip thrusts.
I do nine sets every third day, and I think that's overkill, but I do different types, and I can recover from it.
I don't even get sore from it.
It's crazy.
You can do so much volume, but hip thrusts, I think...
Theoretically, people feel it more in the upper glute max.
But again, we don't have evidence of this as to can you really get differential growth.
I would say for sure the seated hip abduction leaning forward, though.
I don't think that's going to grow, or at least like upright.
If you're perfectly upright at a 90 degree hip angle doing seated hip abduction, I think that would target mostly upper gluteus maximus without a lot of lower based on analyzing the fiber directions.
But that's just theoretical.
And this might not even be a mistake.
This might be an advantage.
We don't know yet because we haven't looked into range of motion on hip thrusts.
What we always said the first decade was people are loading up too heavy and you're not reaching full hip extension.
They're not reaching full hip extension.
And the hip can go into hip hyperextension.
With bent knees, average is probably around 10 degrees.
With straight legs, you can get a little more hip hyperextension.
You can get about 20 degrees.
But there's a genetic, like an anatomy component to that.
Some people can get 40 degrees.
Some people can get zero.
They have trouble just reaching neutral.
But you can go higher than like straight a lot of times.
You can kind of almost be bowed up.
But it's important to make sure the hyperextension comes from the hip, not the lumbar spine.
So anyway, just think of it like this.
You do vertical movements to work the stretch position with the glutes.
These place the most torque, the most loading on the hip when you're deep down in the stretch.
Vertical movements like the squat.
the squat, the lunge, they really load up the stretch position.
So when you do hip thrusts, don't try to make it a stretch position movement because you have better movements for working the stretch.
I do think full range hip thrusts are best for glute growth compared to just doing partials, but make sure you're coming up all the way and reaching full hip extension.
Maybe if you do a set of 10, maybe your last two reps don't quite reach full hip extension, but it shouldn't be like...
where you're only getting a third the way up.
Well, let's just say women want bigger muscles.
It's hard for them to know that, to know that they want bigger glutes.
They just don't want to be bigger.
Women don't want a giant glute.
But what they're saying is I want rounder glutes or rounder glutes that when you're
When you look at the glute muscle, if there's not a lot of bulge to it, it's flat.
It's atrophy.
It has a hypertrophy.
To get that round shape, you need bigger glute muscles.
You need hypertrophy.
They need hypertrophy-specific training for the gluteus maximus.
And let's face it, most people don't have really good glute genetics.
Most people, they're only – well, especially a lot of women who desire big glutes, their only chance of getting –
Big, round, muscular glutes – well, not big.
Even just round glutes that they want is to do really optimal glute training and have the diet that matches it.
So they need to know that.
They need to know that this advertising campaigns with like Pilates and, you know, bar and all these –
classes that they say well these will give you long lean muscles these are a lot of the female specific marketing preys upon women's fears of getting too bulky too muscular but for the glutes it's how are you going to grow the glutes if you don't get strong how are you going to grow the glutes if you're just doing wimpy movements holding for time or like stretches it can't happen so they do need to know what you're what you're seeking is not glute tone it's glute hypertrophy
By the way, the inner thigh gets worked a lot when you do the vertical movements, the hip extension exercises like squats, lunges.
Some people don't want that.
So that's where you got to get... Because it makes the leg bigger.
So that's something to talk about is what if you want to grow your glutes without growing the legs?
I mean, there's not much evidence that three times a week is better than two times a week in the literature.
But two times a week is safer.
It's your safer bet because you're going to be recovered.
Three times a week, it's more problematic.
My opinion, you can get away with it.
But for a lot of men...
If you come to me and you're a man and you say, hey, I want more glute growth, I'm not going to tell you to do booty by Brett.
My booty by Brett program is like squat lunge movement, hinge movement, you know, thrust bridge movement, abduction, and we do one upper body press and one upper body pull.
And you get really strong at those upper body movements because I'm always having to do chin-ups and push-ups and bench press and military press.
It works well, but men have different goals.
We also want to grow the biceps, the delts, the pecs, the lats.
So you don't tell them to train glutes three times a week.
You just say, look, what are you doing for legs?
Some guys will like, you got the typical guy who skips legs.
He says like, oh, I just run on the treadmill for legs.
That guy needs to start training his legs.
Also, you have the guys that are like, I just do leg press, leg extension, leg curls.
Okay, you should probably do more glutes.
But if you have a normal – if the guy already does squats and deadlifts, great.
Add in hip thrust because they're not going to compromise your recovery.
Just add in hip thrust and if you feel okay doing seated hip abduction, throw that in too.
More men are doing seated hip abduction and more men are doing hip thrust with the –
advent of all these plate loaded machines you see now in gyms they're making it way more convenient to hip thrust because people don't want to set it up the setup back the first like decade we all you had to set up these my og followers will laugh at the times where we had to drag plates and barbells and aerobics steps and risers and benches all across the gym buckle in now you buckle in it's so much more convenient but just add in hip thrust or 45 degree hypers glute dominant fashion and
So you're already doing the stretch position work.
Hopefully the man is already, for his quads, he's already doing squats or lunges or split squats or deep leg press.
He's already doing that.
If he's already doing stiff leg deltas or RDLs, great.
Just add in a squeeze position work because you're going to be recovered.
And I think there's some synergy to it.
It's weird because like if you've only trained, we saw this with you yesterday, you have big glutes, but you don't train the extended range, the squeeze position.
So you're very weak compared to how strong you are in the flex position.
You're...
you belt squat a ton of weight, you're strong in the flex position, but not the squeeze position.
When you start getting that squeeze position strong, good things tend to happen across the body.
So it's not just for, it's for function too.
And I've heard just so many stories over the years of people going, man, when I started hip thrusting, my lower body mechanics changed, my function changed.
I no longer get this type of pain.
I feel myself being more functional.
So you do it for a function too.
But I think it really adds to the glute growth because every man is sold with isolation movements or single joint movements.
And it's weird because I've noticed men kind of getting salty of this glute
phenomenon this glute training phenomenon so if you know i i've never heard like say you were doing you posted a video of yourself doing curls on your instagram you're not going to get a bunch of men that go bro just do chin ups lol bro just do pulled supinated pull downs you're wasting your time with that
We all know that.
If you're trying to maximize your arm size, yes, you can get big arms if you have a really strong bench press, dips, shoulder press, you know, chin up, pull down in rows.
You're going to have big arms, but they're going to get bigger if you add in some dedicated elbow flexion and extension work.
Everyone knows that.
And all the women know that with glutes too.
It's the men that tend to have a problem.
They like the old days, like in my day, we did this.
And they want to say, quit wasting your time with those silly hip thrusts or those kickbacks or that abduction.
Just do squats and deadlifts and lunges.
I will tell you, the listeners who train glutes know this.
A lot of people don't end up with big glutes when they focus on squats and deadlifts.
You can go to powerlifting competitions.
These are people who make their main hobby is squatting and deadlifting, and they're in their singlets.
You can't hide it.
You go to a local powerlifting competition, you will see- Singlets are like the wrestling- Yeah, in powerlifting, you'd think you'd see good glute development.
You're like, how are these people squatting and deadlifting all the time when they don't have glutes?
My clients have better glute development than what you see at powerlifting competitions.
It's because they're using the rule of thirds.
They're training the glutes through different vectors.
That can be a distraction if you get too carried away and want to do every glute exercise because sometimes it's like, no, just get stronger at the basics.
And then sometimes it's no, incorporate more variety.
But I will say if men want to grow their glutes, so if you're a male listener right now and you say, I would like to have more glute development, I'm already doing a type of squat or lunge.
I'm already doing a type of like,
hinge like an RDL, just add in two sets of hip thrust twice a week.
And if you want to throw in the seated hip abduction machine, do that too.
You'll notice some good glute growth over time and especially get strong at the hip thrust.
Start out light.
Master that mind-muscle connection.
Make sure you're using the full range and then gain strength over time.
Get to where you can do 315 reps.
for 20 reps.
If you don't like high reps, do 405 for 10 reps.
Trust me, you will notice some improvements if you control the weight through the full range of motion.
That's very simple, actionable advice.
the pelvis.
So the bar, for some people, you just keep the bar right above the pubic bone and it stays right there throughout the whole range of motion.
Probably 66% of people can do it that way.
If you have a type of hip anatomy where your pelvis is off to the side where the
When the bar is right above your pubic bone, it's going to be hitting your pelvic bones.
Then it's excruciatingly painful.
For those people, they push it forward as they come up.
So what happens is probably one-third of my clients, as they rise up, they push the bar up onto their upper thighs.
That's what my women do.
The men tend to keep it above the pubic bone.
We have different pelvic anatomies, and so I can get people to do it comfortably.
It takes time, though.
Everyone can do it.
Every client I've had can do hip thrusts.
You learn to keep the bar right there in place.
It stays put.
It's scary to look at it.
You might think it looks dangerous or hard to pull off.
Also, no one starts with 405.
You start off with body weight.
You start off with a barbell.
lightweight and you you build up the tolerance to that pain over time it's the same as when you start doing like low bar squats or high bar squats it's it's like ah this hurts and then you if you have ever done zurcher things uh this hurts or front squats this hurts like hell hook grip and
Oh, that hurts like hell.
And then three weeks later, four weeks later, you're fine.
So the bar placement, though, does need to change depending on your hip anatomy.
But those are the two main things people do.
But there's a difference with what I recommend for men and women to build their glutes.
And with men, if you're worried about hip thrusts,
Learn how to do glute dominant 45 degree hypers.
That's an awesome glute exercise.
It's hip extension.
We call it the back extension.
It's hip extension.
And if you round the back, flare your feet out a little bit.
When you round the back, you're shutting the erectors off.
And then you're using your glutes to pull you up.
It's an awesome hip extension exercise.
So add that in or hip thrusts.
And then if you're comfortable doing seated hip erections, you're going to see results just from that alone.
You don't have to pay attention to all this stuff we've talked about in this podcast.
Just do a simple thing of adding in
hip thrust or you can do glute bridges off the smith machine those are kind of easy to set a bench down um and glue bridges or hip thrusts we'll put a link to i saw a clip that you've posted that made it really clear how the smith machine can be useful especially you get angles that might be more difficult to get with the classic hip thruster approach and then 45 rehypers add one of those in twice a week it to your leg day if you train legs once a week
start training legs twice a week and you know do a do a compound movement or a multi-joint movement for the the the quads the hamstrings and the glutes and you'll be you'll be able to recover just fine and that will help you grow your glutes but also use train the glutes from different vectors i'm telling you i can say this with so much confidence um when you start doing hip thrust correctly and really feeling that squeeze if you've never done it before good things start happening in the body
It's just we should be strong at end range hip extension.
And if you look at the glutes on anatomy chart, it's kind of the keystone.
It's like the keystone muscles that tie everything together.
A lot of good things happen when you do that.
And then just resist.
You said one of the main errors, one of the common flaws with hip thrusting.
I kind of got sidetracked, but it's not coming up all the way.
Or like people's knee angle.
If your feet are too far out, you feel more in your hamstring.
If your feet are too close, you feel it.
and the stretch in the rectus femoris.
You don't feel as much in the glutes and just ego lifting.
In fact, I kind of think it's this tight rope we walk where you got to push it hard.
And then all of a sudden you realize you watch a video.
If you record yourself or something, you're like,
yeah, I was progressively overloading and now my form looks ugly.
I got to dial it back.
And that's a common thing we have to do with a lot of exercise.
I realized I was a little too greedy with my progressive overload and my form is compromised.
My range of motion has been compromised.
I'm a little sloppier.
I'm going to reset.
And you have to do that from time to time.
I call it the glute medius hip thrust.
It could be called like a plate standing abduction because you eventually use a plate, but it works the glute medius of the grounded leg, not the up leg.
It works the down leg.
So, absolutely.
Add volume to the lagging part and take some volume away.
You can't just hammer everything.
And I think that's one of the main limiters of, especially men, but also women with glutes.
Like, you want to do every movement there is.
And I want people to understand how easy it is to maintain size and strength.
There's this classic study by Bickel.
It took – they looked at young and older subjects.
I'm just going to focus on the younger subjects.
But I think it was like four months they did a – like they hammered quads like three times a week with three sets of squats, three sets of leg press, three sets of leg extensions, three times a week.
All three of those three times a week?
All three, three times a week.
Grew their quads.
Quads got way bigger.
And then one group just stopped training.
One group did one-third the volume, so just one day a week.
So instead of three days a week, they just did that same workout one day a week.
And one group did one-ninth the volume, meaning just one set of squats, one set of leg press, one set of leg extensions.
So from doing 27 sets a week to just three sets.
You look at it, they maintained most of their size and strength.
Doing just one set?
For like six months.
Doing just one set of... Squats, one set of leg press, one set of leg extensions.
And so you can maintain very... That was like his classic paper that...
But I kind of realized that too.
I'm like, man, it's really easy to maintain strength and size once you've built it up.
It's hard to build.
It's easy to maintain.
And that could have something to do with this muscle memory concept where it's like, well, muscle memory has an epigenetics component to it and then a myonuclear component to it.
But once you've gotten those nuclei fused as extra nuclei from the stem cells, the muscle stem cells, the satellite cells,
And they're now in the muscle fiber.
They're there to stay.
That's kind of debated.
But as long as you're lifting weights, it's hard to gain.
It's easy to maintain.
So sticking with this concept of like maintain certain muscles, we know from the extreme high volume literature that
that for brief periods, if you specialize, you can blast a muscle with high volume and it can grow.
It's almost like the more the merrier, which is crazy for me because there's now five studies, I believe.
The first was this Radiali study.
Then there was Schoenfeld.
Two by Ennis.
There's another one I'm forgetting.
But these are five studies showing that over 30 sets a week,
You get more in a dose response.
You get more growth the more volume that you do.
Some influences have argued that it's just swelling.
You're getting more swelling.
But that is doubtful based on a study.
I think it was from Rafalo.
It looked at like the swelling three days after and five days after.
It looks like that's legit.
But all of us know that's not sustainable.
You can't just do 30 sets for every muscle group indefinitely.
That's the recipe for disaster.
What people should be looking at is, wow, you can blast a muscle with high volume for brief periods and grow.
So how does this translate for lagging muscles?
For a lot of my followers, they're just on a permanent glute specialization routine.
They want glutes so much and they don't want other muscles.
Like a lot of my followers are like, I don't really care about my upper body or my quads or my hamstrings.
I just want bigger glutes.
This is mostly female followers?
Mostly female followers.
But I will say a lot of men care about – we care about every muscle and we kind of look in the mirror and it's whatever your weak part is.
Some people, it's their calves.
Some people, it's this.
So can you follow this?
I'm looking at your neck is jacked, but you've trained it for how many years?
I train my neck twice a week.
How many years?
Yeah, because you have a thick neck and there's a study on that.
Because the old adage was just do, you don't need to train your neck.
If you do deadlifts, shrugs, you know, rows, it's going to grow.
No, it doesn't.
The study showed that they had one group doing that, just the deadlifts, the shrugs, the rows, and another group doing...
neck flexion extension, the group doing the deadlifts and shrugs, they grew their traps, but not their neck muscles at all.
If you want to grow the neck muscles, you have to train the neck muscles.
This is just my experience.
So I agree with you.
And it's funny, I have an identical twin brother and he's always like, man, I love your neck is big or I have this little bobble head.
But I don't do neck training, but I think what happens is a lot of people
Like, pull-downs in military press and even, like, bench can irritate people's necks because we flex it.
When I bench, I always want to be here.
When I compete in a powerlifting contest, I had to learn how to keep my head back.
So a lot of times we're just flexing it isometrically, and I think that's what I do.
When I'm doing, like, chin-ups and stuff, and I'm always, like, flexing it isometrically, which can provide a stimulus.
I'd get a bigger neck if I trained it.
But I think that's the hard part is...
I love having strong forearms.
I love grip training.
I love every muscle.
How do you work it together in a comprehensive program and do it week in and week out?
That's the hard part is how to train everything.
So we end up going, the six lifts we mentioned, you know, you're going to get most of your muscles, even like deadlifts are going to train your grip muscles.
But it's like then how do you hit all of them for maximum function?
How do you strengthen everything and not get distracted?
Because time-wise, you're right.
I think the problem is when you try to say, I want every muscle in the body.
I'm going to do 20 sets for my forearms, 20 sets for my biceps, my triceps, each head of the delt, my traps, my pecs, my lats, and upper pecs, lower pecs, upper lats, lower lats, erectors, glutes, quads, hamstrings, calves, adductors.
you name it i want it and then you it's a recipe for disaster so you have to specialize a little bit based on your goals your your preferences your individual weaknesses as per your anatomy and that's where you could say look um what we've talked about throughout this podcast gives people some tools it's like look the first set is the most important
It's for bringing up lagging muscle groups, but also what if you just wanted to maximize hypertrophy?
What if a bodybuilder, a pro, like what if I, it would be kind of cool if I could test this theory.
I just don't think anyone would want to train this way.
If you said, look, I'm going to go on this blast and cruise type philosophy where it's hard to build, easy to maintain.
So instead of trying to build everything at once,
I'm going to really prioritize one muscle from the upper body and one muscle from the lower body or two each month.
So month one, it's quads and pecs.
And month two, it's back and hamstrings.
month three it's delts and then glutes and adductors because they kind of go together maybe you throw arms into that delts and arms and then you know glutes and adductors and then you rotate you rotate through that cycle and you're doing all of it you're just skewing the volume a lot and the and the focus the progressive overload focus
So on the months that you're maintaining, you're just trying to do one or two sets, limited volume, trying to maintain your strength.
Per exercise, two or three exercises.
But then you're really blasting the muscle that you're focused on.
Theoretically, those would grow a lot during the focus month, and then they maintain.
Maybe that's a better way to grow muscle.
I did that for delts, but it gets to a point where I'm so sick of doing delt raises for the front side and rear delt.
You just get so sick of it, but I would do a lot of variety
But I started training more volume, more frequency.
I wasn't necessarily focused on progressive overload either.
Like I've preached progressive overload, but my delts grew at the age of 48.
Now I'm 49, but they grew last year, which is hard to do at our age to have your all-time best delts after all these years of lifting.
But I incorporated a lot of variety.
I was doing lengthened partials, cables, machines, dumbbells, bands.
I was doing it all.
And just the extra volume.
grew my delts i didn't get stronger at shoulder press or lateral raises i was just hitting them more frequently doing more volume you reach a point where you're sick of it and you're like i can't i don't want to do any more delt raises so it naturally lends itself to like four weeks spurts you know i do do it for four weeks then i throttle back and then with grip training i was always like man i will never be able to hold on to the bar with my max deadlift weight
And then I did a powerlifting competition a lot of years ago.
I'm like, shoot, I can't wear straps.
I got to strengthen my grip.
Well, what I learned was like chalk adds like 80 pounds to my grip.
Mixed grip adds another 80 pounds.
And using a really neural bar adds like another 80 pounds to my grip.
So I've gotten to where I almost deadlifted 675 once.
I got so close to being locked out.
But I could hold on to the bar.
Once I focused on my grip training for like –
two, three months, I got it super strong.
Now I don't have to train it that much.
Every once in a while I notice, okay, my grip limited my deadlift.
I got to train a few sessions and it's back to good.
It's like you blend that into your motor program or something.
Now you use it more and it's easier to maintain it for some reason, but you got to put in that work up front.
So these are just things that kind of lend credence to what you're saying.
So this was something in the, like, early 2000s.
I think his name was Brian Haycock.
He had this hypertrophy-specific training, and he called it strategic reconditioning or something like that.
And, you know, we always thought maybe there's something to it where it primes your – then it primes you to get newbie gains again, or at least it will actually –
help you grow more muscle.
Um, but it was always just kind of a theory, but in practice, a lot of bodybuilders don't tend to do that.
They tend to tend to train you around, but the thing is you need to deload.
It's really hard to not get nagging pain.
It's important to not necessarily take a week off, but chill for at least a few days, maybe a whole week.
Um, but this was recently put to the test in the literature, um, taking a week off, um,
Brad Schoenfeld was on that paper.
And what they found was you didn't see better benefits taking the week off, but you also didn't lose much.
So it's like, but what I want to talk about is this literature.
I'm not well versed in it.
I'd have to go back and look, but it's people who did periodic training.
Like if you train for a few weeks and then take a week off and then train for a few weeks and
Yes, you lose strength, you decondition, you lose strength and some size, but you quickly gain it back.
And this whole notion that you have to be training year round all the time, it's just not evidence based on a few studies that have shown that you...
they show similar results with people that take some periodic time off you gain it back quickly due to like muscle memory here's where it can be beneficial if it helps your psychological desire to train or if it helps heal nagging injuries or pain
then it can be beneficial.
I don't recommend it to my followers, but I do recommend having times where you chill.
Life sometimes forces you into that.
You either get sick or you get injured or you have to go on a vacation and you just don't have access to a gym.
But I tend to...
Just listen to my body.
And there are just times where you're pushing it hard and you just feel beat up.
And it's like, have a few easy days.
It doesn't have to be a week.
It doesn't have to be, could just be three training days and you'll come back refreshed.
But I think it's a vital, necessary, crucial component of long-term lifting.
And if you don't do that, it'll end up hurting you.
You can't just train.
It's like, how do you make sure you're not overreaching?
How do you nail that perfect volume and effort where you're not pushing it too hard, where you're not inhibiting?
and inhibiting your muscle activation because you get things perfect and you can't predict your sleep and your stress and your recovery physiology all the time.
So I think it's a good idea to chill for a little bit and do lesser volume or do different exercises that are just easier on the body.
And then you'll be pleasantly surprised like, well, and what I always like doing with my clients is that's what I like with my Booty by Brett programming is
I want my clients to know you don't have to squat deadlift year-round.
When you're doing a step-up or a lunge with weight, two studies show that one on step-ups, one on Bulgarian split squats, one group did bilateral, one group did single leg, and they both gained the same squat strength.
I'm not going to tell, you know, the world's strongest power lifter, don't squat.
You can maintain all your squat strength with single leg training.
But for the masses, yes, it's a single leg squat pattern is the squat pattern.
It builds your bilateral double leg strength as well.
You don't have to do every lift year round.
They transfer each other.
Pick one exercise from that pattern.
And trust that you're going to maintain most of your strength.
Yes, when you have the squat-focused month and you put deadlifts and hip thrusts on the back burner, the next month, yes, you set a PR on squats on week four, you're feeling good.
You start off the new month now focusing on, say, deadlifts or hip thrusts.
Maybe you lost some strength, but it quickly comes back.
And now by week four, you can PR on that too.
Things come back.
You don't always have to.
And I think that's something that's really hard for people.
You get so tied to the lifts themselves.
You get so tied to the routine and the, I have to be doing every exercise.
If I stop deadlifting, I'm going to shrink.
If I stop squatting, I'm going to shrink.
And the body's pretty resilient.
You maintain your muscle.
You maintain your strength.
If you have to do a single leg pattern or if you're just training the movement patterns, you will retain those.
If you're training it third in the workout, not setting PRs, but you're just doing it,
Like I was really focusing on squats and deadlifts for like three, four months.
And I do hip thrust just lightweight mind muscle connection focused.
But I'm focusing on the squeeze position.
So I'm maintaining my squeeze strength that way.
I'm focusing on my stretch strength through squats and deadlifts so the second I said I'm gonna do hip thrust first today I haven't done hip thrust first in three months four months I did them first in the workout and I tied three PRs I did three sets and all three tied PRs because I had that bottom position strength through the squats and the deadlifts I had that top strength by doing the
the mind muscle connection stuff, it was there.
I just was always training in a fatigued state.
I think there's a benefit to mixing it around for that reason.
And I wish more people knew, especially when you're in pain, if squats are hurting you, don't do it for a while.
Find a suitable alternative.
If deadlifts are hurting you, don't do it for a while.
If hip thrusts are hurting you, don't do it for a while.
And the thing with hip thrusts, people say, you see on the internet, people saying, oh, hip thrusts are bad for your back.
Well, or like especially the scoop method is bad for your back.
No, the scoop method is better for your back.
But hip thrusts don't hurt your back if you're doing it properly.
You know what limits you is the bruising on your hips when you get freakishly strong.
I have clients that are female clients that are hip thrusting in the 700 pounds.
Yeah, they're freaks.
I have like five that have hip thrusted over 600 pounds, maybe 600.
But, yeah, most of them can do 315 for 20, 405 for 10, 495 for 5.
Most of them can do that.
And they weigh, like, an average of, like, 140 pounds.
Because, like, you go to a powerlifting gym and what do they have?
Squat racks.
You go to an Olympic lifting training center, they have platforms with squat stands.
You go to a glute lab, you're going to have 10 hip thrust stations.
You're going to see 10 people hip thrusting.
We get really freakishly good at hip thrusts.
But what limits people is the bruising and the pain at the hips.
So especially if you use like a rotisserie hip thrust, you can use about 10% to 20% more weight.
They're typically the day after they really crushed rotisserie, their hips are beat up, they're bruised, or you can get abrasions or like sores there.
So they're going, coach, my hips hurt.
Okay, what do you do?
Instead of hip thrust, now you do single leg hip thrust or you have partner hip thrust.
You have someone sit backwards on your lap because the surface area is spread out and you hip thrust a human for high reps because it doesn't hurt.
It lets those parts heal.
So we have to mix things around.
We have to switch it up.
Um, also if, yeah, sometimes hip thrust can make your knees a little sore if you do pause reps or like bar plus band where you add extra resistance to make the top harder.
So everything requires, um, it's a think, the iron game is a thinking man's game.
You can get great gains doing the very basics, what we talked about in the beginning, the
The listeners are going to be overwhelmed.
It's going to be like, look, just do two full body workouts a week, two hard sets, warm up, two hard sets in any rep range because the rep range doesn't matter so much.
You can gain muscle with lower reps, medium reps, or higher reps.
Mix it up to keep it interesting.
You'll get most of your gains doing it that way.
You'll get 85% of your gains doing it that way.
and you the benefit is you won't be beat up you'll be recovered um and you'll be motivated to lift because you'll be looking forward to go to the gym all this other stuff is for the extra 15 percent the guys who are really into it the people who are obsessed with it like like us we're guys and gals you're talking about men and women yeah and and with guys it tends to be full body hypertrophy with women it tends to be more glute specific because that's the
that's what's popular what's what's in vogue right now um but yeah this extra 15 it's a thinking man's game thinking woman's game and it's you know you gotta use strategy you gotta learn somewhat you know about the biomechanics and the physiology but that's what makes it so fun and like we're able to learn new things as we're approaching 50 how cool is that yeah it's an endless progression and um
So classic Brad Schoenfeld paper, three sets of three versus three sets of 10 on the squat.
Three sets of 10 grew more muscle.
But in general, lightweight and heavyweight grow similar amounts of muscle, but you have to reach a certain amount of reps.
The consensus is about five or six.
So say it's six, you have to do at least six reps, but it could be all the way up to 30.
They grow the same amount of muscle.
There is some argument as to whether high reps create more muscle damage.
There seems to be evidence of that.
So if you train a muscle frequently,
the lower side of things might be better.
It also is kind of exercise dependent, like single joint movements tend to be better done with higher reps.
I think that's my opinion, but generally you could do, if you like doing low reps, you could do sets of six and grow just fine.
If you love higher reps, you could do sets of 20 to 30 and grow just fine.
I think variety is always the best case because it's boring and it's kind of like different stress on the body to spare the joints.
But if you don't like going heavy, you never have to.
If you don't like going super heavy, you never have to.
All right.
Calves are so genetic.
So you have good calf genetics.
You don't even need to train them.
They're just huge.
You have poor calf genetics.
You might be feeling like, man, I can't do anything to bring them up.
The evidence emerging is that there's not much use for seated calf raises or for really focusing on the top squeeze position.
Calves respond good to stretch and you can do just straight up full range standing calf raises.
You could also just do lengthened partials where you just do like the bottom half and
And if you do full range calf raises, you might benefit from doing extended partials like lengthened supersets where you keep going.
You might be able to do three to five more reps at the end just doing the bottom portion.
Focus on the stretch with calves.
Absolutely, but it just matters whenever you start.
If you start training in your 80s, I think there's even evidence in maybe 90-year-olds, they can grow muscle.
But the caveat is that you start... Andrew, you and I won't be able to have this much muscle when we're 90, obviously.
I hope you're right.
Well, maybe we will.
Maybe you'll figure out these with your protocols.
But my point is...
If you start training when you're 15 and you train optimally throughout your whole life,
There will be a point where you peak with your muscle mass and then there'll be a point, but the point is it's further than people think.
People used to think, well, you'll probably start losing muscle mass in your 30s.
No, it's probably more like in your 50s, you can maintain all of it.
But if you haven't started lifting, you will absolutely grow muscle.
Will a 70-year-old who starts training for the first time grow muscle as much as you will
when you're in your 20s.
No, but you still will grow.
It's just blunted a little bit.
You know, age tends to dull everything, but you can absolutely grow and you should absolutely start.
Strength training during pregnancy is very well researched.
It is absolutely something you should do.
It improves your outcomes with almost everything, you know, pregnancy delivery related.
But there's a caveat that if you don't, if you haven't lifted weights, you might not want to start lifting weights while you're pregnant.
But you can absolutely, if you've been, if you're an avid lifter and you get pregnant,
you should absolutely continue training.
First trimester, this is generalizing, but first trimester, you feel more morning sickness.
You feel icky.
It's hard to stay motivated and you feel, you get morning sickness and like, then second trimester, things return more to normal.
and you're back to yourself again.
And then third trimester is kind of day by day.
Your belly's getting in the way.
Sub days feel off, but you will find movements that work well for you.
Sumo squats tend to be well tolerated, you know, but you can even hip thrust while you're pregnant.
You just don't let the bar push into your belly.
You keep it on the upper thighs and you don't go as deep.
Do Smith machine and keep it on your upper thighs so it's not pushing against your belly and you'll do just fine.
you will be able to go to the gym.
You might be able to do leg press.
You can always stay moving and stay fit.
Maybe you do.
They just don't want saggy glutes and they want to focus more on that.
You want that.
But if you had big glutes and you had that same amount of fat, it would look better.
Stretch out over larger muscles.
Yeah, exactly.
So it's the not having muscle and having more fat and that droopy appearance.
So yes, get strong at lunges, step-ups, squats, RDLs, and hip thrusts.
They will all grow your glutes well.
They will all hit the lower glutes well.
And don't just do the exercise.
Get stronger at them.
And then, obviously, you want to have an optimal body composition for you.
Some women have what I call genetic BBL programming.
What does BBL stand for?
BBL stands for the Brazilian butt lift.
It's the fat injections into your glutes.
They take...
I think they take fat from your stomach and inject it into your glutes, and it's really popular now.
Especially, you know, I'm in Fort Lauderdale, and Miami, it's very common, and it's very common in, like, South American cultures.
But some of my clients, you know, if they have, like, Caribbean or South American heritage, it's like they gain weight.
They keep their – they keep, like, lean abs, and all their weight just goes to their butt.
They're just –
Yeah, they can carry on, they can
pull off, you know, 30% body fat looking really aesthetically pleasing for their goals, whereas other people can't.
Great question.
So first of all, I want to mention before steroids became a thing, the bodybuilders back then, if you can look up like Steve Reeves, Reg Park, John Grimeck, they did three full, I think they all did three full body workouts a week.
And so other people, you know, put on – like men tend to store fat more in their bellies.
We have different fat storage, but just even with women, they tend to store fat differently.
If you store it like around your entire gluten, it just makes it rounder versus –
kind of going to your saddlebag areas and just making the lower look really saggy.
So you're going to have to figure out your optimal body fat percentage and get there through diet and activity.
But you can improve just through re-comping, like gaining strength in your glutes, specifically on those exercises, and it'll just look better and better.
So I've probably written more on this than anyone.
In fact, Brad and Alan are two of my best friends, Brad Schoenfeld and Alan Aragon.
I argue with them all the time about this.
And they think that you should bulk and cut.
You see better results that way.
I don't think...
I mean, there's one, this Helms study by Eric Helms, and it showed that adding like basically the subjects gain just as much muscle in maintenance as they did with surplus.
And all these studies on big surpluses just show that you gain more fat.
This is a very controversial topic and most people will disagree with me on this, but I will say what is the stimulus for gaining muscle is working hard in the gym and PRing.
Do you have to be in a caloric surplus?
The evidence doesn't appear so.
I will tell you most of my clients recomp.
They come to me, I attract already fit people who come to me and then I say, do you get enough protein?
They say, yes, I get around a pound per, sorry, I get around a gram per pound of body weight per day.
And I say, good, I'm not going to touch your diet.
Let's just get strong.
And they recomp.
I've had clients that train with me for a whole year.
They stayed 135 pounds the whole year.
And at the end of the year, they show me, Brett, look at my jeans.
I have this crazy, like, five-inch gap of the old jeans they used to wear, meaning they stayed the same weight, but they lost all that, their waist, because you lose fat from the problem areas.
You gain muscle in the muscle bellies that make you look more athletic, and it changes your...
your appearance and your body composition a ton, even though the scale weight doesn't change.
But if you do want a bulking cut, what I will say is just do mini bulks and mini cuts.
Just gain five pounds and lose five pounds.
You don't have to put on 30 pounds.
Or they trained mostly full body, but they'd hit muscles frequently.
That's old way of thinking.
And I think it does more harm than good.
Men, we can bulk and we don't mind the way we look a little bit.
We're like, look at, check out Trapzilla.
Women don't like the bulks as much.
The thing is they didn't do, now we have so many machines, they did mostly barbell training and you know what I mean?
But no one has to do these huge bulks and cuts.
You get these bodybuilding coaches that push that on to like, you know, lifestyle clients or like clients that are already obese or like very overweight.
And you're like, why are you...
They just need to cut.
They need to cut down until they get down to the healthy body fat level.
So, you know, I just want people to be more familiar with re-comping.
I've written about it a lot.
Check it out, re-comping.