 Welcome to Barbell Logic, Rewind. This is the Barbell Logic podcast, and today we've got Andy Baker, and we're gonna nerd out on programming a little bit. What's up? Nice to be here. Thank you for having me. I was just telling you guys this is my first podcast, so I'm a little bit nervous. That's crazy, that actually really surprises me. Cherry Blast. Well, after practical programming, I think I did two, but I'm not sure that the two that I was on that anybody ever listened or watched to them, so. What's different about this one? If Andy podcasts in a forest and no one learns they hear it, did it really happen? That's right. We may have ruined our reputation by the time this one comes out, and no one might listen to this one either. So that's why we just do this for ourselves, and then if people don't hear it, they can hear it. That's right. Yeah, so I wanted to talk about, and I wanted to geek out on programming actually. We're doing some programming talks this afternoon, you and I are, along with Dr. Sullivan. And so for those of you guys that don't know, Andy is a co-author of Practical Programming. And Barbell Prescription. And Barbell Prescription, that's right, which is not just programming, but really an entire theory of training. The manifesto, I think. That's right. What you say, people over 40, just true, although I think as you- The master's lifter. Yeah, as you get a little further, it man, it is just like insane awesome wheelhouse from about 47 to 67. Yeah, we debated over the age of where to start it. You know, where do we say over 50, over 60, over 40? We kind of just went with over 40, because we're thinking when is the first time that you really have to start modifying programming. Definitely in the 40s. Obviously not as much, you know, the guy that's 40 and fit and strong is not gonna be modifying nearly as much as the guy that's 65 and brand new. But at the same point, there's modifications that have to happen. So you have to put your lips right on there. Yeah. On this microphone. Ooh. Just take it to the edge. There we go. All right, that's what we do with everything. We take everything to the edge. Yeah, I mean, people that have listened to us, know we start telling you that you're old at like 36, 37. That's kind of our thing. I felt the difference in my own training when I was about 32, 33. No, me too. That was the first time, which is what, you know, you'd always heard your whole life, you know, testosterone starts to drop, you know, early 30s. What were the differences? Just recovery between workouts, you know, just doing a heavy volume workout and just feeling like, you know, 48 hours later I couldn't go back in and train again. You know, just backing off the volume, having to have more days in between, you know, either high volume or high intensity type sessions, you know, and just. How old were you when you started competing in powerlifting and strength sports? Early 20s. Yeah, early to mid 20s. And I think that's probably why you were more in tune to, I was the same way, right? So I won my pro-card and strongman when I was 28-ish somewhere in there. And. God, that was a long time ago. It is, I know. And so I remember my recovery ability, really even the first several years, the first two or three years that I was a professional strongman, it tanked when I hit 31, 32. I just couldn't, I could do the same stuff. That's exactly what you do. I just couldn't recover from the stuff. Right, yeah. It's the first day you guys got out of bed and limped and had no reason for that. Oh, no reason? For me, it wasn't like limp or like injury or anything. It was just, it's hard to describe. It's just a general sense of just kind of, of just fatigue. Yeah, like if I had to go lift today, I couldn't lift. Like 135 would be a struggle to squat. Yeah, right. You know, it would just, everything would feel off and just grinding, no pop. That feeling persisted longer, you know. And so, you know, you just have to restructure your training. That's, I mean. Never trained at any point. That's correct. You're the least athletic human on the planet. Bad. You don't know what pop feels like. No. Unless it's like popping a hamstring or something. Right. And then you know what it feels like. Yeah, yeah, same for me. So, I'd like to spend a little bit of time geeking out here on some of your programming. So, let's talk about what you've been doing since project programming. It's really opened up. Right. A pretty successful business for you. Yep. And tell us a little bit about it. Well, I've got, you know, I've got the gym still. So, I'm doing, you know, most of my time is still spent at the gym coaching clients. Which is north Houston. It's not just north of Houston. Yeah, just north of Houston. So, about 30 miles north of downtown Houston. So, still run the gym full time. But then, in addition to that, I've got my website at AndyBaker.com where I've got, you know, a bunch of articles and stuff, free articles. And then I've got online coaching stuff, downloadable programs, custom program design. So, people that I work with, kind of on specialty programs. So, you know, really a wide range of people. I don't really specialize, although since the barbell prescription came out, kind of associated with just, you know, training older people or whatever, but I got people of all stripes, you know. And I've never wanted to specialize. Like, I've never really wanted to be the guy that trains just older people. And I know everybody says that you should. You know, from a business perspective, you should carve out your really small niche. It just, to me, it was too boring. I just enjoy working with too many types of people. Well, if your niche is programming, you're a very systematic, logical thinker. But we're nichey anyway. Whether I wanted to or not, I found the niche. Well, I mean, you know, it's just, you've got a really good handle on the theory of programming, right? I think, and you're able to take things that are obviously complicated and make them pretty simple and practical and put them in a program. And then, you know, the programs that you sell, you're able to direct the right demographic off into the right program. So, if you're, there's something like, we've talked before, as a matter of fact, when we launched, I wanted you. It was like, hey, you want to work for me? And you're like, I do want to work for you. And you said, can I still sell my programs? I said, nope. And you're like, damn it, not going to make a decision. So, but we've never really considered each other competitors because you are the guy. So, you know, ours is expensive and it's very hands-on and very kind of white glove. And yours is certainly far less so expensive. And you try to direct people to properly built programs for their demographics. Is that fair? Yep, yep. And, you know, not everything can be custom all the time. And I think what we're finding out increasingly is that it doesn't necessarily need to be, you know, I get feedback all the time from people that are having, you know, great success with this program or that program. And they'll say, you know, why did this work for me so well? And I said, because you actually did it. Like you actually followed something for 12 to 16 weeks. You didn't change the program up every two or three weeks. So, maybe this wasn't the most optimal program for you or the perfect program. Everybody's looking for the perfect program, but there's no way to define that. There's no way to know what is optimal for you. It's just, if you're making reasonable amount of progress and you're not beating yourself up, you're on a good program, you know, and if you do it for 12 to 16 weeks without interruption, you're probably gonna make some progress, you know, on anything reasonable. Well, start with LP. Like if we start to build out this theory behind programming, we can just, we know LP works, right? LP works for everybody. So it doesn't matter in the beginning, what your age is, what your sex is, what your end goal is. If you want to just be strong to be able to play with your grandkids or if you want to be a competitive powerlifter or a bodybuilder or a triathlon triathlete, in the beginning, you're not strong. And the best way to get strong is to keep volume and frequency static and add a little bit of weight to the bar every single time until it doesn't work. And so we do that for everybody. So that's not, we have a personalized programming. So the question is, we know the program, novice linear progression works, as long as what we found, form is pretty good with a 95% of correct. And consistency. And you never miss. Right, yeah, that's the hardest part. That's the hardest part. That's the hardest part, is get people to stay consistent with it. Right, so you've gotta make sure that you don't miss your workouts and then you need to be looked at at least on some routine basis by a coach. And that doesn't mean, again, so you have an enormous spectrum there of options. So on one end of the scale, if you can afford and or hire a coach in your town like you, if you're in North Houston, you live in a Tassassida, Kingwood, North Houston, Lake Houston area, you should be going to see you, but you ain't cheap. I am not cheap. That is true. He's stingy, but he's expensive to hire him. That's right, that's right. Yes, he's stingy, but he's expensive to hire. And if you're in Southwest Houston, you should hire Randy Winfrey. You should go see these guys. Well, you get 60 miles apart probably. Yeah, that's what they're like. I'm like on the very north end of Houston, fourth largest city in the country. I'm on the very, very north end. He's on the very, very south end. By the way, not fourth largest city in the country, but largest city in the country by landmass. Yes, yes. So it takes the longest to go from one end of Houston to the other. But it's very easy to drive. Yeah, cause you got all the loops. Right, yeah. You got the beltways that go around the city. So yeah, and then the spokes that go in. So it's actually, it's a pretty well designed. Well, it's grown out pretty well perfectly. Right, yeah. And so with the exception of Southeast because the ocean's there. Right, yeah. Or you can call that the ocean. Kind of a barrier there. Yeah. It's not exactly a beautiful beach, Galveston. We're proud of our Gulf. So, I was born in Houston just. I knew that. And so the first time I ever swam in the ocean was in Galveston. First time I ever got sunburned to the point of getting inch and a half blisters all over my body. The first time, I don't know. People that moved from like California and the Carolinas and that, when they moved there and the first time they go to Galveston, they cry. I thought this was a beach. Oh, there's a beach here. Oh, yeah, it's Galveston. Yeah. What I remember about going to the beach in Galveston was we drank Cherry Seven Up. And when Cherry Seven Up came out, like 1983, so good. Remember that? I do. You know what's good in Cherry Seven Up? What's I give up? Seagrams. Who would have guessed? I've actually never had it in 1983. I don't think I've ever seen Seagrams. Seagrams. Yeah, that's what it is. So, yeah, so, yeah, you've got the entire spectrum. So you can hire a coach for 400 or 500 or 600 or if you're in Manhattan, $1,600 a month to work with you on a every single session sort of basis. Or you can, if you don't have a coach in your area, you can hire an online coaching or one of our other coaches have online coaching where you're actually going to get coached and seen and that's a couple hundred bucks a month. And if you can't afford that or, you know, then you have options to be able to buy programs. And you also do a Facebook group, right? Yeah, that's part of the online program. It's just Facebook is such an easy way to interact with, you know, members. Yeah, so you've got a community that you built there. Yeah, so everybody's getting the same programming and then you can go in the Facebook group and, you know, everybody's doing the same program. It's a place for me to easily interact, you know, with them that's not via email. So, you know, I can get on there once a day and, you know, go through everybody's questions and look at videos and all that kind of stuff. So it's just such an easy format to use. What are those questions? What's the big one? Oh, well, they're all program specific. You know, it depends on what program they're doing. You know, this isn't working for me. This is working for me. I want to add this. How do I incorporate cardio, you know, nutrition stuff? You know, I want to squat an extra day per week. Where do I throw that? And, you know, it's all just kind of that kind of stuff. Has that given you some data to where over time you will tweak those programs from time to time? Right. And I've got a lot of people that are in there that don't even follow the programs that I send out. They're doing their own programs or whatever they just like being in the Facebook group and having access all the time, you know. So, you know, kind of in a Q&A type format. So, but yeah, I mean, that's the thing and the best way to learn is by coaching people, you know. And I think everything I've put out there, you know, you're talking about being able to kind of distill things down and make it simple for people and all that is, I mean, everything that I write down on paper that goes out to my, what I call my digital audience comes from the gym floor. Right. I mean, I don't know how I would come up with content if I wasn't in the gym all day, you know. Everything comes from conversations with clients and, you know. You just have to make it up. What's it? Yeah. Yeah. You know, or just, you know, repurpose other people's material, you know. And so everything comes from just working with real people and trying to solve real problems, you know. So you said to me that most of your questions now are most interested in HLM. Yeah. I think it's just probably, the thing is with like intermediate program, we have things like the Texas Method that are pretty clearly defined in terms of sets and reps and HLM gets a little bit more murky. It's, and I've always keep telling people, they say, well, you know, can you send me the HLM program? And it's not a program. It's just, it's an organization. It's a template for training. Within that, there's a lot of variability. I mean, almost an infinite variability when you get into all the different permutations of sets, reps and intensity levels and that sort of thing. Let's explain for the listeners. First, let's start. So HLM stands for heavy, light, medium. Right. Lay out the basic tenets of the template. The basic tenets is you have a day devoted to your heavy training. Now those could be all on one day. So, you know, when you write it down for somebody, the easiest way to write it down is, you know, you've got your heavy squat day. OK, I also would call that like your high stress squat day. So it could be heavy relative to the sets and reps that you're performing it for. So it's it's your highest stress day. Right. It could be high volume. It could be high intensity. I usually use a combination of both in that workout. So I try to get a little bit of everything in that workout. It tends to be like three sets of five, four sets of five for you. What typically do you do? I would look at probably a total of anywhere from three to five total sets. Usually it will be, you know, one higher intensity set, you know, anywhere from like, you know, one to one to five reps kind of all out, you know, heavy, heavy and set hop in set followed by a series of back off sets, you know, maybe five percent offset, how yours would differ a little bit from Bill Starr's original, which is just ramp up. Yeah. So the easiest way, you know, the Bill Starr's original, everything's, you know, kind of ascending sets of five, you know, that probably works too. I just typically use more of a sets across or top set followed by back off set approach. So if we think about just squats, because it's the easiest way to think about than your Monday, your first workout of the week. Right. It's the heaviest stress day. The heaviest stress day, you know, and then you've got your lighter squat day would be in the middle, which is typically your lowest intensity and lowest volume. Right. And then your medium day would be medium, kind of a little bit less volume than the heavy day, but a little more than the light day, a little heavier than the light day as well. So you're really managing stress. Right. So even though it's called the heavy light medium, first thing you think about is this is intensity, right? Heavy light medium, we're talking about the load on the bar. You're saying it doesn't necessarily mean load. Right. It certainly has something to do with it. Sure. Yeah. But it's some combination of volume and intensity. Yeah, I usually. To drive up stress. So it's really high stress, low stress, medium stress. Yeah, and I've done it where I've held volume relatively static and just waved intensity. And I've done it where I usually what I do is kind of wave both volume and intensity. So just as an example, let's just make it real simple. Like Monday would be a heavy five sets of five. So it'd be whatever the heaviest weight you can do that day is. And then Wednesday would be three sets of five at like a 20% offset. Yep. So that's quite a big drop in intensity plus dropping two sets off. So much easier. Won't necessarily feel easy, but it's quite a bit less stress. That Wednesday day never does feel like. Right. No matter how light. Yeah, me actually, in my experience in the medium day is usually easier than the in the. Right. And so. You're more recovered by then. Right. And that's that's where I've gone and just jumped the gun a little bit, but that's where with with a lot of athletes like uses with track and field athletes where I really like the medium day is like dynamic effort stuff. OK. Because you feel good on that day. Like you feel like you've got some pop. Sure. You know, like we were talking about earlier. Less reps. Right. As fast as you can hit it. Right. And so two, seven sets of three. It'll be, you know, like so if the medium day is four sets or if the light day is three sets of five, let's say a 20% offset, then the medium day would be like four sets of five at a 10% offset. Oh, so you're still keeping your reps at like five-ish. That's just an example. But even for dynamic. No, no. So like with a dynamic effort, what I would do is I would look at that total volume, say 20 reps. OK. And then divide it up. 10 doubles. Yes. OK. Maybe approximately the same weight, though. So it's going to depend. OK. So you know, it's going to be fast. Well, it depends on the person who you're working with. Like so I really like heavy light medium programs for athletes. Like I just think that's a really good way to organize training because if you look at most athletes, they have a lot of work to do in the middle of the week. You know, sports athletes that are in high school college or whatever, they usually have the weekends off. So they're able to come in on Monday and hit it pretty hard. They've had at least a day or two off from running and practice, whatever sport they're in. And then, you know, Tuesday, Thursday, Wednesday, they might have to do conditioning drills or sport specific stuff. And you can light and medium squat on sore legs. Sure. Entire legs. But it's harder to hit the. You know, the guys are probably not doing anything on Sunday. Right. So when they come in on Monday, that's why Monday is the hardest day. I get the most out of them on Monday. Right. That makes sense. You know, otherwise, if you're planning heavy stuff, you know, especially lower body stuff, if you're planning heavy stuff on Wednesday and Friday, well, you know, as well as I do, you're not really in control most of the time when you're working with high school and college athletes. You're not really in control of all the stuff they do outside the gym. If we look at the stress recovery adaptation cycle for a novice, it's very clean and very simple. Right. Monday is the stressor. Right. Tuesday is the recovery. Right. The time after, you know, as soon as the workout's over. And Wednesday shows that there is an adaptation because we're able to keep going up the weight on the bar, not just once. There's an adaptation. But three times a week for weeks and weeks and weeks. Right. As soon as it becomes intermediate, that gets a little more fuzzy. Right. Right. It's not as clean. It's never as clean. And that's the thing I wish we had in practical programming. I wish we had like a two or three page section on like the gray area. Yeah, the mess. Between all of it. Because I think the dividing lines are not nearly as clean as we would like. They're not. They can't be. Right. And we've talked about it. Especially between intermediate and advanced. Okay. Like there's almost. No, yeah, you can't. There's almost not a difference. No, but I actually think there's novice in everything else. Right. I'm kind of of the same stripe where it's there's weekly and then there's like, you know, every two weeks versus once a month. Yeah. And then it's like, so where do you cut it off? Yeah, you don't know. Right. So that's where it has to be individual. Right. So hang on. So I'm going to build there because we've got to get. So when you get to heavy light medium, what is the quantifiable metric or metrics that you use to show that we are making progress on a week by week basis. Performance on the heavy day. That's it. That's the only thing I look at. Monday's performance. So Monday, the weight continues to go up or. The volume continues to go up and the weight stays the same. We can look at tonnage. We know that there's more stress out of rep out of set. Stress goes up every single Monday. Right. And as long as they can continue to hit their prescribed sets and reps on Monday, week after week after week, and the stress continues to go up week after week after week. Then you can say quantifiably. We've made progress. Right. Okay. Good. Perfect. You know, and then typically what I do is, you know, when we laid out for somebody just on paper, I'll show, you know, everything, all the heavy stuff on Monday, all the light stuff on Wednesday, all the medium stuff on Friday. But that's usually not how I do it. I usually like to have one heavy lift per day, right? You know, so it's like, you know, heavy, light, medium for the squat, but then for your pressing movements, it might be, you know, light, heavy, medium or whatever. So that we, we're not going heavy, heavy, heavy. Right. Right. Because no, I mean, all your slots are not very well. Yeah. And it's not efficient. The light day is too easy. Right. I know for me personally, I can't gear up to go in there and just do a bunch of light lifts that I know I'm going to make. It's almost not enough stress to disrupt homeostasis at all. I want one, at least one lift that I really have to focus on. So it's like, okay, heavy bench day. Like I got to go in today. I got to kill it on the bench, but then I got light squats and power cleans or something like it. But then do you still try to make Monday as the heaviest stress day across the board? It usually is because of the squats. Because automatically, because the squat is the hardest lift. Then if there's a heavy squat, medium. Times the bench winds up being on Monday too. Just because the organization's for the pressing usually it makes sense where it's heavy bench and then we overhead on Wednesday and then on Friday would be a medium bench, which for me, if I can, I don't like to introduce too much complexity in terms of, you know, so when we get an intermediate trainee and we introduce them to heavy light, medium programming, you know, minimum effective dose of complexity. Sure. Right. So the first thing we're changing is sets and reps. Absolutely. And then variation and exercise. Yes. And so, but I might make small changes, you know, something like moving from, you know, a bench press to a close grip bench press is not exactly a pretty tiny change. Right. If you're not athletic enough to handle that or pausing it for a two count, yes, you know, so for something like that, I will make the medium day loads harder. And I tell my lifters that all the time. It's like, there's little things we can do. We don't have to just put load on the bar. We have a light day or medium day. There's things we can do to make this lift harder. One, we can pause it, right? One, we can change our grip or we can change our stance, you know, or we can just move it faster. And that's where I started doing the dynamic stuff. It's like, you know, the lifter says, well, this four sets of five bench feels a little bit easy. We'll move it faster, you know, explode in every single rep and then less shorten the rest periods down to, you know, so it's the same amount of overall volume and load, but you're making that exercise a little bit more stressful. So, you know, people want to train hard. I do. I don't want, I don't like to go in and just have a light day. Yeah, a complete light day. Right. That makes sense. Since you use this heavy light media mostly for athletes, I would assume there's more variants in the pulling exercises before anything else, right? You're doing a deadlift and then you might be doing a power clean, you might be doing a rack pull or an RDL or like, what are the things that you tend to use there? If you work with like a sport athlete and especially one that is going to go play, you know, say college ball or whatever, they're going to be like in track and field or football or whatever. Even if you're not the biggest fan of the Olympic lifts or the variants, they're going to have to do those when they get there. Sure. You want to prepare those kids as much as you can to get to their freshman year, their strength and conditioning program and, you know, be able to power clean some weight. So the Olympic variants really, really fall neatly into the heavy light medium program really, really well. So, you know, it's very easy to have your heavy deadlift day as just dead. Heavy is the deadlift. Right. Heavy is a deadlift. That's light. That's pretty easy. Light is a power snatch and medium is a power clean. Right. I mean, it's real simple. Real, real simple. You can organize it however you want. You know, you can also just do if you have one or the other. So you have a guy that just really sucks at the power snatch and just having power clean twice, you know, once heavier, once lighter, you know. So there's there's a lot of ways to do that for a general. That just makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, it's super easy to do that. And when you're doing that, too, the benefit of doing that is that even though it's a light pulling day and you're going to power snatch, you're power snatching maximally. Right. I'm still probably doing singles right on the power snatch. It's heavy as they can. But it's still not that much weight. You know, it's still it's relative. Yeah, very little eccentric movement there. And the same with the power. Doesn't make you sore. You know, my favorite method usually for those types of kids at that intermediate level is really nothing but singles and I'll do them timed, you know, every 30 seconds to a minute pull a single, you know, there's no form deterioration. We can use heavier weights, you know, builds good work capacity. You can get it a lot of volume with just a bunch of singles in a real short period of time. So that's usually how I use that with a more general strength trainee. Yeah, I was going to say so the middle age person who's not going to Olympic lift. Right. So I will either do, you know, if they're not going to Olympic lift at all, then the light deadlift day is usually going to be some sort of back movement that does not involve the low back because, you know, I just haven't had luck with the rose. Rose, you know, even if they have to be chest supported or something like that depends on who you're working with. The low back is the area where you have to be careful with because if you beat people's low backs up, it affects everything else. Sure. Effects are squatting, impressing, whatever. So, you know, chins, you know, if they're, you know, that's always good midweek type break. And then the heavy day is still usually going to be the deadlift or a rack pull. So I usually don't have a deadlift and rack pull in the same week. I've not had good success doing that personally or with people. So it'll be the rack pull or the deadlift on the heavy day. The medium day would be like, you know, just a little bit lighter deadlifts, but maybe with a little bit more volume to set to five or my personal favorites to stiff legs. I've always had the best carry over to my deadlifts. I like deficits. Yeah, deficits for a thing, right? So you're actually if you start to look at the way we can increase stress with exercise selection, right? By changing the exercise selection, I have a theory that we do one of two things when we choose exercise variant of the main lift. We can increase stress by increasing range of motion, which essentially increases time under tension. Right. So it's essentially a function of volume, right? A deficit deadlift compared to a deadlift is more work, right, more time under tension and essentially more volume, even with the same set, right? Yeah, I would agree. Or we do the other end of the spectrum. We shorten the range of motion, higher intensity like a rack pull, right? Short range of motion, less time under tension, and we still can drive up the stress because we're driving up the stress with intensity there. So those end up being a function of intensity. So press lockouts, rack pulls, floor presses, board presses, things like that and almost all of those fit pretty neatly into one or the other, right? And so, you know, pause squat, it's more time under tension. A tempo squat, it's more time under tension. And then you just you also have to go and my experience has been, too, that anything that you're doing dead stop out of the rack pretty much qualifies as a heavy to move because those people underestimate the difficulty of doing, say, like dead stop. Yeah, there's no rebound. Dead stop, pause, anything. Benches, you know, starting with the bar, you know, an inch above your chest where you have no, you have no tension built up in your, you know, in your pack and, you know, doing five to 10 heavy singles like that. You know, it's just it is brutal. It's hard to recover from almost to the point where it takes more than it gives back, you know, in certain insurgents. You're going to have to manage the stress, you know. But so that kind of stuff definitely qualifies as heavy work. And and then you just have to go a little bit with experience of just having had done a lot of that stuff yourself. You know, what is your recovery like? I don't know if you've had the experience with rack pulls where, you know, I've gone in, you know, and loaded up, you know, 600 plus on a rack pull and pulled it for reps. And then, like, you go try to week later and like, I can't break 405 off the pins. Yeah. So I found that my lifters, either a rack pull or deficit deadlift crushes them, but not both. Right. So like Santana can deficit deadlift all day, every day? Like the guy's just it's weird. It just doesn't affect him. But if he rack pulls, he's wrecked for a while, a week. Right. So is he naturally pretty fast off the floor? No, he's not. Right. So that's what you would think. It's just not the case. Now, no, he pulls with pretty standard speed or pretty consistent speed throughout the lift. So that is what you would think if somebody's really good off the floor, then maybe they're deficit deadlift is not that we've been doing. But that just doesn't seem to be the case. I'm specifically looking at the amount of fatigue or performance decline we get from doing that lift. You know, how long does it take to recover from that period? Right. And for Santana, a rack pull kills him and a deficit deadlift doesn't. For me, it's the exact opposite. I can do an 800 pound rack pull. And the next day, I'm like, I'm fine. Right now that rack pull is also usually with straps, right? Really, really heavy. Right. So there's something about really, really heavy in your hands. Oh, I agree. 100% you know, I don't know why or what does it. But a deficit deadlift, deficit deadlift the bottom of my rector's down at my ass. Just oh, they're just killing me. Right. So hard. My guess is it would have something to do with build as well. Yeah, you know, high in the commentary. Yeah, that's certain lifts are going to be, you know, and there's difference between a two inch deficit and a four inch deficit. Right. I never use more than a two inch deficit. I never do either. I just I don't think mine is, you know, not even three quarters. Yeah, that's what I do. Inch and a half. Right. And that we though, yeah, you and I have never talked about that ever. Right. And we just program for decades and we found out that it carries over it. Why? Well, because the back angle doesn't change a lot in a one and a half, one inch, one and a half deficit. When you go to a four inch deficit, it's a squat on the floor like a deadlift anymore. It doesn't carry over. It's really dangerous to honestly, I think because the position it puts you in you have to drop your hip so low, the bar is way out in front of the midfoot and it comes off. But you're able to generate a lot of leg drive. Or if your hip's high, your hips are way above your shoulders. Yeah, it turns into a stiff leg. That's right. Yeah, so. Which is not a bad lift either. It's not a bad movement. We had a lot of these conversations several years ago when we're doing practical programming where we had never really talked and we started talking about programming and it was like we reached a lot of the same conclusions independently. Not just me and him, but like just everybody having this conversation with Sully. You've got all these guys have been programming for years and you start realizing like, oh, we all do the same thing. Right. And you didn't do it for any actual like scientific database reason. You just did it because over time experience had showed that this is what works. Right. This is what our people respond to. This is what we respond to in our own training. And and that's why you can't buy experience, right? You can't just look at, well, the data just says this experience actually matters. It has to, right? The data is only useful when it articulates something that has already been observed in practice is what I think. The way that I look at kind of the data rather than the other way around not looking at the data first and then trying to replicate programming or methodology that comes from the data. You've got it right. It's a terrible way to do it because the data shows all kinds of stuff that are irrelevant. Right. We've gone over this, I'm sure you guys too, in the podcast of, you know, these crazy ridiculous programs that you would never put somebody on. But, you know, in a lab environment show some increase in hypertrophy. Sure, right. That doesn't mean anything. That doesn't mean that one set of 20 leg extensions three times a week is a good strength training protocol. It just happened to work for six weeks on a group of untrained people. Sure. You know, so data is good when it can articulate something that we kind of already have observed in training but don't necessarily have a great explanation as to why it happens. Sure. You know, we just, but we know that it does because we've seen it happen enough times. Or we can actually utilize the scientific method and we go, OK, this is what I think works. I'm going to make this hypothesis. We're, you know, we're going to debate it and we're going to drink whiskey and we're going to talk about it and then we're going to lay it out and then we're going to test it. Right. And then we're going to see what the data tells us because now we're actually testing this hypothesis and it works pretty well. It's just so hard. It's so hard with this type of stuff to get any type of good, you know, scientific method. You know, it's it's it's hard to control because it's it's human behavior, even in a lab environment. It's no placebo squat. Right. It's just it's just so it's so difficult. Well, you can't control nonproductive stressors as a coach. Right. I can't control if one of my clients girlfriend breaks up with him on Thursday night. Right. Or if you got the flu, rent rent a fever in a car accident, whatever, like any of those things. And so to actually derive data, even if you take everybody out of their environment and put them in an actual lab and make them sleep there for six weeks. So, man, they pick up some cold. Right, right. Still all kinds of stuff that introduces in there. So it's just whatever. And so you just can't. So we do the best we can and we take thousands and thousands of lifters that we've coached over decades of years between you and me and slowly and all these guys. And when you start to look at it and go, well, how did we come up with the idea that completely separate from each other? This is the thing that worked. It's just something about just intuition. Sure. And it goes about like with the volume and intensity type debate of, you know, what drives progression, better volume intensity. And the answer is both. Of course. And we've all observed people where, you know, this is what happened with body building back in the days. What's his name? Mike Menser, Meltzer, the high intensity guy. So, you know, he got these great gains and supposedly from this, you know, one set to failure and all this kind of stuff. But if you look when all that stuff started, those guys had been training for decades on extremely high volume. He was already crazy strong. Well, their body. They had adapted to the volume. Right. And so it had not adapted to the intensity. When you pull the volume away and it introduced him in, can we still use the word supercompensation? Well, I mean, it's fine. What word is replaced? That I understand what you're saying that looks like supercompensation. Actually supercompensation. The word we used to use. So but when you have a lifter that's been training with a ton of volume for a long time and you pull that volume back, let him recover a little bit from not, you know, doing these crazy, you know, the Arnold type routines. They actually realize the adaptation is what exactly. They realize the adaptation. They go, oh, it's higher intensity that works. And it's like, no, no, no, it's higher intensity on the back end of really high volume for a prolonged period of time. Right. And people see that all the time. So they you get these guys that are maybe not training with a lot of volume. They're training, you know, maybe they're just squatting once a week up to, you know, one top heavy set that works for a good long while. And then they kind of stagnate. Well, then they go to a three day a week squatting program. It's not volume back in. Yeah. And they start progressing and they go, oh, volume's the answer. And then, you know, a year later, they've stagnated again. They go, volume suck. And it's so it's like volume goes up and then it has to come down and then it goes up and then it comes down. And it's only that repeating process of building volume, pulling it back, building volume, pulling it back. This idea we were talking about about stress sensitivity versus resistance, right? Like I get the more times I'm exposed to the same stress. Right. I build up a resistance to that stress. It requires a bigger bolus of that stress every single time, every single progressive time I do it in order to elicit an adaptive response. And at some point, if I just push intensity, intensity, intensity, intensity, intensity, at some point, intensity stops working, right? But the same occurs with volume. Sure. Volume, volume, volume. And so that's why we're constantly trying to manage the two. Hamburg and I were talking about this the other day. Think about what happens when we were talking about the stress recovery adaptation cycle for an actual novice when it feels clean, right? When it feels like it's the, you know, each session is the stressor, then you've got your recovery and then the next session shows the adaptation occurs, right? Well, actually, at the end of novice LP, that's obviously not what's going on, right? There's clearly fatigue presently, yeah, from Monday to Wednesday, right? Let's say the last three weeks, last three weeks of actual LP, the guy still is able to put more weight on the bar and make progress, right? But complete recovery is not even close to occurring, right? Now, here's the question. Why does LP actually stop working at that point? Is it, is it? We have a, we have a theory. Wait a minute. I have a theory. Don't, don't poison the well. What do you have? No, go ahead, go ahead. Go poison the well. He's like, save my ass. Right. OK, so is it because you're not able to add weight to the bar, therefore, you're not able to induce enough stress to elicit an adaptation, to drive adaptation and strength, or is it because by the end of LP, there's enough fatigue present that you're not able to recover from the heavier and heavier progressive loads. So you can't make progress. Right. I think it's both. I think it's both. I think it's both. I think it's both. And I tend to think it's, you know, is it 50-50? I don't think so. I don't think we can know. Yeah, I would, I would lean towards it's more of the latter of the fatigue being present. But it's definitely both. I think it's different for the different lifts. Yeah, that's probably true. That's probably true. So orchestra and LP are three sets of five. Right. Yeah, let's say you can't change the volume, right? Sticking with three sets of five. And so for the presses, he can't put more weight on the bar. But it's not recovery with the press. So I immediately, on questions like that, I immediately start thinking of a client or a person. Right, right. I'm going to train it. What do I do in that situation? Do I immediately increase volume on that guy? You have to change the rep. You change the rep scheme. I do. But maybe the volume will change. Volume must go up, but not today. So what do you do? So let's take the squat. My mind automatically goes to the squat because of kind of who we are, what we do. Well, that's why I said press because I think everybody, it's different. The recovery is what puts the brakes on the squat at the end of the year. I'm pretty sure. OK, but here's the question. On Friday, let's say that this person squats three thirty five for three sets of five on Friday and it either damn near kills him, let's say misses, let's say he goes five, four, three. And it's the end of LP, basically. What do you do with that? So I have and this is in practical programming, but I have a little thing that I've done for a long time with people like that. And it lasts about a month. OK, you know, it's not a long term solution. And so but I look at how the guy is failing, is he failing like the first set that so on three sets of five, is he going? Is he coming in and going and only getting three or three or is he going five, five, two? OK, OK. How is he just running out of gas by that third set? Or is he coming in just not able to do it? Yeah, if I'm watching his first set and it's a pretty good clean set of five, then I'll just keep having him in squat, the one top set of five. And he can still run an LP on that and then just do a backoff set or two. And a slightly reduced weight. He can do a five R.M. Three times a week, adding weight. So still a linear progression. He just can't do 15 reps of that. Correct. That is definitely the case with your better genetically gifted lifter, your younger guys, like you're I go back to the track and field and stuff, the shop put guys and stuff like that that are super explosive. And that's how they're going to fail. Like you're going to be able to do it, but they're not going to be able to carry that out for 15 reps. Sure. If they're coming in and their workout on Monday is, you know, four, four, three or, you know, three, three, two or something like that. You know, if it's a miserable failure, it's probably time to just change programming rather than trying to, you know, I don't believe that people should try to just beat themselves at the end of LP and milk out every last single pound out of the bar because it makes whatever you transition to after that too hard to sure that the transition to the next thing has got to be a reduction in stress for several weeks. It has to be. It has to be your first. You don't call it a D load, but it has to be a load. That's what it is. And also that there's the mental side of that, too, if you've pushed somebody really, really hard on LP. It's super hard. The last those last three, four weeks sucks way harder than anything you'll do as an intermediator in advance. That's why you can't take them from that on Friday of like the three or four weeks have been the hardest three sets of five of their life. And on Monday, go time to start Texas Method five sets of five really heavy. Right. Well, I never do that anyway. No, nobody would. Yeah. And it wouldn't do that. No. And so that's where, you know, but going back to the LP, if they're coming in and not getting that first set, then you can do the same thing, kind of a little bit of a reduction in load by just having them do, you know, run out like three triples. That doesn't last as long. That maybe is like two or three weeks. OK, so we do the same thing. So wait, let's build out the actual theory for this. So you you're giving the practical, which I agree with all of it, but I think we have to understand like, why does that thing work? And so for us, let's talk about the squat. If the problem with the squat is that the guy is not able to recover. Right. That it would make sense theoretically that we could just let him recover longer. Right. And he would come up and be able to go back up. And that actually might work a little bit. Right. As a matter of fact, we do that often because what we'll do is we'll actually, I will often move to a Wednesday lighter squat. Right. Before I put them on sort of a Texas method, like volume, light, heavy, right, or a heavy light medium or so what I'll do is I just make Wednesday a 20 percent back off day. Right. Friday and Monday still look identical. Yeah. Three sets of five, three sets of five, they still go up and that works for two or three weeks. Right. Do it right. But at some point at the end of LP, the lifter isn't able to go up in weight and he's not able to recover enough from what he's already done because by the time he did and all of that fatigue dissipates, detraining has occurred. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why we have to start manipulating volume and intensity together to play with stress so that the lifter is able to make progress over the long term. Yeah, because you can't just take more days off because you can't just take more days off. You can train. That's right. You can train. You have to train often enough and heavy enough in a way that allows them to still progress and you can't have continual degradation and performance. So then the next step is what you just said. I am of the opinion. I also would say that this is definitely an opinion of mine. I think I can back up the other stuff with decent sort of at least logic and reason, if not data on this one. I would say here's what I do. Because the adaptation we're trying to get is forced production. Right. People forget that the object of the game is weighed on the bar. And it's not. Man, I hate the fact that when we say the word intensity, what we're talking about often or what people think we're talking about is percentage of one rep max. Right. I understand as you organize programming, I use programming that uses percentages because how else do you actually lay it out? There's no other way to represent. That's what like when we did practical programming was very against percentages. But you start laying out programs. There's no way to show relative relative weight. Yeah, you can't say that somebody that reads practical program is going to be like, well, Andy said this guy does 340. And so what would that be for me? Right. That's too hard to do. But absolute intensity. Magnitude of the way actual the actual weight on the bar actually matters. It actually obviously. Right. So if you take a guy who squats 600 pounds, can that guy make progress, drive a strength adaptation with a 67 percent squat, which is a 405 squat. And I would say yes. Yes. We talked about that on the phone the other day. 405 squat. Yeah. Right. But Sibyl, my 82 year old lady that deadlifts one 45 for a set of four, 67 percent, which is about ninety six pounds is a waste. Right. It's a waste. Taking out the trash. That's taking out the trash. That's right. You said a really good thing the other day. You said nursing homes are full of people doing seventy five percent intensity sit to stands. Right. And they don't get better. Right. Why don't they get better? Well, because they're seventy five percent isn't heavy at all. Right. But some of you squat six hundred pounds is right. And so because what we're trying to drive up progressively is stress. Right. And three sets of five at 405 or four sets of six or six sets of three. That is a lot of stress. Right. Well, Sibyl can walk in and deadlift ninety five pounds for sixty. Right. Yeah. Just do it all day. What do you want me to do this till tomorrow? That's fine. It's not enough stress to drive adaptation for her. Her threshold. I know for Sibyl I've actually been thinking about since we've been talking about it. Yes. So her top was her best deadlift is one forty five for set of four. She missed her fifth. She has to pull over one twenty five. Nope. One thirty five. Is that right? One twenty five doesn't do for her. Yeah. It doesn't matter if I try the other day. I was like, let's do one twenty five. You know, she was like, you know, she plays organ and it was Easter and she had family in. And she I'm so tired. It doesn't even really preserve adaptation. No. Well, that's right. If you take over. I don't even think it maintains. That's why when we did the barbell prescription, I was insistent that intensity dependent was in the text because they are. If you. That's right. That's why when we deload, if you look at the way we deload in the barbell prescription, especially for the older, you know, the older they get, you look at the prescription for like a midweek deload. It's really low volume, but the weight doesn't come down that much. That's right. It's like deload with like one triple. Why? Because we know that the volume is the thing that the older population has a harder time recovering. Yes. They can do it. Now, again, science would say that the older you are, the more female you are, the more vegan you are, the less testosterone you are, that you are a non-responder, the more Hamburg you are. It's you need more work, more work. Right. A bigger bolus of work to be able to get an adaptive response. That's what science says. Only all of our experience says that's not actually what happens. That's not actually what happens in my experience. What we see is that the more female you are, the older you are, less protein synthesis you have, you actually have to go heavier. It's why we take women to five sets of three. It's why you go heavier and you can't get away from the fact that as intensity goes up, volume has to come down a little bit. It has to at some point. You can't do a light day with a guy at 95% of his, of what he did on Monday and do three or four sets of five. Okay. So that means, so that now we've come full circle on this theory, which means what I know you do often and what I do most of the time, what you do most of the time is that at the end of LP, when I can't make a intensity increase for three sets of five, I start trading off volume for intensity. Right. And I start going to three sets of three, you know, multiple sets of three, maybe a top set of five and back off or top set of three and back off or whatever. And then here's the thing. I want to be very, very transparent about this. I don't know. I certainly know that tonnage doesn't go up during that period. If I calculate tonnage, there are tonnage on Friday at three sets of five. And then I take them to three sets of three. If you do the calculations, tonnage does not go up. Yeah, it goes down. That's right. Calculated one rep max also probably doesn't go up. I don't know. May stay the same or whatever. It's it's it's that. But here's the thing. I think that there's something important that happens when the absolute intensity of the bar goes up for a little while, right? Not this is a very short period for most people. And of course, that's who knows what that means. Because that's a four to six week. Yeah, it's about a month. So we're we're we're going triples and we might even go singles or might go five singles across. Well, five singles across is not very much tonnage. No. But boy, it's hard. Something happens to that person that is never been exposed. That's right. It's a brand new stress. Two reps left in the tank is if you'd never done right bone on bone, RP 10, right? One rep max, three rep max, five rep max. And I think and you think because we talk about it all the time that's something virtuous occurs that's actually virtue here. And this is something that I think a lot of people forget. The physiological change that occurs is not the only thing that's important here. 100 percent. God, man, there's an emotional, social confidence building thing that occurs in this month at the end of LP when I drive up the intensity. And you know what? If you put it in all the equations, I don't know if you actually theoretically got stronger. You know how I know you got stronger? Because the weight on the bar continues to go up. Then when I can't anymore and that happens in about a month, right? That's right. Then we start bringing the volume in to drive the stress at a guy that at that level. It's like, I don't care what your estimated one RM is off of your four best four sets of five. I want to see you with four plates on your back. That's right. That's right. I want to make you drop it down into the hole and stand back up with it. That's right. Not knowing it happens to that guy. The thing is as a coach, again, we're not just getting paid to make people stronger because let's be honest, you take a guy and you get him under the bar for, you know, six, eight weeks, 12 weeks. You're going to basically have given him what he needs already for his health. That's right. You know what I mean? You really are. Unless I mean just daily functional strength. But the changes that occur when you make yourself stronger than you need to be as a coach, if you don't let people do that, you're robbing them of something. You're robbing them of an experience that they need to have that makes you not just a better lifter and stronger and able to produce more force or whatever, but makes you a stronger person. That's right. You know, it's the only thing that we can do really is, you know, non-athletes to push our bodies. That's right. What else are we going to do? We're not going to go fight in a cage or, you know, whatever. We're going to, you know, it's like it's the only realistically thing that we can do to really walk that line of really challenging ourselves physically is load ourselves under the bar. The last meritocracy. I think we went to the training to put them through all of their paces. Right. Or, you know, you can do heavy, heavy triples all the time. Doesn't mean that you can do your single. Well, they doesn't mean they need to learn that there's a skill. We've talked about this before. Of course. It's not just a physiological adaptation to be able to squat a heavy one RM. You have to know how to stay under the bar and not quit on it. That's right. Feel that moving up a centimeter at a time and know that it's still moving up, you know. That's what we're talking about. We're not saying like, look, you should grind reps three or four times a week for six months. That's crazy. But if you don't know how to grind, you're never going to set a true one rep max. You can't. What are you there for? That's right. What are we actually trying to do? What are you there for? It's like, if you're a cage fighter, do you want to go in there and kick everybody's ass? Right. You want to be John Jones and go fight a bunch of amateurs and just. Or do you want to go? I mean, he's. Cosmo Kramer. You want to go in there and know the little kids. Right. You know, that's the best episode. I mean, for me, I'm just talking my own personal experience. You know, I'm as strong as I need to be for my health. You know, for me, it's about the challenge of I want to get under a bar on occasion that I'm not sure if I can squire it. Almost everybody we train who actually buys into this and gets through it. Right. So Brett McCays in the room. I can remember Brett got to the point where his squat was like, you know, upper mid upper three hundreds, not quite four hundred. Right. His deadlift is close to five hundred. You guys are strong enough for anything that likes going to throw like he's strong enough at that point. And I actually thought when I went to him, I would be like, OK, what do you want to do? Like, I just want to maintain my strength and let's go do like mud runs and I'll do mud runs in my life and stuff like that. And I was like, you want to keep getting stronger? Or do you want to just, you know, you want to maintain strength and whatever? And he was like, I want to keep getting stronger. Yeah. Stronger than you need to be. Stronger than you have to be. Right. You can't get it otherwise. You don't understand otherwise. Right. Right. So like you can't have that conversation. Right. In week three. No, no, no. Because they haven't been refined by it yet. Yeah, we had Sanders on. So when he first hit his, I don't know what it was, three 15 squad or something. I think I told him I, you know, he was early to mid sixties when he was 65 years ago. And I'm like, you know, he's like, so what's next? And I'm like, I don't know, man, like, he's pretty strong. Like, you know, he was like, I don't get four or five. You know, and now he's he hit 480 in the meat the other day, you know, or 475 or whatever it was. And, you know, he's got two torn hamstrings in the process. Right. You know, and it's like. Is that your fault? No, it's just it's just a consequence of a guy that's, you know, I'm not my job is not to tell you what you should do. It's just you ask my help. I'll tell you how to do it. Sanders is a Navy Seal. And yeah, exactly. You have to know your people. And that's the thing is he's there is no way that Frank Sanders is going to be satisfied to stop at 480. That's right. Like 500 is coming. That's right. Like whatever's got to happen, 500 is coming. And, you know, no matter how many hamstrings the guy has to go through to get there, he's going to get the 500. I don't recommend that to people. No, of course not. That's just hamstring transplant. Well, but you would recommend you wouldn't recommend plain in the NFL for health either. Right. Right. And that's the thing that people have to understand that what we do in the beginning is we get general people who are weak and unhealthy, right? Strong and healthy. Right. And then they get to choose. Yeah, exactly. The power to now choose. Just want to stay strong and healthy and like just maintain that. Right. Do you want to be competitive? Right. Because as soon as you decide you're competitive and Frank Sanders is a competitive. Right. Yeah. And that guy's as competitive as it gets. If he never does a meet. He's still competitive. Oh, of course he is. You know, it's not about as we say that it's not about. Yeah, remember when we interviewed him he talked about for years and years he would just he would run and run. He'd run these like long trail runs and he's like, I hated it. Right. Well, why'd you do it? Because I had to just I was chasing after the PR. Right. He wasn't competitive with other people. He was competitive only with themselves like, man, I don't know, I just I just I wanted to run a 10 K in this in this much time for me. Not because anybody else knew. It's like the corniest thing in the world, but it's the Apollo Creed speech from Rocky Four. And it's like, without some war to fight, the warrior may as well be dead. Yep. Sure. It's what they call foreshadowing. And it's. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Epic foreshadowing. And then Drago killed him. Right. Sorry. Spoiler, if you haven't seen Rocky Four. 30 30 year old 35 years. I mean, it's corny as hell, but that I mean, it is kind of the truth in a way. And it's what we it's kind of what you're going to do. It's what we have. Yeah, we talk about this all the time, even from a business perspective, with our clients, you have clients when they sign up for this, there's almost no commitment. Right. And then most of them fall in love with this. Right. It's for the first six months through novice LP. Right. It's puppy love. Right. Right. It ain't there. Nope. And then some guys turn out like Frank Sanders or Brett or Santana or you or me who like, I don't even know what I would do if I couldn't do it. No. Right. Like you start to become like, this is what I do. Right. Right. And so and for a business guys, I want a bunch of clients like that. Right. Those guys don't leave. Yeah. Right. They stay because they're in and they don't get bored and go do hot yoga. I don't want people are going to get bored and go do hot yoga. Right. Yeah. I've never been that bored. Sometimes I do naked hot yoga. I think about what my body might look like naked in hot yoga. And it does not. Close your eyes and you think about it doesn't sound like an appealing picture to me. Would smell like bacon grease in there. So that's an hour of this. We could do four. Yeah. We should do more of these for sure. That's fine. We'll do more. But no, we'll wrap this one up. Tell everybody where they can find you first. If you're looking for a local coaching at my gym, KingwoodStrength.com, if you want to find all my stuff online, it's AndyBaker.com. Right. Start with the blog from there. Tons of free articles on there. Look at the programs, you know, if you want to after that. So. Well, thanks for doing this, man. Yeah. Thanks for being on the show.