 Welcome to Barbell Logic Rewind. So you guys just finished your first competition, which means that you have transitioned from being totally normal general population lifters who are just trying to get generally strong to competitive lifters. Now, for some of you, you'll compete in a bunch more competitions in the future. Some of you, that'll be the only one you ever do. And that's okay, right? There's nothing wrong with that. There is a difference that occurs. Most of you in the room have gone through novice linear progression where you just do the three sets of five and keep adding weight every single time. What I wanna talk to you about today is what do you do when that stops working? Because it stops working eventually, right? And I wanna talk to you about the theory behind how we do it. Everybody wants to know the practical side of this stuff, like how practically, like just tell me what to do, right? And if you were just a client of mine, who was just like a middle-aged guy or lady or soccer mom or whatever, just like just tell me what to do, I would, right? But this class, we wanna flesh out a little bit about the whys behind the house first, and then I'll actually tell you the house by the end of this, but I want you to understand why we're doing what we're doing. All right, so everything we do in strength training and programming is based on the stress recovery adaptation cycle. What the stress recovery adaptation cycle says is this. Homeostasis is disrupted by a specific stress, and we're not even specifically talking about strength training right now, right? This is just like it is. It could be like you're running, get ready to run for a marathon, right? And you could go out and run a long distance and running a long distance, having never run long distance, we'll disrupt that homeostasis. That's a stressor, right? It will disrupt that, resulting in a decrease in performance. For us, we're focusing on strength or force production, but that could work for anything. And then the body immediately begins a system of recovery processes to adapt to the stress you just exposed it to. And when it adapts to that stress, it gets better. Now, here's the way that's been traditionally looked at. And if you guys take an actual like exercise physiology class and you look at exercise phys textbook, like a standard textbook, it's gonna look like this, right? So this looks pretty similar to what I drew up there, but I wanna show you there's a couple of little differences. I'm gonna take you through three pieces of change. So number one, this is what has traditionally been called the super compensation cycle. This is the way stress recovery adaptation has been looked at, what I have drawn up here on the board. So I have this baseline of fitness or strength or whatever the performance is that I'm trying to have that's represented by this horizontal line. I stress my body. Let's say you guys went out and did your performance yesterday. Could you do the exact same performance today that you did yesterday? No, you would suck today compared to what you did yesterday, right? Performance has gone down and that's represented by this. So I've stressed my body, it goes down. And then I'm in this recovery period right now. If you view what you need to do Wednesday, today, Monday, you can even do it tomorrow, but Wednesday is probably the right day, tomorrow or Wednesday. If you view what you need to do in the weight room as recovery, that's why it can't be heavy yet. You just need to go in and get some blood flow, low impact. Blood flow is not the same thing as running. You can't just go run because it's high impact and your joints already hurt from what you did in the weight room, right? You go in and you do some lightweight, you do a bunch of reps, you pump a bunch of blood in, you'll recover. And the theory has been that your body would supercompensate and get better than it was before. Only that's not really true. That's not really the way this works, right? We can't define how much better you're gonna be. After you recover from the meat, let's say somebody deadlifted 315 at the meat. That was your deadlift, right? Once you recover, let's say it takes you a week to recover still. You're in a kind of weekly recovery process, one week to recover. How much more can you deadlift? We don't know. Is it 2% more? Is it 3% more? Is it 5% more? Is it 1% more? We don't know because we can't define with this super compensation what this is, like how high this peak goes. It's not that this is totally wrong. We just need to have a paradigm shift in the way we view it. So now let's view this. Now, we stress the body and the body doesn't supercompensate, it adapts to the stress. But the argument that has been made in the past is that adaption, we don't know how much it adapts. There's some fuzz. And I don't think that's wrong either. I just also think there maybe is even a tighter way to explain what's going on. What I think occurs is that you start with this level of baseline, what would be over there on the left side. And let's say you are adapted to squatting 180 pounds for three sets of five. Let's say it's 180. What do I need to do to stress my body to force an adaptation? Could you do 180 for three sets of five? Yeah, but it's not gonna make you have an adaptation because you've already adapted to 180 for three sets of five. So what I'm gonna do is I'm actually gonna I'm gonna step out of the camera for a second. I'm gonna stress my body more than what I'm adapted to. Boom. And I'm gonna do 185 for three sets of five. And that's gonna force my body, the same thing's gonna happen. My performance is actually gonna decline and then it's gonna come back up and adapt to the 185. And now I'm adapted to 185. And now in order to get a stress it's gonna disrupt homeostasis again and cause another adaptation. I can't do 185 because I've adapted to 185. I have to do a little bit more. Maybe that's 190. Maybe it's 187 and a half, right? Here's what we know. If it's too much, it'll kill me, literally. It'll literally kill me. That's what this general adaptation syndrome looks like, right? If the stress is great enough, I die. But if it's just a little bit more than I've been adapted to, my body will recover and adapt and be better. That's what explains how we actually get stronger. So rather than the adaptation just returning us back to baseline levels, the adaptation actually makes us better because the stress we chose was higher than what we're actually adapted to. So I don't think we've ever explained it that way. But I think it's a little bit tighter way of looking at it, right? So, okay. That's stress recovery adaptation. That doesn't change whether you're a novice or an intermediate or an advanced or world class or whatever, right? We'll talk about how that stress recovery adaptation cycle just elongates. It really just kind of elongates as you get further down the line. The time to recover is based on some stuff. It's based on, well, the amplitude and duration of the stress itself. It is going to take you longer to recover from the meat you did yesterday than it is to recover from your normal workouts that you do leading up to the meat. Why? Yeah. It moves in more weight than we're used to. That's right, it's more stress. You had more stress yesterday than you're used to. You all did nine lifts, right? You did three lifts and three attempts at each one. So you went really brutally heavy on three different lifts, like really heavy and in front of a crowd. So there's not just the thing that you just do the lifts like you do when you're in the university gym, but now you're actually performing this in front of other people, which this heightened awareness gets some like, there's some nervous system going on too. How much experience you have to that previous stress? Here's the thing. The more times you do powerlifting meats, the more time you expose yourself to this style of stress, the less it's going to bother you from time to time to time. If you go out and run a mile and you haven't run for a long, long time, that next day and the day after, you're going to be really sore, you're going to hurt a little bit. It's going to be hard to recover from that sort of thing. But then as you run the mile over and over and over again, it affects you less, right? You adapt to running a mile. Same thing here. You're going to adapt to powerlifting meats. You're going to adapt to heavy squats. You're going to adapt to heavy deadlifts. And so the more we expose ourselves to that sort of stress, the less time it takes to recover from that stress. Now, what if your heavy squat right now is 200 pounds and six months from now, it's 400 pounds? Well, that's a lot higher stress. So it's still going to take a while to recover from that, even if your one rep max now is 200 pounds. So let's say it represents, 200 pounds represents 100% of what you can do and six months from now or a year from now or sometime down the road, 400 pounds is 100%. Well, they're both 100%, but 400 pounds is more stressful than 200 pounds, right? Even though 200 pounds right now is really stressful for you. As a matter of fact, it's the most stressful thing you can do right now. But the day is coming when it won't be the most stressful thing that you can do. So yeah, additional stress imposed. What about your girlfriend broke up with you a couple of nights ago? What about this stress that actually doesn't have to do with the weight on the bar? What about you stay up all night drinking and smoking weed? Don't stay up all night drinking smoking weed, right? You're much college kids. I know what happens sometimes, right? And then training sucks, right? Or you don't sleep or like you have work stress or your parents are getting divorced or like whatever, right? Or you just work a manual labor job that takes it out of you. You do something that you're like, man, obviously really affected what I'm doing in the weight room. Like obviously those additional stressors can also play into how long it takes to recover, right? And then the last thing is just other genetic and like physiological things, which like here's the good news. You're all college kids, so you all recover fast. And you guys are like loaded full of testosterone. So you recover really fast, right? The older you are, the more female you are, i.e. if you're female, as your hormonal milieu changes, as you have lower testosterone, higher estrogen, like older, less like protein synthesis ability, all that sort of stuff, it takes longer to recover, right? You guys are like, do you take a 17 year old, 18 year old senior in high school? He's like a walking bottle of steroids, right? For real, I mean, it really is. Like you realize that when old men get prescribed hormone replacement therapy when they're 50 years old, all they're trying to do is give them the same amount of testosterone they had in their body when they were 17. That's all that's occurring, right? And so you already have that, but older guys don't, unless they were given it from their doctor and that does change the recovery. If you take a 50 year old guy who's really low testosterone, he's gonna have a harder time to recover than the 50 year old guy who's getting a prescription for testosterone from his doctor. So hormonal milieu obviously changes that. Okay, all right, let's talk about stress in general. So here's the problem with stress and recovery and a lot of this stuff. Stress cannot be measured in units. If your girlfriend breaks up with you, your boyfriend breaks up with you, your parents get divorced, how do you measure the amount of units of stress that is on your body? But you can't, right? There's no way to do that. And so it creates a problem and later we'll talk about the metrics for how we make sure that we're actually making progress. But there's no way to just give you a dose. I'm just gonna give you four doses of stress. And I'm gonna give you three doses of stress. Like there's no way to measure that in units. Well, that actually creates a problem because we know over time you have to do more, progressive overload. I have to have more stress, only I can't measure the stress. It's really hard to measure the stress. I don't have units for that, right? Stress results in a decrease in performance. Now what the desired performance, right? And the performance we're really talking about here is strength or force production, but the same thing works for any other performance. If I'm trying to run a marathon or I'm trying to do anything else that requires athletic ability, stress will lead to a decrease in performance. And that occurs even like in the middle of a workout. If I do a heavy set of presses, like a heavy set of five, can I immediately do another heavy set of five like 10 seconds later? Now I gotta rest a little while. How long do I have to rest? Well, it depends on how strong you are and how stressful the heavy set of five was. For some of you, you might build a rest like 60 seconds and still come back and hit another set. The more advanced you get, you're gonna have to rest three minutes and four minutes and five minutes and seven minutes sometimes, right? To be able to make sure that you can come back and hit it. And then can you squat three sets of five really, really heavy on Monday and come in again on Tuesday and squat three sets of five again, really, really heavy or even a little bit heavier? No, probably not. Maybe in the very beginning you can. Because in the very beginning, you're only squatting the empty bar or 65 pounds or 85 pounds or whatever. Nothing wrong with that, right? But as you get stronger, the amount of stress that's put on your body takes longer to recover from because it takes longer to recover from that we have to manage that, right? We also know that stress has to be specific to the thing we're trying to do. If I want to get stronger, guess what I have to do? Not a trick question. Well, if I want to eat better, I gotta eat, yes, right, obviously. But eating doesn't actually make you stronger. And we know this because there's 500 pound fat tubs of lard that aren't strong at all. So eating alone doesn't make you stronger. What actually makes you stronger? Lifting heavy, right? Lifting heavy. There's a specificity principle there called the said principle. Specific adaptation to the imposed demands. I can't get better at squatting if all I'm doing is running. Running makes me better at running. Squatting makes me better at squatting. Duh, right? But it's actually important to understand this because there are gonna be people on the road that say, well, if you just want to get strong, all you gotta do is like crossfit or all you gotta do is like go to yoga and you get stronger. Yoga makes you more mobile. It doesn't make you stronger, right? You guys have already covered this stuff in this class, this sort of thing. Strength makes all the other physical abilities better, right? I'm sure you've heard this before. It's the only one. It's not a two-way street. It's a one-way street. So once I get past that early piece, I have to be very, very specific to this. If I'm gonna get stronger, I should lift heavy. But I have productive and non-productive stress. Are there things I can do in the weight room that a lot of people do, like crossfit, that actually is not a productive stress for getting stronger? Can I go in there and just F around in the gym and not get stronger? Yes, you know how you know? There's like, you guys lift at the university gym here. There's an university gym because the university gym is full of guys who are trying to get bigger and stronger, who are not, right? They're 155 pounds as freshmen and as juniors, they're still 155 pounds and they're no bigger. So there is stress that helps lead to the desired performance and there is stress that doesn't, right? Productive stress. What we wanna do is as we get further along the line are less novice, which is where you guys are getting. Some of you are not novices now. Some of you still are. If you continue to lift, you won't be. Doesn't last forever, can't do three sets of five, add weight to the bar every time till we're all squatting 1,000. Can't squat 1,000, right? I mean, a few people can. They're on drugs and Jesus made them to squat 1,000. So it was a combination of those two things, right? Jesus made very few people who could potentially squat 1,000 and of those people, the ones that squatted 1,000 also have to take drugs, right? I'm looking around the room. No one in this room is ever gonna squat 1,000 pounds, right? So not gonna happen. Even if you took drugs and you shouldn't take drugs, right? So at least not until you're 50 and your doctor prescribes you drugs because then you actually need the hormones, right? Right now you're all walking balls sterile, it's fine, but it's not gonna happen. So at some point that starts to run out. When it runs out, it's actually really important that I understand what stresses are productive. Also, here's the deal. Don't I want like the greatest return on investment for what I'm doing in the gym? Isn't that a big piece of this? I'm really busy in case you didn't figure out for my little story. I'm also married, have two little girls, we homeschool them and we're not like crazy weirdo homeschoolers. Like we drop F-bombs in front of our kids and stuff for cool homeschoolers. But we do really, really hard curriculum with our kids. Classical based model. My kids learn Latin, Thomas Jefferson stuff. It's hard as could be and it's a lot of work, right? I don't have time to go into the gym and train for three hours and a bunch of stuff that's not gonna make me stronger if what I'm trying to do is get stronger. So if curls aren't gonna make me stronger, I'm not doing curls. And if I don't have any interest at the time, some of you skinny guys like I'll just, I'll pick on you again, but okay. Like you don't need to be doing conditioning right now unless you're not on the cross country team or anything, right? Okay, so if you're not a competitive endurance athlete, there's no reason to do conditioning right now. You just need to get strong. And then the day will come when you'll be like, hmm, I need some more conditioning. Dr. Rikulia and I probably could use more conditioning, right? Speakers. But she doesn't need to be doing conditioning. So, right? I wanna go in there and accomplish the most amount of things with the least amount of work, the least amount of dose. It's not about being lazy, it's about being efficient. All right, fatigue is what happens. It's what stress causes, right? It's the result of stress disrupting the homeostasis. So stress comes in, what does it do? Makes you fatigued. You know, because you're fatigued right now because you competed yesterday. Honestly, does anybody wanna go lift right now? Those of you that competed probably don't wanna go train. Like in your head, you might've been like, it was so fun, I'm excited to get back in the gym and train, that's different. But how many of you feel like your bodies are ready to go train right now, right? And if you do, it's because you're actually still very much a novice. Think about what I'm gonna say, tomorrow you're going to feel worse. Today's not the worst, tomorrow is the worst. And Wednesday morning actually might be even worse than that, maybe. That's why you actually get back in the gym and Wednesday and move around a little bit, okay? Because we have to have, we have to learn how to manage fatigue, right? Fatigue is what occurs with, that's what stress makes happen, right? And I have to manage those things. And sometimes fatigue is like subjective. And here's the deal, if everything we do is in a laboratory, is like in a vacuum, subjectivity doesn't matter at all, right? But it's not, right? If you're depressed about something, like it's okay, right? Like everybody goes through crap like that sometimes, whether you're wired to be like actually struggle with depression or whether you just deal with like acute, like I got a bad score on a test or my girlfriend broke up with me or I got fired from my job or whatever, right? Like how much does that impact your perceived fatigue? You guys have been doing this for a semester now, right? Probably every person in this room, at one point went into the gym and train and was like, I really don't wanna train. I feel like crap, I'm having a bad day for whatever reason, right? Like stuff that has nothing to do with the gym, stuff that has to do with up here, right? Just perceive like I didn't sleep well last night, like this is going bad in a relationship, my parents, whatever, like it's kinda stuff, like somebody's breathing down my neck, whatever, right? And so you have this additional perceived fatigue and it's easy to just say like, hey, just forget about it. But remember that like I built a career on being able to keep people getting stronger and keep them happy. I can't take somebody that's walked in and I'll give you an example that I think I can do this and be pretty anonymous even though I'm on video. So I have a client who is starting the process of going through a divorce. How well is her training going to be over the next couple of months? Man, is it because there's any physical problem with her at all? None, right? But I've gotta be able to be empathetic enough to her needs to let her still train, she still has to train. But I can't drive her ass into the ground with her training because she's already been driven into the ground at home, right? So we have to think about that kind of stuff. And you have to be honest with yourself about what's going on. Now here's the deal. You can also use that as an excuse to not work hard. That's not okay. You with me? You don't get to say like, I only got five hours of sleep last night, so seven or eight hours like I normally get. And so I don't really wanna train hard today. Nope, you're college kids. You can not sleep at all, come in and train and you're probably gonna be okay. There is a balance there, right? That's not the same thing as getting divorced after being married for 22 years. Not the same thing. You with me? Right, okay. All right, move to the recovery piece of this. If stress results in decreased performance and that decrease in performance is called fatigue, recovery results in an increase or improved performance has the exact same problem as stress. We cannot define recovery in units. I would love to. I would love to say, you know what? If you can just get an extra couple of units of recovery, you can come back and I know you can go up five pounds on your squat on Friday. Only there's no way to do that, right? Recovery is this crazy weird thing. There's all sorts of stuff we don't understand about recovery. It still has to be managed. And there are things that we know will help recovery. The number one thing you can do is you can get enough sleep that actually makes you recover. We know it. Like it's as clear in the data as we can possibly get. You can also eat more protein and eat more calories if you're not getting enough calories. By the way, if you're gaining weight, if you're like consistently gaining a little bit of weight at a time, you're getting enough calories. You don't need to eat even more calories because then you're just gonna start getting fat, right? If you're losing weight while trying to get stronger, you're not getting enough calories. You cannot, and you guys said like physiology stuff, physiology class stuff. Okay, that's kind of what you're doing here anyway, right? You cannot gain muscle and lose fat at the same time. It is not physiologically possible. It's really not even physiologically possible even if you're on drugs. If you're gaining weight, if the scale is going up, you are gaining muscle and fat. You have to be. And if you are losing weight, you are losing muscle and fat. You have to be. Now we can skew percentages a little bit so that when you gain weight, you gain a little more muscle and a little less fat, but you will gain both. And when you lose weight, you are going to lose a little bit of muscle and some fat. And we can try to skew that. So you lose mostly fat and some muscle, right? There are things we can do to make sure that that occurs. If you're not hitting your weights, your prescribed weights in the gym, the first thing you look at is, am I sleeping enough or resting enough? And that rest might not be sleeping. Am I resting enough between sets? Am I resting enough between workouts? Those sorts of things. Am I sleeping enough? And then am I eating enough? And not just eating enough, but enough calories, but enough protein, right? Cause everything that we're made out of in our body is made from protein. Especially just protein and water. It's what we are, right? All of the tissue, not just the muscle, but like the bone and the skin and everything, your organs, somebody from protein. So you have to have enough protein. This isn't a nutrition talk, so as far as I'm gonna go. Now there are other pieces, obviously hormonal manipulation, which again, you're not gonna do, but it's a class, it's important to understand that that's why people take steroids because it actually changes and makes it so that they can recover better. There are other things you can do that make you feel better. Stay with me. That haven't been proven by science, probably won't be proven by science, but we don't have to just throw them out, flush them down the toilet, right? For example, there is an app I use all the time. It's called Headspace. You guys already use Headspace, you know what Headspace is. It's basically like five to 10 minute sessions of really relaxed. It's almost like meditation. I'm just like a word meditation, kind of weird man a little bit. So I'm just like, I'm not really into like home is none of that sort of stuff. I just put on my noise canceling headphones, which are awesome, and I turn that thing on and I just listen to this guy who's got an English accent is really calming and he just walks you through breathing patterns and techniques and when I'm all wired and I'm all a little bit anxious and I can't relax and I can't calm down, I throw that thing on and I lay in bed, turn on the noise canceling headphones and I chill out for 10 minutes. I feel way better. Now, is there any way to get data that shows that actually improves my recovery for my squat workout tomorrow? No, probably not, but it made me feel better so it's okay, there's nothing wrong with it. Massages like this, we have really no data that shows the massage actually helps with recovery. Ice baths, hot tub, saunas, all that kind of stuff. Make you feel good, help you relax, do it, it's fine. Just don't neglect the big stuff which is sleeping and food. Now we're gonna start transitioning too. So all the things we just talked about are the same whether you are a novice or whether you are post novice, you're not a novice anymore. Here's what we know. Stress, specific stress, productive stress must increase over time, period. You don't get to do less work and keep getting stronger, doesn't work. Some of you ladies that squatted 200 pounds at one point squatted 75 pounds and it made you stronger. 75 pounds doesn't make you stronger anymore, doesn't, right? Same thing for you guys. Like when you think about what you squatted on your first two, three workouts in the gym, you couldn't do that same thing and get stronger anymore. The stress had to go up and for the novice linear progression, it's super clean. Volume stays the same, right? You haven't changed your volume at all. What do you do? Three sets of five and on deadlift one set of five, right? How often do you train three times a week? What changes? Weight on the bar from time to time. That's the only thing that changes, right? The weight on the bar goes up and the frequency stays the same and the volume stays the same and the weight keeps going up and in the beginning, the weight might even go up like 10 pounds and then it's gonna go up five pounds for workout and then it's gonna start going up a little bit less two and a half pounds and then the day is going to come when it can't go up anymore. And so what are we gonna do? Well, there's only a couple of ways we can increase stress. We can only increase stress by increasing intensity. Now, we gotta be real clear on some words for a few minutes and then when I kinda get through this, well, I think we're gonna take a short little break. So stay with me real quick. When I say intensity, I just mean how heavy? That's all I mean. Not percentage one rep max. I just mean, is it getting heavier? That's all I mean. There's lots of words that it could be like, how intense does it feel? It could be relative intensity, which is like percentage of your one rep max. Those are all things we have to consider and we're gonna talk about them here in a few minutes. But all I'm saying is you can increase stress by increasing how heavy it is. Weight on the bar, magnitude. That's one way. Or you can increase volume. That's way number two. That's basically it. Now, there are lots of ways you can increase volume. You can do more reps per set. Instead of doing five, you can do sixes. Three sets of six is more stressful than three sets of five, right? Duh, right, duh. You can do more sets instead of three sets of five. You could do five sets of four. That's 20 work reps instead of 15. So you increase sets. You can increase frequency. You can do it more often per week so that you get over the course of a week or so, you get more volume in, right? So a lot of people will tell you that one way to increase stress is to increase frequency. That you can increase stress via intensity, volume, or frequency. But I'm gonna make the argument that an increase in frequency is really just a product of volume. When you do something more often, so for example, you're benching and pressing every other session, right? So how many times are you doing some version of a press? Three times. You're press, bench, press or bench, press, bench. So you're doing three times a week, you're doing some form of pressing, either overhead pressing or bench pressing, right? Right? How many times are you pressing a week? Thank you, four times a week. So that's one more time than the rest of you are pressing. So her frequency is higher and if you look at her total work sets and reps, she's going to do more volume than you are right now because she's going four times a week. She's pressing twice a week and she's benching twice a week. So she's got four different presses in, so frequency goes up, so the volume also goes up. You with me? Now, are there any other ways we can increase stress that's not intensity or volume or any other ways you've heard of people saying, well, here's a way you could increase stress. And I'm talking about specific to strength training. So some people will argue that you can change the exercise selection. You can choose different exercises to increase the stress. If I do something like, anybody ever done a straight leg deadlift? You guys know what a straight leg deadlift is? Yes, you do, based on logic alone of the name. What the hell is a straight leg deadlift? It would be a deadlift, but with straight legs. Have you done IQ test on these guys? I'm gonna have to change the lecture. Is this, are we averaging over or under a hundred? Right in that wheelhouse? Okay. Okay, so you've deadlifted on a deadlift, right? You are bending a little bit at the knees and the hips, right? So the knees are bent and the knees open and then the hips open. And I go right back down, the bar drags up and down my legs. If I do a deadlift and I change the only thing I change is I keep my knees straight and I do a straight leg deadlift. What do you think will happen two days later? Any guesses? Yes. Your calves actually would be more sore. Something else is also gonna be more sore. Your back. No, well, maybe. Hamstrings. Hamstrings, okay. Here's why. Your hamstrings, you guys know what your hamstrings do. They actually make certain joints move. They do something to your hips. You know what your hamstrings do to your hips? They make your hips go from flexion to extension, right? They make your hips go, so they make your hips go. Very simple. Your hamstrings make your hips go from bent to straight, right? We can use layman's terms here. It's fine. But they also do something else. So everybody sit up tall in your chair, just good posture. You don't have to do anything really weird, right? Because you're in hard chair, there's no pads on here. Okay, so where you feel your butt bones, not your tailbone, but those bones on both sides of your butt, where do you feel that pushing into the chair? That's where your hamstrings originate. Some people call those your sit bones. It's actually your ischial tuberosity is what that's called, your ischial tuberosity. It's this little bony, bumpy thing that sticks out of your pelvis on the backside by your butt. And your hamstrings starts there and it crosses the hip. That's why it makes your hips move. What makes the joint move? But it doesn't insert on the femur. It inserts down on your shin. And you know this too, you're sitting there, right? Feel underneath, feel that cord underneath your knee. The cord of tendon right there is actually two of them. You can feel them both. That's your semi-memorosis and your semi-tendinosis. And on the other side, you can feel the other cord. That's your biceps femoris. Now, because it crosses the knee, it has to move the knee. And it makes the knee do the opposite of the hip. It makes the knee go from straight to bent. So my hamstrings make my hips go from bent to straight and makes my knees go from straight to bent. Okay, stay with me. So in the bottom of a deadlift, the way we teach it, if both the knees are bent a little bit and the hips are bent a little bit, how much did the hips get stretched? Not that much. Because they stretched at the, they stretched at the origin, but they shortened at the knee. So if they got longer on one end and shortened on the other end, they didn't get stretched that much, right? Now, when I bend all the way over into a deadlift, my hips close more, which means it stretches them even more, but my knees don't close that much. So they get stretched more at the hips at your butt, basically, and they shorten, but not tremendously at the knee, but some. So that's why sometimes when you deadlift, your hamstrings will get a little bit sore. If you do a straight leg deadlift and the knees are totally straight and the hips are bent, my hamstrings are stretched through their maximum length. They're stretched to the maximum length. What's that gonna mean for your hamstrings two days later? They'll be really sore. They'll be really sore, right? But here's the question, did you get stronger? So I haven't asked any trick questions yet, but that one might be the first one that potentially, it's not really a trick question. It's a novel exercise. It's new, novel, it's new, but does a straight leg deadlift make your deadlift go up? Well, I don't know, but I would argue that I don't think so. What I know is that a straight leg deadlift, which is often performed while standing on a little bit of a platform, like an aerobic step. You guys know what those are, right? The little, like a couple mats or whatever. If I stand on a couple of mats, what does that do to the range of motion to a straight leg deadlift? Yo, give me some feedback here. It increases the range of motion. So if it increases the range of motion, I did more work, but can I do more weight or less weight on a longer range of motion straight leg deadlift than I can on my normal deadlift? What's your deadlift? You said 335, 365? 365. Do you think you could straight leg deadlift 365 while standing on an aerobic step? No, but it would make you far more sore than regular deadlift does. So the first question, is soreness an indicator of a good workout? No, it's not. They've lied to you. It is not an indicator of a good workout. It's an indicator that two things have occurred. Number one, you did something new you've never done before, not for a long time. And number two, there was an enormous amount of eccentric loading on a muscle. E-centric. E-centric on a squat is the part where I'm lowering down. What happens when the bar lowers, at least in most of those lifts, is that a muscle gets lengthened under load. When a muscle gets lengthened under load, here's what happens. Again, I'm gonna give you the real layman's terms, right? So here's my bicep. So let's say the bicep is this long, like you can kinda tell, right? And my bicep crosses my elbow and attaches at the forearm, right? And so if it contracts or shortens, it gets shorter. My wrist moves a long direction, right? So it gets shorter. Okay, here's what happens. If I lower this back down, boom, it got longer. But it got longer, but there was no load. A load would be if I was holding onto a big dumbbell. Now if I'm holding onto a 50-ton dumbbell and I lengthen it under load, something changes. Here's what changes. When I shorten this muscle, there are things in the muscle fiber called sarcomeres. And inside those sarcomeres, there are sliding filaments and the sliding filaments are called, do you remember? Actant amyosin. Actant amyosin, that's right, exactly right. It's sliding filaments, excellent, good job. And what those sliding filaments do is this, and this is like super rudimentary, it's not exactly right when we post it, I'm gonna have exercise scientists be like, it's not exactly right, but it's, I wanna get the point, okay? Here's what happens. Sliding filaments actant amyosin, they slide across each other and they grab and they get shorter. And when the muscle lengthens not under load, not under load, they're able to just release and stretch. But when they lengthen under load, I've got this weight in my hand and I have to lower it controlled, because if not, it's gonna tear my, it's gonna hypersend my elbow. What will happen is those actant amyosin that have grabbed onto each other at the cross bridges start breaking apart and they start going, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping coming apart. And what that does is that actually causes little tears, little trauma, like, there's micro trauma that occurs to the muscle fibers and when that trauma occurs, it causes inflammation and when that inflammation happens, you get sore. But you didn't necessarily get stronger, which is why I don't think a straight like deadlift tends to make people stronger. It's not that it can't ever, but here's what happens when you choose exercises outside of those big four or big five that we teach you. The squat, the deadlift, the bench press and the press is the primary four and then you get through the power clean in here and then the power clean, right? Now, as you start to expand the number of exercises that you choose, one of two things occur. One, you elongate the range of motion, like with a straight leg deadlift or a deficit deadlift or something that just elongates the range of motion, right? Which increases the amount of work you do, which increases the time under tension, which means basically when you choose an exercise like that, it's a product of volume. Do I have that up there? I'm just going off of my own, right? Or two, choose an exercise that shortens the range of motion, like a rack deadlift. You guys know what a rack pull is, a rack deadlift, where you deadlift with the bar on the pins and so you don't have to go as far? When you get good at that, the first couple of times you do it, it's really hard, but when you get good at it, you actually do more weight than you can deadlift. When you do a press lockout, same thing, like we'll press, we'll put the safety pins up in here instead of pressing from down here, we'll put the bar on the safety pins and we'll press overhead and stretch and it's a shorter range of motion and I can press lockout more than I can press, which means less work was done at a higher weight, which means it's a product of intensity. So it still comes back to the only two ways to increase stress is intensity increase, how heavy, how heavy, or how much volume, that's it. Which means when I start moving from novice linear progressions where the volume stays the same, three sets of five and the frequency stays the same three times a week and the only thing that changes is intensity goes up. Number one, and that stops working, I have to start developing a right relationship between intensity and volume to drive progress long-term and it gets a little more complicated, you with me? Because at the beginning I don't have to worry about volume, it's three sets of five and I don't have to worry about frequency, it's Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or whenever you guys do it. All that changes is the weight on the bar until it stops working and then what do I do? Okay, take a break and we'll talk about what we do. We'll take five to 10 minutes, whatever, and we'll talk about where we're going from here.