 Getting stronger. This is something that almost all of us should go after why it's an incredible metric. It tells you a lot about what you're doing. Mostly that you're doing a lot of things right. Here's the challenge though. Strength plateaus are inevitable. So in today's episode we're going to talk about how to break through those plateaus or even better avoid them altogether. Alright let's talk about strength boys. My favorite topics. I know. Well I also liked the chatting about breaking through plateaus because even I mean this is this gets this is one of the things about exercise actually gets harder I feel like because as you continue to try different things and you've been lifting for a very long time and you start to kind of peek out on a lot of stuff. Strength is one of the things that you tend to peek out on sooner than later when comparison like maybe like aesthetics like I feel like I can continue to sculpt and build a physique for a really long time. You relatively quick you get to your max strength. I think it's hard to keep seeing gains. Well it's in the beginning almost anything you do will make you stronger so long as you don't hurt yourself. Right. They come on fast and furious early. Yeah. Then it's like so incremental after that. Yeah. And it's just you know it's inevitable that at some point you're going to plateau or your gains will slow down right. We can't progress forever with strength. Right. But here's I think we should back up and talk a little bit about why it's such a great thing to chase. Whether you want to lose weight or of course gain weight or of course build muscle or improve your health. Strength is amazing for a lot of different reasons. One it's objective. You're the stronger you're not. So aesthetics is typically what people chase on the exercise. Right. Changing the way they look. The problem with that is it's not objective. It's subjective and you know lighting and water retention and how you feel about yourself and your mood and all that stuff. You know and what you've looked at all day. I mean that can influence whether or not you feel like you look good or not. Whereas if I add five pounds to the bar I added five pounds to the bar. There's no arguing what just happened. It's also if you're getting stronger that doesn't guarantee that everything you're doing is right. You're doing is right. But it means that most of the big things are not done wrong. Like you can't get stronger and have a you know eat too little. You can't really get stronger and have an unhealthy lifestyle for too long or have a crappy workout like well that's just is too long. Right. Because you could kind of get away with you know some of these other kind of behaviors you know for a while and like kind of push through and be like really like mentally disciplined through it. But it's a great indication of if everything is stacked together nicely and is working synergistically. That's what that's where you see the real strength gains kind of explode is when you know you're getting adequate sleep and recovery and you're you know eating the foods that are benefiting and fueling your muscle building and all of these things are accounted for and your programming is is great and you're hitting on all cylinders. That's where strength is really one of those best indicators. So that is okay. So that's how I use it because you you mentioned most people you know are chasing aesthetics which was what my pursuit was most of my career lifting. We ever trained right. I cared more about how I looked and I really cared about weight on the bar. But where I did care about weight on the bar or where I did care about getting strong was as a reflection of my programming. That was a because here's the thing I know I can I can follow a shitty program right now and get ripped. Yeah with your diet. Yeah I could if I diet correctly and just lift weights even if it's poorly programmed I'll get ripped. I can do that. But if I want the maximum results from my programming and the way my physique will look I want to have great programming paired with my great diet. Well how do I know that if I can get ripped from even a shitty program. Well the way I know is if I am seeing strength gains in progress on weight on the bar in there then that's my indicator like okay I'm maxing that out over there I'm getting with the most I can get out of that so that I know I'm doing the diet thing right because I'm leaning out and I'm seeing the progress in my physique. But then I'm also seeing results in the strength gains in the gym so that I know that my program is on point so I'm maximizing the benefits. Yeah I mean as a trainer you know someone could lose weight as a client could lose weight but is it fat is it muscle is it water. What does that mean that you're eating too little nutrients or is everything right. There's a lot of guess there's a lot of guessing in that right or you have to dig deeper to really figure out what's going on. When my client would get stronger they got stronger. It was always great news undeniable. It was always my favorite thing and then here's the other part. If you get stronger and you consistently get stronger you're going to build muscle. I mean there's no doubt about it like you can get stronger without building more muscle by improving your central nervous system you know function right the way your muscles fire by having better technique so you can maximize leverage. You could you could do those things and that often happens as part of this this you know the strength gains but if you do it over and over and over again eventually you just build muscle and then for people who want to lose body fat building muscles wonderful because you're going to burn more calories on your own it makes fat loss a lot easier especially maintaining fat loss it makes a lot easier so strength is just regardless of what your goal is like this is at the top of the list of things you should pay attention to for sure you know for the reasons that we just said. Now one thing to to express with this is because some people when they look at strength and I get this for specific types of athletes like if you're a power lifter Olympic lifter then I get that but for everybody else who wants to improve their physique you know who wants to become stronger build muscle burn body fat stuff getting stronger is getting stronger so what do I mean by that well sometimes people will plateau in a lift but they'll get stronger in like four other lifts and they'll focus on the plateau with a single lift and I understand that that's that there's nothing necessarily wrong with that especially if you're an athlete and you have to get that particular lift up you're a power lifter well your squat dead lift and bench press matter most but for the average person don't pay too much attention to the one lift or two lifts that you're not necessarily going up on when you're going up on all these other lifts because it just means you're moving forward and eventually usually not always but usually what that means is you're going to go up in that one lift that you plateaued in so I want to paint that picture for people because we tend to get stuck on just specific lifts and they tend to be the big three or four if you add overhead press there's value in that we've talked about that many times but it's not the be all end all because you can get stronger in lots of other areas without necessarily getting stronger in those lifts you're still progressing you're still moving forward I feel like there's a balance there that the the body's just like a lot smarter than we give it credit for in terms of like allowing you to generate more force and specific movements that you know maybe there's you know some holes in terms of like stability or in terms of like support or secondary muscle groups that you don't need to contribute a bit more and it's you know we just want to we're just so mentally focused on this one lift why can I get better at this lift when in fact you do those other accessory type lifts and things where it's I'm still getting strength I'm still moving the the needle forward eventually once I am able to get stronger and more supported in my entire body's framework now I come back and it locks it for me check this out today's giveaway maps strong this is a strong man inspired workout program you can get it for free if you do this leave a comment below this video in the first 24 hours that we drop it subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications if you win we'll let you know in the comment section also because today's episode is all about breaking through strength plateaus I'm going to put map strong on sale 50% off map strong right now if you're interested go to maps strong calm and then use the coupon code get strong for the 50% off discount all right back to the show there's definitely stuff that we know that we would address in the programming to break through these strength plateaus but there's also outside things other than that and let's start in that direction like what do you think right out the bat outside of programming like how we would change that is like a number one thing that you would go to to help someone break through yeah besides programming diet is got to be up there right yeah and it's typically most overlooked especially in the athletic community oh yeah exactly right um it's typically not eating not eating enough and not eating enough protein is typically what or even sometimes not enough fat right essential fats but usually it's protein and calories and I would see this more often I think with female clients where they do have good programming they're not getting stronger we look at their diet it's like you're eating 1300 calories like you're not fueling your body enough your central nervous system is not going to fire with more power because you're not you don't have enough energy there and your muscles aren't going to build because we don't have the building blocks so you've plateaued because of your diet not necessarily because your program and again it's usually not enough protein not enough calories it can be carbs too though for an example that is what happened in the crossfit community when it was heavy endopaleo and you have a lot of these athletes that are training at such high work volume that they needed that they their body just was not operating and they were not responding because they were not fueling their body enough with enough carbohydrates so there are examples of where carbs can be the missing but I would say I would agree with you that most of the time it was clients either one like we just had somebody to call her recently who was a bodybuilder great physique and stuff like that and uh I mean when we assessed his fat I remember you did the math on it like oh my god his I mean he was he's in the forum now and he is he even with him pumping his grams of fat he still was under by 40 grams a day of what he where he should be and so it's like man you need to get your your healthy fats up but I would say most common for me was was enough protein yeah just because that that's so essential to the body especially when it comes to recovery and building muscle that if you're not consistently giving it enough of that while you are pushing trying to get strength gains many times that's the limiting factor is because you're just not giving the body the building blocks to keep adding and building muscle on your body and the good news is with protein is we have a lot of studies on it we have so many studies that it's pretty well established what that number is in terms of grams of protein for maximum strength and muscle gain and it's right around a gram of protein per pound of body weight maybe a little less in the studies but I typically we tend to tell people to aim for a gram because it's you tend to fall just a bit short of that for somebody who's really overweight eat a gram of protein per pound of target body weight only because it's typically based around lean body mass so if you're a 200 pound guy you're relatively lean aim for 200 grams right you're 130 pound female normal body weight for you 130 grams let's say you're a 200 pound female but your target body weights 140 pounds we'll aim for about 140 grams of protein 200 might be too much but that's basically it right hit those protein targets it's hard to do because it does produce a lot of satiety by the way whole foods make it come from whole foods that's your best bet if you miss protein patterns are fine but ideally you want it to come from whole foods and then enough calories you can eat enough protein and not have enough calories in which case the protein is not doing what it's supposed to because your body is using it for energy or for other purposes and then essential nutrients fats and proteins are essential but then there's also nutrients that you could be nutrient deficient in that will limit your strength gains if you're nutrient deficient let's say vitamin d or magnesium or zinc or whatever things that are essential not having enough of that can also limit your gains and then you mentioned carbs um look i tell you you don't need carbs or not essential but i have yet to find well i mean i found some people but for the most part people don't get maximum strength gains on a super low or no carbohydrate there's always exceptions and i would say it's more than exceptions it's probably like a 20 so that's a significant number but it's not a lot so if you're like with the super low carb diet and you're like well i'm getting protein i'm getting essential fats my diet's good you know try bumping your carbs see what happens yeah for me it was always that so i i fall in this category uh you know i just would when i come into show time and i'd start carb cycling and it'd be in a calorie deficit it was just guaranteed i'm going to be losing strength it just happens and so and i've tried we've done keto and i've done some low carb dieting and stuff and i just don't progress the same way i need that fuel to fuel those workouts there's another piece to the diet that we didn't mention um that i've watched first hand you experience especially uh with us in the last eight years and that's just your gut health being oh yeah absolutely you know you can if you are constantly eating foods that do not agree with you whether you think they do or don't and you're inflamed and your body is constantly trying to fight that uh it's really tough to be building strength and seeing gains in the gym while it's being like a lot of your body's focus and energy is being prioritized to healing the gut oh listen it's it's 12 pound difference lean body mass for me almost 12 pound difference in lean body mass oh my gut is good versus when it's not you don't absorb isn't enough nutrients you don't have the energy your hormones are thrown off inflammation it's a constant stress signal to your body so exercise being another stress means you can't tolerate as much exercise it's just your your gut health is is absolute paramount so you could be doing all the right stuff technically with proteins carbs fats and calories right your digestion's off like you're done yeah it's everything's going to go lower in performance and that leads like directly into your sleep yeah which is the next one as well because i mean in terms of gut health and all that and like you know your body kind of fighting internally there that's something that i had to really address because if i'm not first of all yes maybe i am synthesizing and and maybe utilizing nutrients but then uh towards the end of the night how how i would get this reaction from those types of foods and would trickle into to my REM sleep now i'm not fully recovered and then this is like that vicious kind of snowball effect where i'm taking that in with me into the next day's workout and then you know on top of that then it just compiles over and over nothing will hammer your life a bit more than just chronically being having terrible sleep it just it'll it'll take away your cognitive performance it'll give you it'll make you feel depressed so it affects your moods for men it'll lower testosterone um it'll raise cortisol both men and women growth hormone is totally thrown off and your strength is going to be gone you're just not going to be strong now initially one night of bad sleep you might come back and feel fine because you get all those stress hormones which give you some energy but yeah over time it's just you are not going to build more muscle look here's the deal like we we evolved for the most part in an environment is very different than when we live now and for the most part if you were getting bad sleep it meant you didn't you were not safe and it meant you didn't have enough food so your body is getting this stress signal and that what happens when your body is under lots of stress it doesn't want to have more muscle which costs more calories which is more energy it's like why are we why are we hold on to those yeah let's let's let's let's make our body more efficient because right now stress is high and we don't we don't want to have to burn too many calories so no we're not going to build more muscle and so you're going to be playing this game with your body if your sleep is bad where you tell your body to build muscle and get stronger and your body's fighting you and i'm going to tell you something right now you'll lose that battle you're not going to win you can fight all you want and eventually you're not only will you not get stronger you'll get hurt and then other issues will creep up so you know i read something on our friend dr cabral's page today that i was unaware of i didn't know regarding heart rate variability heart rate hrv is one of the tools that most professional athletes use to to gauge their readiness to perform in the gym and they they will change that based off of how low that hrv score is and he said that the number one thing to improve your hrv score is actually not eating three to four hours before you go to sleep i did not know that yeah you know why that is why you're um so we all know about light on the circadian rhythm so if you're if you're around bright light your brain your body perceives it as the sun being up so it doesn't prefer prepare itself for sleep so this is why studies will show being in in some dark uh wearing blue light blocking glasses for example or dimming the lights a couple hours before bed you you sleep better produce more melatonin more growth hormone better REM sleep because your body your brain needs time to prepare for sleep then when you go to lay down and go to sleep now it's ready versus bright lights turn them off hit the sack you it's going to give you it's going to take an hour for your brain to even perceive what's going on and then whatever right so that circadian rhythm from light you're you also have a circadian rhythm from your gut so when you give yourself food your gut perceives it as being daytime and it's going to affect your digestion and that's probably negatively and affect your sleep historically we were never eating in the dark no right no no no you're not going to have you're not going to be eating food and cooking food in like we're super vulnerable in the dark this is a time when predators are out what we did is we did everything when the sun was up as it went down we went into safety let's all go in our cave and protect ourselves or whatever and get some sleep so you have a circadian rhythm with your gut just like you do with your eyes and when you feed yourself at night right before bed it takes you're going to produce less melatonin worse REM sleep you know rest less restful sleep less recuperative sleep and then not to mention this part of digestion there's definitely things going on in your gut that digest food but part of it is local motion helps with it so walking there's muscles that pass through the gut that are around the gut things like the psoas muscle that helps food move plus you're standing upright right there's a reason why your anus is at the bottom and your mouth is at the top because gravity makes food go down when now you ate and you're laying horizontally uh that definitely affects digestion plus your body shuts down or most healthy bodies will shut down digestion when you're sleeping because it doesn't make sense for you to wake up five times a night to use the bathroom it actually releases hormones to uh to make you urinate less and it slows down digestion to so you don't have to go to the bathroom so eating right before bed um is a number one way easy way imagine imagine the assault the average person is probably putting on themselves they have no idea like that how many people lie on the couch or lay in bed streaming netflix or binge watching netflix why they eat crap and it's not even healthy food even if it was healthy you know it's just eating eating laying in bed and watching and watch streaming you know and binge watching television at night it's like and then you're wondering why your your gains are stalled and it's like dude these are one of the one of the easiest ways that you can break through i used to fix all that shit i used to laugh at so i i had a wellness studio and in my wellness studio i did this for like 13 years and in there i had this woman that was i mean i guess you could classify she was a physical therapist by trade but she did like functional medicine training she had all these she took all these course anyway i would listen to her talk to her clients and in the early days i'd hear her talk about sleep and i you know i wouldn't do it i wouldn't let her see her whatever because she worked there and i respected her but i'd roll my eyes like that's not like really she's not losing she's not holding on to 10 pounds because her sleep is poor and she would she would tell these people that oh listen we got to fix your sleep that's why you're you're not able to lose that that less 10 pounds or you know the reason why you feel crappy while we're working out is because you're you're you're not optimizing your sleep and i'd sit and i'd be like oh my god whatever her clients lack or whatever but then over the years i would see what happened with these people and they come in and at first i was i was in disbelief they'd walk in like oh my god you're so right i fixed my sleep i can't believe i'm losing weight and i'm like it's because that's not why it's because you're you're working out it's because you're eating better or whatever and i went up earlier but eventually it started i started hearing this enough and i started seeing her client i care about people i want to help people and i never forget the first time i did this on a client i had a client same thing struggling whatever uh this this executive woman also a mom and i said let's do this let's start with this i want you to create a sleep routine keep a journal we're going to keep track of this and let's see if we can optimize your sleep and sure as fuck she lost weight and her gains we're going crazy in the gym and it was just from that and then i was sold i was like well it's the it's the compounding effects that also happened from it too that like yes so many downstream effects so that's the part that's what i just said downstream not compounded the downstream effects that happened from it's very similar to what we just talked about recently when we talked about like adding calories into a diet or adding protein to a client who's trying to lose weight and the scientific community like oh that's bullshit you know what i'm saying it's the but it's not just because they do that it's because they eat food that satiates them it's that they hit their protein intake they end up eating less calories the same thing goes for sleep like you prioritize sleep and then oh guess what you have energy in the day so then you're more productive you move more you take more steps hormones balance out your hormones balance out so you don't have these weird cortisol spikes you're not you're not craving weird foods you make better food choices you have more energy so then you end up going to the gym you have a better workout you have more energy in your workout it's like all those things are all affected from that and so yeah there's not this direct like oh having a bad night of sleep doesn't put five pounds of body fat on you like there's not this direct correlation to that what it is is that it's the downstream effects that happen by either getting good sleep or bad sleep and as coaches and trainers i can start to try and focus on all the nuance differences of training and diets or that or i can find big rocks like this that i could tell my clients like hey we're not going to really focus too much yet on diet or your training what all i want you to do is prioritize sleep what i know from experiences oh when they do that they're more likely to do this they're more likely to do less likely to do that and like this and all that is what you're gonna see all that from all those different ways of capturing like stress like so the hrv angle right with you you see the readiness because you know your heart rates can have these irregular patterns when you're under more state of stress and so it's like you know if you're if you're not getting that adequate sweet sleep recovery you're going back into your workouts you actually crank that intensity up a little bit which is going to push you a little further in gaining more strength as a result because now you can actually recover and you're not just adding more stress in your bucket here here's how important sleep is because we talk about like three main pillars it's more complicated this but there's three main pillars right activity diet and sleep those are the three main pillars which one will kill you faster if you avoid it completely yeah food activity or sleep sleep if you got zero sleep within i don't know what that's something like within a week or two weeks or maybe 30 days of the most you're dead you can go longer without food and you can go much longer without activity that's just how important sleep is for your health so fixing your sleep means this going to bed at the same time every night waking up at the same time every morning that we don't have jet lag on mondays one hour before bed prepare for bed by turning the lights down creating a sleep routine don't eat anything two hours before bed making sure your room is super dark or wearing an eye mask keeping it cool and that's it those things right there are covering most things and most people will get dramatic improvements to sleep if they do that on a regular basis on a consistent basis okay so we cover the the big rocks that are outside of programming not like programming now talk about programming things to help break through so number three most important when i see somebody who's been working out for a long time and they're they're hitting a strength plateau is their body is not able to stabilize the heavy weight that they're moving okay i remember the first time i ran into this personally as a kid and i say as a kid i was a teenager and this is a silly example but it was the most i'd ever done in terms of addressing a weakness i was stuck i don't remember what the number was but i was stuck on my bench press wasn't going up wasn't moving and when i was a kid bench press was the exercise nobody cared about anything else it was all about how much you could bench and i remember seeing an ad i've talked about this so many times your rotator yeah dude there was an ad for this thing called a shoulder horn and it works your rotator cuff and the way i got sold was there were like quotes in there my bench press went up 20 pounds and i was like oh let me try at least it wasn't that expensive i work so i'm like i'll buy this i tried it i worked on my external rotators right and my bench literally went up 10 pounds almost instantly i think i was plateaued forever yeah and that's when i realized like oh these stabilizing muscles just weren't strong my body didn't feel safe to let me lift more because these stabilizers wouldn't allow me to and by strengthening the stabilizers i could lift more so stabilization is often listen you're only as strong as your how stable you are as stable as you are and stabilization exercises and movements have such tremendous carryover one of my favorite now mobility work helps do this but one of my favorite ways to improve stabilization and improve central nervous system output and power heavy carries heavy carries are phenomenal for this the first time i ever did this uh in on my own was after i met you guys and justin would talk about overhead carries all time he has justin has this incredible overhead press very strong and he's like oh you know one of the best things you could do is yeah big game changer yeah hold the kettlebell above your head pack your shoulder right stand nice tall and walk and try and stabilize i'm like well if it works for justin i'm gonna give this shot and i saw my strengthings go up uh within a couple weeks i was like holy cow that was the the and i've been working out for decades right this is amazing the second time i saw this was when i did our program map strong map strong uh farmer walks is one of the exercise that's in there and you do that on a regular bait and it pretty consistent and i got to like almost uh i was at almost a four hundred and seventy five pound farmer walk where i just and i just felt like everything was just tight and strong i could feel all my weak links having to stabilize my deadlift went up my overhead press went up my curls like all these exercises that i didn't even think were connected went out because i practiced these heavy carriers just keeping your spine stacked like keeping your your joints where they need to be in the most optimal position like in your muscles need to be a part of that process so if you're not using your rotators at all like and you're not strengthening them as you're just strengthening your major muscle groups you know you're doing yourself a disservice because the thing is like your body again it's going to limit you has these natural limiters these governors we call the overbearing mother yeah and you need to almost you need to to quiet and calm the overbearing mother and to to be able to do that you have to focus intensively on some of those little things where you know this is this is going to help kind of educate and direct um you know those muscles to kick in at the at the right opportune time and so walking and doing carries this is a whole another dimension to lifting weights because now yes you you pick the weights up but now you get a move with it you're adding locomotion yeah which adds all these variables from lateral forces rotational forces and if you don't have that down yet uh it's going to get exposed and and those are those little nuanced things when you're doing an actual compound lift that are going to come about that that sets you it it totally causes a leak in your overall performance that's that's the key right there to me is like when you it's very obvious to me when you unpack that like when you think of like you always do a squat or a deadlift like you have all these links up there like everything from your hips to your core to your shoulder like all these things that have to work synergistically together to make that lift work and if you're not strong and stable and rigid in all of those links in order to do that the lift you may be able to performance still but there's leakage yeah your if it's if there's any sort of instability yeah there's exactly and so there's a hole in the bucket and so what I love about heavy carries it connects you from your fingertips to your neck down to your toes and you you couple that with walking and moving and everything is having to fire synergistically together you bring that into a lift like an overhead press like a squat like a deadlift and now you've taught your body to communicate better to it and you've gotten strong and stable on that and there's left there's less leakage in that lift and you're inevitably going to be able to lift more here's how I like to communicate to it imagine if you had a straw that you had to blow through to produce power but now imagine that there's a couple holes in the side of that straw only so much powers and come out you plug those holes and you're going to generate more force this is what happens when you have power leakage because you're not able to stabilize the lift you're not able to strengthen the stable the stabilizer support that heavy lift you use the word limiters right it's it's really like this like it's like a car that's got 600 horsepower but it has protective limiters on there that only allows you to get to 500 horsepower because the manufacturer said yeah it's got 600 horsepower but anything above 500 and we didn't create this engine to be able to handle that and you're going to blow something but let's say you go and you reinforce the engine now you're able to read the release or take off that limiter there's no more rev limiter there's no more speed limiter now you got 600 horsepower okay Olympic weight lifters are an example of this Olympic weight lifters uh they can generate almost all the force that they can generate because their body feels safe doing so most people most untrained people can really only generate something like 60 percent of the real force they could generate because their body doesn't let them and sometimes you can get that extra strength if you're super scared or super mad or defending yourself this is where you hear the stories of the mom that lift the car off the you know the burning car off their kid is that you know under extreme duress your body some rides yeah it takes off those because it's like all right it's worth it to hurt yourself but anyway you're in the gym and your limiters are weak stabilizers well heavy carries i mean you would a great way of explaining it like holding something overhead or holding something at your sides or on top here and then walking now you're adding movement now there's a little bit of sway there's a little bit of whatever and you got to stay strong and stable like you want to talk about a way to to strengthen your stabilizers without having to figure out what to target specifically or whatever yeah i mean it's uh it's it's a great way to do that and heavy carries are incredible the biggest carry over i see what the heavy carries are with squats and deadlifts that's where i see and standing overhead presses i see yeah those big those big movements where all of those links have to communicate together it's like trying to hit a baseball with a water noodle versus a baseball bat i mean think about that right i mean that's this that's what it is is you have all this this leakage that's coming out and you can have all the force in the world trying to swing at it but if there's a breakdown in all those links or those links are weak and unstable let's see how far you get that baseball yeah which brings us to the next point which is now we're worked on stable as i stabilizing well what's a great way to strengthen weak links well one way is to get real specific you work with a strength uh you know expert who can break down your lift and get real individualized with exactly what you need your weak links but here's another easy general way that a lot of coaches and trainers might not even communicate which is doing different exercises different exercises that are often similar to the ones that you plateau in i'm going to give a great example okay when you do a deadlift deadlift is a very very uh incredible exercise whole body exercise great backbuilder great way to build strength we love it it's in almost every one of our programs okay when you do a deadlift there is a a particular type of tension that's creating the upper mid-back and whenever you strengthen something with like this kind of uh you know isometric type of contraction there's some carryover to outside of that position in other words if i strengthen my bicep here in this contracted position i get some carryover to some some extension and some more contraction but not all the way right it's not all the way like a full range of motion well here's a great way to strengthen your deadlift by working on some of those muscles that are involved in different lengths exert your deadlift or exert your squat why try holding something with your elbows underneath the crooks you know the bar under on the crooks of your elbows and you have more of a rounded upper back i'm not talking about a rounded lower back that's not good but the upper back the shoulder blades round a little bit like you're hugging something right then you lift in that position and all of a sudden those muscles have to stabilize in a more lengthened position that they may be used to when you're doing a deadlift now when you pull that deadlift oh my god i feel stronger and more stable like exert your lifts exert your deadlifts exert your squats they fell out of favor a long time ago those are great examples of people like why do that why do you exert your squat why do you exert your deadlift when i could do a front squat when i could do a regular deadlift that's why pick another exercise where you do maybe maybe heavy sandbag carries or or where you're lifting like an atlas stone but otherwise by the way this is why strongmen do zurcher yeah squats and and deadlifts because they lift atlas don't have to do that around real things at some point it's just weird to me that at some point we decided that uh we needed to move more robotically and we did we needed to have like sharp 90 degree angles for everything and make sure that our spine was always stacked and you know and you know just eliminating the fact that like you are going to lift a really heavy like bag of cement or you know dog food or and the weight is going to shift on you at that point and this is not controlled this is not like just nice you know equally balanced plates and in a barbell always that i can just kind of pick up and have like control over and i know what to expect so it's just to me it's just very much more of like this is overall real world strength in in different environments different variables that are thrown at you so to be able to train your body adequately for those types of variables is going to make you overall stronger yeah the only thing i really have to add to this point is in my own personal experience what i have continued to learn is like every time i add a a novel exercise into my routine something that i suck at i'm not good at and then i pursue getting good at that it always carries over to my other yep i always see this strength gain in my and the other big lifts because i started to train something that i was uncomfortable doing i wasn't good at it i mean i'll never forget and this was way late this was not when it was around the competing time was when i started to really focus on Bulgarian splits clubs and i avoided them for so long because i hated them so much putting all this energy towards getting really good at that one thing went back to a bilateral backsquot holy shit it was like i felt so much more stable i got stronger i hit pr like so you know a lot of times just seeking out these these novel movements that may not be popular on instagram what everybody else is doing and and pursuing getting good at them you'll be blown away at the carry over it will have in these other traditional movements that's right another one with the you know in terms of weak links is sometimes oftentimes you don't involve power training in our workouts it's all strength kind of grinding lifts but there's no speed involved now i know that you have to be careful with speed there's more moving parts there's a higher risk of injury so there are exercises you could do um that are far less risky that allows you to evolve a little bit of speed but strength and then the ability to contract and display that strength with speed um it can it contributes to strength overall so that's just one more thing to add to this all right lastly here's one that you know that i think is missing often because when we look at strength we often look at strengths like super one-dimensionally how much do you lift right now and then you're done okay but real strength real strength has some stamina involved right like you go do anything any kind of work or job or chore or you go grapple or you do something like strength it's great but if it doesn't last longer than five seconds it's kind of it's like a waste of time now i'm not talking about long-distance endurance i'm not talking about being in a long-distance runner or whatever i get that that's a totally different stamina but there's also something called strength stamina um we we talk about it as work capacity your ability to display strength like repeatedly by the way you know who does this very well a popular there's a class of athletes very popular one of the most popular sports in the world definitely the most popular sport i would say in america football football players have work capacity why because they go play one you know you know it's a first down it display explosive power then they got you know how long do they have between the next down and they got to do it again like the team that could do that repeatedly over and over is is hard to deal with for two hours yeah yeah it's not like consistent it's not like they're playing soccer or they're constantly running but they have to be strong repeatedly over and over that's work capacity well i was just thinking of a more uh sort of everyday average person kind of example like if you're moving like you're moving furniture for instance and like something that's like super heavy yeah i can muster enough a force and generate enough to like lift something up but now to like move with it and like keep holding on to it and just endure that strength and hold on to that type of force that i i produced just to pick it up and hold it now you you have to maintain that like in and move it over here it's just you know to be able to increase that ability like gives you so much versatility yeah i have such a love hate relationship with this plateau breaker because i know how effective it is yet i dread it so much because it's hard it's so hard like i did this really so i i you know i had i have been pretty consistent with my my my training lately and stuff like that and i sure and what i haven't done in a long time i was like when was the last time i did 20 reps on a flat bench press i could just never do that i never program that i never do that and i have to humble myself and bring all the way down to 135 in order to complete three sets of that to do that but oh my god does my body feel at the next day it feels like it was the first day hitting chest again and i haven't done it in so long it's just like i'm so glad you said 20 reps because body built people who are like oh work capacity whatever i just want to build an amazing physique bodybuilders have known this for a long time bodybuilders have been advocating for sets of 20 reps yeah for a long time for building incredible supersets and giant sets and trices that that's work capacity ladies and gentlemen that is not just high reps that's what we're talking about that's part of what we're talking about another way to do it is to shorten rest periods to do exercise that just require more out of you by the way there's another athlete that has to work on all these things it's just these are strongman competitors right strongman and strong women competitors they need to have this because they have to display strength but they also have to display a little bit athleticism with it so unlike powerlifting where it's like one rep one rep one rep you have to move quickly they're like lift this heavy you know round atlas stone and lift another one that's even heavier and they'll lift another one see now the events aren't long it's not like they're doing you know crazy endurance work but it's you mean you look at a strong man competitor strong woman competitor tell me they don't have a lot of muscle like that's definitely a strength sport and work capacity is all of that in fact in fact if you've plateaued and this goes to the people who are only concerned about strength and all they ever do is train in the low rep ranges and all they ever do is rest three to five minutes in between sets do a block of where you're improving your work capacity with 20 reps or exercises that require more strength stamina then go back to your training watch what happens yeah what's their limiting factor is fatigue you know once you get to that point where you've gotten really strong but now like i'm getting to the same like the third set let's say and i'm trying to produce the same amount of force but i'm too tired too fatigued my muscles are done like if i could build up my gas tank to give me more when i'm in you know that third set then that's a whole another thing i can pull from well and the and the main takeaway from this episode i really feel like is for the the listener that is in a plateau that's struggling right now with breaking through a plateau and then to go through these five things and and and check the boxes of like man have i if i really checked my diet and made sure i'm hitting my protein take or or dove into my gut health and and seen that okay am i actually putting some sort of a sleep routine have i really maximized that go through that that was the last time i did something like have a farm heavy farmer carries or overhead carries or worked on some like strong stabilization type movements like that when's the last time that i put a novel exercise into my routine and got good at it like a zurcher or a turkish get up or a movement that's unconventional like that and really worked at it and then lastly when was the last time that you pushed like work capacity was last time you did 20 reps of squats or 20 reps of bench press if you haven't done any of those things and you're in a plateau like start prioritizing some of those things and watch you break that plateau totally okay so here's what we did we have a program called map strong we created it with a world's strongest man competitor robert oberts because we want to pull from that type of training to create a program that will make you strong overall strong and this is a great plateau buster for lots of people because the emphasis isn't necessarily squats deadlifts and bench presses they're in there but the emphasis on overall body just strength it's one of our most popular programs and because we did this episode what we did is we made that program 50% off so you can get it half off right now if you go to mapsstrong.com so mapsstrong.com and then use the coupon code get strong for the 50% off discount also if you want to follow some of our workouts but you don't want to enroll one of our programs for under five dollars a month you can go to mind pump media on instagram and enroll for it basically get a new workout every single week you get a new workout every week it's less than five dollars a month it's mind pump media on instagram today we're going to teach you everything you need to know to build a strong well-developed chest when i think of weak points and and areas that i struggled with developing for a really long time chest was up there with the yeah it was for me it was for me for sure i got more caught up in the weight i could lift versus how i was developing my body i think it's one of the most challenging muscles to develop for most people because the form and technique