 Ladies and gentlemen, Sal and Mike, 3SB, that's CEO, Abby Lu, Dirstry Barbell, and we're here to talk about the only thing that matters in lifting. Lifting is so boring, there's only one headline that'll last six months, and it's about my elbow depth. Yeah, it's about the most interesting lift to watch. The most exciting reason that we all love the bench press at Meats, that's why everyone goes to Chipotle during the bench press sesh, but we gotta make it even more boring by changing the rules. By making the rules so meticulous that I can't even lay on a bench and do it no more. Right, and we don't even know if, like, how the judging is gonna work entirely. I didn't actually read the actual article or anything like that, so this is your less than educated, did you dig into it now? No. Yeah, so maybe we'll dig into it and do a follow-up, but the basis of the rules are in the IPF and probably all affiliates, so CPU in Canada, Powerlifting America here in America, which once was, maybe it's the end of an empire. You know, Rome, I think the mom and dad started fucking each other or something, or no, I guess mom and dad's fuck each other. The mom and the cousin started fucking each other, and then they built the aqueducts, and then they're licking paint or something, and then they all got sick and stupid, and then you got the crazy king, and that's what ruined the empire? Yeah. That's how history works. And so maybe we're at the end of the IPF empire. Maybe they gone so crazy. You know what I mean? Yeah, they went, they took it too far. And now you're gonna crumble. Yeah. So we have the top of the shoulder joint, which is a confusing term. Again, we didn't dig that deep into the rules, we'll get there eventually, but the top of the, you know, the top is often orientated vertically. So when I'm standing, the top of my shoulder's like here, but when I'm laying, the top of my shoulder's here, and it does say joint, but if you got any kind of jackness to you, which clearly you hire fucking jacked. Yeah, we go, bro. We got delts. Started to tell them. What are you gonna have, an x-ray machine? Yeah. Know where the hell, the top of your knee is easy. Are they gonna start recording it and doing, um, what is it, like, playback? Yeah, but yeah, talk about making the meets viewer friendly. Right. Yeah, Abby's back there just nerding out, you see like NFL refs, they throw the curtain over their head, they're back there reviewing the play, throwing yellow flags and shit. Yeah, like, how are you gonna know whether judges are gonna, are gonna be consistent with that? Yeah, so we're going elbows, the bottom of your elbow, deeper than the top of your shoulder joint, not the top of your delt. And I believe, and I don't know if they said directly, they're motive, but I believe the motive to make it more viewer friendly, more understandable for the masses, where you're not doing gymnastics and yoga on the bench press, which is the meme, which is the joke. And I wonder if this joke or meme or this rule book is, or this rule change is literally pushed by like meme culture. Because like real lifters don't really joke, like we'll casually joke about sumo and arching your bench, I make fun of you, but we're just such casual joking. I don't, I don't negate it as the sport because it's part of the sport. Yeah, but I don't think it's, is it any louder, the whole arch argument or the meme, is it any louder than the sumo versus conventional? No, it's the same. I think it's like the sumo conventional was going on for so long, and it was even more controversial, or like more people hated it, and we're so loud about it calling it cheating. And nothing happened there. Yeah, yeah, not yet. Not yet, oh god, yeah, now they're gonna start getting into that. Maybe. I feel like once they made this a rule, you're just, you're stirring the pot up, now everything is gonna be looked at, and now people, I mean, things are gonna shift a little bit, but you, you said you don't think it's gonna change overall too much. I don't think so, just because the IPF is already so split, at least in America, and no offense to the rest of the world, but America really is the heart of powerlifting. Yes, a lot of other countries are very strong lifters. They have stronger lifters, great competitors, but the masses really are here culturally, and by numbers, we run the game. And so I don't think because the IPF is so split here, other feds are split here too, right? There's the WRPF, a lot of international Russian lifters, and big-name lifters competing the WRPF. A lot of folks still compete in the USPA because they like Deadlift Bar, or maybe they like PEDs. So I just think it's already like niche down, niche down, niche down, and then even within the IPF, I bet you it's less than 10% of IPF lifters will have to change their form to accommodate this. You know what I mean? Like it's not like everyone's arching, and even you have a decent arch, not a crazy one, but a decent arch, and your elbow is probably past your shoulders. We'll look, yeah, we'll look, but I look casually, and I don't think you're gonna have to change it, if, hypothetically, you want that. Yeah, I should see if it doesn't. The biggest thing, I think, is one, now you're just drawing semantics everywhere in a boring mundane sport with no variables. Let's not make it more boring and mundane. I think it's gonna have a negative effect on big guys, more than the arched, and typically the archers come from the lower weight classes, just because they tend to be more mobile. So bigger guys, which have not been cheating by the arch, they just tend to be bigger sternums, bigger bellies, bigger chest, and ladies, just your bigger people, you have more muscle, you have more mass, and if you do have shorter arms, which I'm, you know, I've been 250, I have tiny little biceps, like my arms are very short. Getting my elbows there, if you're touching high, or touching low, excuse me, lower on your sternum, your elbows are not passing. They may not be passing your sternum, and now you, what are you gonna do? You're gonna have to pull it into your gut and kind of get this internal rotation, which isn't healthy for the shoulder, which happens in geared lifting sometimes. Pro-track, now you're projecting. Yeah, no, really though, they do it in geared lifting sometimes to touch, because the materials so caught up, you'll do one of these, dip, touch, and flare back out. So now you're gonna have rawlifters doing that, which actually, changing your whole technique. You arguably could make it more dangerous, and the bench press is already kind of in a peculiar position. The only arguments I do see to even have this conversation, I think the conversation is good, because I do think sports need to evolve and change, based on talent, based on trends. And as it grows, as it goes forward. Yeah, you get bigger tailpools, different bodies. And the other one is, I don't mind the argument that let's test strength and power and not technique. I think it's good for conversation. Can you directly apply that? No, because then, what's the easiest thing to do? A broad jump, a med ball toss. Those are so low skill in such high physical attributes, but anytime you have a sport, there's gonna be technique involved. So why wouldn't we want that technique to be honed in, and people take this serious? And that's really to me what the arch, what the sumo, what the coaching and programming is. It's people taking the sport seriously, and wanting to do the best they can by the rules given to them. And everyone's bodies and their mechanics are individualized, and then people are just taking advantage of those leverages with the rules and everything. So, but now we're taking that away from them. So if you have really long arms, really short torso, I'm gonna make you deadlift standing on blocks now. Right, yeah. Because your range is, you're cheating. Yeah, we're gonna start measuring the range of motion. Right. For sumo pullers. Move this, you have to move the bar 12 inches for it to count. Yeah. Literally though. Like that's like obviously an extreme argument, but it's to make a point. Like, yeah, how far are we gonna go to make everyone lift the same? At this point, I mean, I actually, I didn't know, I didn't think that it would be a rule. I don't know why it was so far fetched to me. Yeah. It just seemed like, oh, they're just, like, people are just talking about it, just, you know, to start a conversation. But now that it has, like, I don't know, I'm thinking of what else they're gonna change down the line. Yeah. Yeah, and little stuff does happen, right? I think the USAPL now allows you to lift your head off the bench, which I think is such a, you know, minimal, it's a minimal change. I don't think it helps or hurts that many people. Heels up versus heels down being enforced in benches is a thing that's gone on for a lot, which I think is a semantics thing. I don't think, you know, I haven't done the exact math and study, but we could take a survey of the top 100 lifters in every fed and literally just visually look at a screenshot of who benches what way, head up, feet up, heels down. And I think there's no clear cut winner. Same with the Sumo Conventional Argument. If Sumo was literally just better, everyone's pulling Sumo. Conventional deadlift would have died 30 years ago. If Sumo was just better. And all top fullers are going to be pulling Sumo. Yeah, right. And so if we look, we can just screen cap those things and say that, well, those aren't an issue. So for me, if it's not an issue, we don't need to rule for it. So the heel up, heel down, I'm indifferent. The head up, head down, I'm indifferent, right? We have all these little things. Again, I think the discussion of it is great, because that is how you get new ideas and grow the sport and get new lifters involved. But is the application on this one, you know, shot out to Noriega, I believe, and Candido again, who talked about the grip width changing by weight class? If they do feel this is a true issue, I think that's a better solve. Because we talked about it a little bit already, but the judging on this is going to make things ultra-complicate. Yeah. I saw on Celine Crumb's story, I don't know if it was her idea, or if she got from someone else, but the whole like, if we're now looking at elbow depth, maybe take the paws out of bench, and get kind of like a squat. Because when you go with the logistics of it, yeah, how many things is the head judge going to have to look at? And that's been a thing kind of, I don't know if it's efficient in the rule book or not, because so many different federations, but with geared powerlifting, often it's just a touch. Because it's so difficult to go down there, and you're going to be going kind of slow anyways, because the material's binding up, that you can't really like heave in a suit, you'll miss, you'll misgroove. So it is kind of more of a touch, so maybe that is a play. But then yeah, then how are we going to define a heave? And how are we going to define a bounce? Right, and like, but you're right, because if you're that bigger weight class individual, and you can't get elbow depth, I don't know if that's official term, you're going to have to do that internal rotation, or pull it into your stuff, fat muscle, muscular stuff, tisha, and you're going to have to like do one of these, you know? But then now you're going to be able to breathe out and like heave it, which in some feds is semi-allowed, as long as you hit the pause command, you can kind of heave. So it does throw a ripple in a lot of things. Again, end all be all, it's a branch of a branch of a fetter of a drug tested thing that I don't want to say that IPF's dying, but they might have just control all deleted themselves. You know what I mean? I don't think it looks favorable. And if you want to be, I think if you want to be a federation in this sport, the audience and spectators in this sport are the lifters. It's not the soccer dad. Soccer dad is watching football, not playing football. So I understand if the NFL, MLB, NBA make rules based on the audience, because they're driving the money. This sport is funded and driven by us. It's for the lifters, dude. So if you want to appease to that, if you want the sport to grow, you want the lifters to recommend your shit. You want the lifters to give the input. You want the lifters to be the ones to lead the way and lead the culture on and off the platform because that's where the money's coming from. It's not Budweiser, right? Budweiser, you're doing it for the soccer dads and all that shit. It's different. And most of the people or most of what I've been hearing comments on it on social media are really for this rule. I don't know if I've heard anyone be like, damn, dude, glad they finally did that. We really needed that. Right. It's like, good, good. Now we're taking out all the freaking big arch people. Now what are you guys going to do? Like no one's trashing on all the big arch lifters that right now. And again, back to my main point here, I guess to wrap it up is I don't believe that you need an issue to solve. I don't necessarily believe in the if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Because I think that's what normies think. And I think as a creator myself, or I'd like to think I'm a creative, I like to think how you can improve things. So yeah, let's break it. Shout out to my mentor, Dean Stark. You want to break it and put it back together better. So I don't think all our issues only need to be solved. I think we can improve things that are good. You can make good things better and better things great. But this rule. I don't know if this is one we needed to look at. Again, discuss, talk about, not only. I think the issue is better to be discussed or more priority to be discussed than this resolution that we came with. The result, you know what I mean? It's not it. It seems like this issue's been discussed a lot and then the result or the answer was just made up in a day. It did seem, it felt like that. It's not well thought out. Again, going to the Candido grip idea by way class seems a lot more well thought out. And obviously, Candido's, in my idea, North Star in the sport for many reasons. Culture, how well thought out and how much he cares about it. So again, leading it by the lifters, leading it by the cultures, leading it by the culture, rather than some arbitrary rule or what we think is probably important. Shout out to your Instagram. Everyone's asking. At abby.lu, avi.leu. And if you're in NorCal, you want some coaching. We have classes, personal training. You want to get better at the barbell or just fitness in general. Hit up Abby. She's here at Third Street training and learning and hanging with us. Silent Mike, we're out of here, man. Be a part of something big in yourself. We over me will catch you. New videos every Monday and Thursday. Appreciate you.