 Welcome to Barbell Logic, Rewind. We're talking about the stress recovery adaptation cycle. We revisited that, right? And we were talking about how the stress has to increase, but we have an ongoing problem with recovering. As the stress goes up, the problem with recovery becomes harder to deal with or can't become harder to deal with. And I'm trying to come up with a way to think about the components of programming, the tools that we have when we do programming that can help us deal with those challenges. So when we're dealing with this challenge of recovering from the stress, which we need more and more and more of over time, when we program, there's some stuff we can do, right? We can add weight to the bar. We can take weight off of the bar. We can increase frequency. We can decrease frequency. We can increase the number of sets. We can increase the number of reps. We can decrease all of those things. There are really only about four things that we can do. And then there's a fifth one, maybe, which would be exercise selection. But there are really only four or five things that we can do. And then each of those has a positive or a negative, right? Add weight to the bar, take weight off the bar. Right, so we can manipulate intensity up or down. Up or down, right? To increase stress or decrease stress. And we can manipulate volume up or down to increase stress or decrease stress. One of the things I wanna talk about, maybe to have a completely separate podcast episode on, is that I believe that frequency is clearly a function of volume. It's one of the ways we manipulate volume, right? It is a manipulator of volume. Yes, increased frequency decreases. You can increase volume by increasing frequency. You can also decrease volume by decreasing frequency. Just like we go from a three-day, squats three days a week to a four-day split, increases the frequency of number of workouts per week, but decreases the frequency, and thus the volume of the squad itself. So is recovery then actually an aspect of volume, right? Like you can't actively, despite what CrossFit says, you can't actively recover. It's only like the absence of work, right? Yeah, so right. So you can't program recovery is what I'm saying. The only thing that's actually recovery is food and sleep. Right. The rest of it is actually managing fatigue, right? So I don't like to think about, it's not wrong, but it doesn't work quite as clean in my head, to think about manipulating training variables for either stress or recovery. I think what we're doing is we're manipulating training variables to increase the stress and potentially increase the fatigue. So do you think that increasing fatigue then is like it's a good thing to do, from time to time? If the stress isn't great enough to cause an adaptation, if there is no fatigue, the stress wasn't great enough to cause an adaptation, right? Well, in LP, there's clearly fatigue. You squat in your last two or three weeks, you squat, you're just, you rack the bar, you take the plates off, you put the plates away, and you're beat, man, you know? And then you rest and then you come back and the fatigue's mostly gone. It's 92% gone and you're able to do it again. Sure, wouldn't that be the ideal situation if we could undergo the stress, endure the fatigue, have that dissipate, and then move on with your life forever? Wouldn't that be the ideal situation? It would, except for the only way to do that, we've talked about this before, is that you could theoretically, you get to the point where in LP, as we talked about before, your workout you do on Monday, you come back on Wednesday and you're probably pretty much completely recovered on Wednesday, and then pretty much completely recovered on Friday, but four weeks in and six weeks in and eight weeks in, there's obviously still some fatigue left over from the workout you had two days before, and when you get to the end of LP, there's tons of fatigue, right? You're still very fatigued from it. So at that point, theoretically, you could just keep spreading out your workouts. We've talked about this before, instead of training every 48 to 72 hours, you could go to every 72 to 96 hours. And then you could train once every five days and you could train once every six days and once every seven. And if it was just an issue of stress and then recover and adapt and it was clean, then you could just keep doing that forever. You could just have a really giant dose of stress one day, rest for two weeks, come back and have a bigger dose of stress two weeks later and or show that you made progress, but we know that doesn't actually happen. And so that's why I think that stress recovery adaptation, as I said in the previous programming podcast, is not wrong. Stress recovery adaptation is a simple way of looking at things. And it's generally correct, but because we have to expose the body to multiple bouts of stress in order to make progress long-term, then this simple idea of we stress and then we recover and then we adapt is just too simple for intermediate and advanced programming. Collectively, it's still right. I mean, you still have this period, especially if you're preparing for, say, a powerlifting meet where all of that stress leading up to a powerlifting meet was the stress, was this overload, and then you get to sort of this peaking period that's last two, three weeks before the meet where you try to dissipate the vast majority of fatigue without detraining, right? So you still kind of practice the lifts and you stay generally heavy, but you do very low volume and you let the fatigue completely dissipate, but all of that strength remains and then you go perform on the platform. That's what you're doing. But ultimately, I think that all of this stuff is really fatigue is one of the things that occurs. That's why I think I mentioned this last time that the fitness fatigue model is probably closer. It's at least a slightly more complicated view of stress recovery adaptation, but that a bout of stress that occurs, like when we train in the gym, leaves us with sort of two outcomes. We get both an increase in the adaptive response, the for us strength, get stronger, but we also get more fatigued and those things are constantly at war with each other. And if the fatigue goes up too much, then even though the stress was enough to drive a strength adaptation, we can't actually perform that strength adaptation. We can't show that that performance is there because there's too much fatigue left behind. And so we're constantly trying to manage an intermediate and advanced programming, we're managing both the stress and the amount of fatigue. And that amount of fatigue that we're managing, the way we do that is with recovery. So the recovery is the word that we use, but it's really this combination of sleep and food for recovery and periods of reduced stress in order to allow fatigue to dissipate. When we have too much fatigue, that's the overreach that we don't want, right? Well, I don't actually, I think that sometimes you do want it. I think that an overreach state is okay. You can just get to the point where if you overreach for too long, then you actually get need to, right? And that's when you get kind of overtraining, right? Now I do think that it's tough to over train. I certainly think it's possible. Yeah, very few people are gonna do that, I think. Yeah, for older guys, they can do it, you know, but it's weird. I think that often overtraining for older populations is probably occurs more, at least at a sort of a physiological and acute level in things like joints and things like muscles, right? Like they just get so beat up and their joints, like their knees and their hips and their elbows and their shoulder, those are the things that hurt. It's not that their muscles are truly overtrained. Yeah, my shoulders quit before the rest of me does. Right. Yeah, and so parts of me overtrain. So do you program then for late intermediate or early advanced? I know you wouldn't say this, well, I think that you wouldn't say this for an early intermediate. Do you actually program to put that person at a certain level of fatigue? Are you seeking that? You are seeking that. Of course, I'm trying to drive up fatigue. That's what a loading period is, right? It's loading and deloading. Now, for early intermediate, late novice, early intermediate, I would never plan for that necessarily. That's not something I'm planning for. But for an advanced lifter, like, sure, we're trying to plan for periods of loading and then we actually have periods of deloading. Now, what I've changed about in my... Hang on, let me stop there. So are you actually, we've been talking about heuristics, is talking about fatigue a way of talking about how you program? Or are you actually seeking that state? You know what I'm saying? Is fatigue a measure of how much stress they've gotten? Or you actually dig it, right? You could say, oh, okay, he's fatigued. His bar speed has slowed. His first rep of his set on the next training day shows that he has fatigue. Is that something that you're seeking that fatigue? Or is it just something that you use as a measure to say, okay, the stress was enough? Yeah, probably that. Especially going into a meet for something that's competitive. When they're six weeks out, five weeks out, I want them fatigued. They're hating it. I actually want that, right? Because I know their body, and I want them enough fatigue that I don't want too much, but I want them enough fatigue that their body can recover and adapt during that peaking period. And so, obviously, if it's just an enormous amount of fatigue, we're looking for... The problem with that is you could just fatigue the hell out of somebody. Yeah, you could just take care of them. I mean, that's the part of the work to make you do whatever. And so it's super fatiguing. But what we're really trying to do is, again, because of that specificity principle, because we know that it has to be heavy to get stronger. If the goal is to get stronger, we've got to keep getting heavier. But I can't just load them up as heavy as I can, just to fatigue them as much as possible and let them think I'm stronger, either. There's still... We know that there's sort of this incremental increase that has to occur over the stress, in the stress for the period, right? And of course, we've talked about this in the past, that that period for novice is a very small period, right? It's just two, three days. And for an intermediate, it's longer and for an advanced lifter, it's even longer than that. But what I'm trying to do is I'm just trying to constantly manage that level of both stress, to increase stress over the course of the overload period and moderate fatigue so that the fatigue is enough to drive the adaptation. It's enough to disrupt homeostasis to drive the adaptation without driving them into the ground. But also if there's not enough fatigue, right? I mean, you get this too. This is where I've changed in my programming on an actual practical level. I used to, we talked about how we're not big fans of templates, of eight week, 10 week, 12 week templates for even advanced lifters, but that we would often still use those templates and try to kind of tweak them to the person. But the thing that we tried to bring to the table, especially at online coaching, is that we still watch your videos every single day and break down your videos. And I've actually gotten completely away from the templates over the last six months. And part of it is because, let me explain, because there's a caveat there. I know what block training looks like. And I know what DUP looks like. I know what it's supposed to look like. I know what it's supposed to feel like. I know what the bar speed is supposed to be. And the problem that you get when you lay out a program that's a percentage-based program, which all advanced program templates are, they have to be, right? In order to work from one person to the next, it can't be pre-programmed with weights. It has to be programmed with percentages of one rep max. So there's several problems with that. But one is that thinking that you can operate and that the level of the stress event would be the same for the same percentage of press as it is for squat or deadlift is just not the same. That's not the case, right? Yeah, the deadlift is almost always a lower percentage than the others. That's right. Now, good programming templates account for that. And they'll often have you bench press and press with a higher percentage for even equal volume than you would on the lower body lifts. But still the person that my client that I'm looking at, I would rather watch them on a week-by-week basis and program for them one week at a time. So if they're in, say, an accumulation phase or a transfutation phase and they're in that general realm and I'm programming Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday for them and then I'm watching and I'm going, well, I know they can go up 10 more pounds on squat, but they can only go up five more pounds on deadlift, deadlift is hard. And the fatigue is starting to get there and they're back on the deadlift, right? Or vice versa or whatever. And so what you'll see is that people will make progress and fatigue differently on different lifts. And when you take a template, you're sort of pre-gambling on how much fatigue is gonna be there. That's why a lot of these templates have written in sort of three weeks of loading and a one-week deload. I don't pre-plan deloads ever anymore. I just give them when needed. When the person is just like, you know, workout after workout, they go three, four, five workouts in a row and they're just like an entire week, let's say, where they're just slow and they're struggling to hit their lifts and then I know that fatigue is too high and I've got to back off the fatigue. I've got to get fatigue to dissipate some. And so there's lots of ways to do that, although I actually think that we generally, at this point, most people agree in strength training, even people who would tend to disagree with us about how we program. I think most of us deload is similar way. Most of us stay pretty damn heavy and we just reduce the volume to reduce the amount of fatigue. And so the intensity may still come down two or three or 5%, but the volume is often cut sometimes in half. Yeah, in order to, and of course that depends on the person. So that's just, you know, don't take that as a true standard, but that's what we do. So again, what I'm doing here is I think it's wrong to look at recovery as ways that we can manipulate training variables. The quietness says that evil is just, it's not an active thing. It's an absence of the good. Right. So your recovery is just the absence of the stress. Yeah, that is actually exactly right. Recovery is the absence of the stress. Yeah, so you might think about recovery when you're doing programming and you're like, I better leave some space in here, but you're not programming recovery. It's just like, you're not giving them a bolus, a dose of stress during that period. No, and although we do sometimes actually tell our clients what to do during the week. We're like, hey, listen, this is, you've got a lot of fatigue right now. We're gonna give you a deload week next week. It's really important to get extra sleep. If you can't get eight hours of sleep at night, I want you to try to take a nap in the afternoon, try to get an extra hour of sleep in the afternoon if you need to, especially if they're a nutrition client. We talked to their nutrition coach and say, can we bump them up 500 calories, especially on protein and carbohydrates so that they got the ability to recover. A lot of people will go in a deload week and they're like, well, I'm not training very hard, so I'm gonna back off my calories. That's dumb. Why would you back off your calories in a deload week? I know what they're thinking. They're thinking, well, it'll make me fat. I don't need that many calories. No, no, no, this is actually when you need it because you're stressed to the point that fatigue is built up and you're not able to make progress because there's too much fatigue. So what we have to do is dissipate the fatigue. Well, how do we do that? Fajitas, man. That's how we do it. Fajitas. You know, the beautiful fajita. Chill. So knowing these things that we just talked about that maybe recovery isn't a thing, but it's the absence of the stress and that so everything that we do is related to stress. And then how can we manipulate that stress? And there are only a few things we can do. Yes, three. We can do something with the weight. We can do something with the frequency. We can do some. No. No? Yes, but what I call that. So we can do something with intensity or we can do something with volume, which is frequency, same. Well, okay. Stay with my thought process for a second. And then what's the third one, which is a clearly a secondary. Which would be the exercise selection, I think. Exercise selection. That's basically it. Now I actually said that primary training variables that we manipulate are intensity and volume and secondary are frequency and exercise selection. But then I explained frequency is secondary because it's really just a function of volume, right? So I get it. I'm sort of arguing semantics, but what I like to do is try to make things as simple as I can first, and then we can kind of get into the weeds and what that looks like. Yeah, well, it's not semantics, but we need to organize these principles. So when somebody comes to programming, they can say, okay, there are three things I can do here. Intensity. Intensity, volume, and exercise selection. Volume and exercise selection. So let's take intensity first. What can you do with intensity? Which is easy, right? Intensity is easy. Intensity is easy. You put weight on the bar or you take weight off of the bar. That's exactly right. That's it. Those are the only two things you can do. And then that one then in turn affects the second one, which is the volume. That's right. So they play with each other. Outside of early in a program, in an advanced program, or during novice programming is the only time that intensity and volume do not have an inverse relationship. Right. They must have an inverse relationship. Let's be super rigid here. Okay. The relationship still stands. We just don't manipulate it. Correct. So in novice programming, when we said this in the last podcast, was in novice programming, frequency stays the same, volume stays the same. That entire volume component is the same. Exercise selection doesn't change. The only thing that changes is intensity goes up. Right. So you know stress goes up because everything else is a constant and one variable increases. That's it. When we need to reduce stress to make room for recovery, we manipulate at the end of LP. We manipulate the intensity by lowering the midweek squat session. Correct. Bar the weight on the bar. That's exactly what we do. We only manipulate intensity during novice linear progression. That's the only thing we manipulate. And at the end, you start getting to advanced novice and making the minimum effective dose changes into Texas method or heavy light medium. Then we start playing with other things. But intensity is simple. Yeah. There's not much more to say about that programming component. Volume is complicated. The next one is volume. What can we manipulate with volume? Sets. Sets. Reps. Reps. Frequency. Frequency. Those are all the things that can be manipulated. So let's talk about sets first. Okay. In LP, clearly it's three sets of five unless it's the power clean, in which case it's five sets of three or the deadlift, which is one set of five. Sure. When we do the minimum effective dose change, we will often drop one set. Or add one set. Or add one set. Often I'll do them in tandem. So we talk about the minimum effective dose. Sometimes the minimum effective dose is changing two things. So it might be, I'm gonna add a set Monday and I'm gonna drop a set on Friday. And in doing so, because there's an inverse relationship between the volume and the intensity, I'm able to actually put some poundage on the bar on the Friday. We lose some volume that leaves room for an increase in the intensity because there's an inverse relationship. And you lose some intensity on Monday with the increase in volume. So then you start to see that the stressor on Monday is the volume. It's really tonnage is what I said last time. And then your Wednesday is the... The stressor on Friday is intensity. And then yeah, Wednesday is what? And Wednesday is a little bit of a D load. And so what you end up with, you have a tiny block. You have a five day block. Yeah, so Wednesday, we've talked about this before we probably do an entire episode just on Wednesday and argue about what's really going on Wednesday. And again, I think it's probably smart to say we actually don't know. It's one of those things we're not entirely... We think that... I don't know, you talked about you drop it out so much just fine too. I think what Wednesday is is I don't consider it a recovery day. That's why I think the terminology is wrong there. People think about Texas Method as being that Monday is the stress day, Wednesday is the recovery day, and Friday is the adaptation day, is the performance day. I disagree. I think both that Monday and Friday are clear, heavy stressors. The volume is a heavy stressor. The way that volume stresses you. I keep giving this illustration, I'm gonna do this again and again and until people get it. If the Friday doesn't count, then you're stuck with strong lifts. Yeah, and you could just go Monday, Wednesday, Monday, Wednesday, and Monday would always go up. Right, until it couldn't. Friday doesn't count. If Friday is only a performance, then just take it out and just do your five by fives on Monday every Monday and only on Mondays and do a light day on Wednesday. Well, that doesn't work. Like that's obviously Friday is enough of a stressor. So yeah, you can try that yourself in C and you can also look at other people's training logs and look at people's success or failures with the strong lifts protocol and then you'll know that once the novice phase is over, you have to have, we have to have periodization. You have to have some changes in intensity and some changes in volume to drive the changes. Correct. I wanna say something more about midweek. By the way, next time we have Sully on, we need to just, we should talk about midweek because he's firmly in the camp that nobody knows what happens in midweek. For my older guys, I say I drop it out. For my older guys, I will often do that. For my underweight guys. By the way, you don't drop out your midweek. You just drop out the squat. I drop out the squat. That's right. And so keep the other stuff. That's right, right. But for my underweight guys, I've got them squatting for eights because I'm trying to put some meat on them. Let's start with what we do know about Wednesday. What do we know is going on on Wednesday? Well, we know that Wednesday is a day that is there to not increase fatigue. Right, so we're- Fatigue should not increase on Wednesday. There's clearly still fatigue left from Monday because Monday was hard and sucked, at least once you've been in it for six weeks or so. Wednesday cannot make that fatigue number go up. So if you're left on a scale of one to 10, if you're left with a fatigue rating of six and a half, right? Just for purposes of argument. Six and a half rentals. And you go in and you kill yourself on Wednesday and you crush it, right? And now your fatigue is an eight. You can't go in Friday and squat a heavy set of five. So Wednesday is there to help fatigue dissipate while still getting good work in. And of course the other stuff is important too. And so I think that Wednesday often helps avoid detraining. I think it's practice for form. Although again, I was thinking about this the other day. Form changes dramatically when you go from 60% to 70% to 80% to 90% to 99%. And so I've heard before that Wednesday is sort of a practice day for squat. And I would say, well, using your own definition of what practice is, don't know how much practice is actually going on there when the weight is as light as it is compared to your truly your fiver at max or whatever. So let's go back to our principle. We know fatigue is going to be reduced. So you can do anything from what you're doing, sets of eight with your young guys to nothing on squat with your older guys, anything in between. But your younger guys can probably handle sets of eight. It doesn't beat them up bad at all. And they're not terribly heavy, right? So let's go back here. So we were talking about volume and the first thing we said that we can do is change the number of sets. Correct. And the other thing we can do is change the number of reps. That's why you'll see, you know, in our discussion with Andy Baker from a few weeks ago, we were talking about moving guys to three triples on their Fridays. And then later, a couple of triples or maybe a single triple. So we can change the volume. We can drop the volume from five reps to triples. Again, to serve what purpose? To drive the intensity. If you drop it from five to triples, it's to get the intensity to go up, right? And, you know, obviously the sets in the reps are intimately connected as well because you can manipulate one or the other and the other one usually changes. So for example, like you can go to three sets eight, like what you're doing for your younger guys on Wednesday, but I'll often go eight sets of three. Yeah, it's fine. I actually tend to like that better for the strength adaptation. And so those are all things that can be so you can change the number of sets you perform to increase or decrease volume. You can increase or decrease the number of reps you perform to manipulate volume. But you can also increase the number of sets or the number of reps by increasing the number of bouts that you have per week or any given time period by increasing or decreasing frequency, right? So one of the things I can do if I need to get more volume in, then I can just add another session of that thing, right? Or maybe it's just another workout in general to increase the total systemic volume on the body. And so that's why frequency is almost always a function of volume. If I have somebody sort of later advanced sort of people in novice programming, they are pressing 1.5 times per week and they're bench pressing 1.5 times per week. And by the time they are advanced, they are often doing both of those three times a week. Yeah, you know, those two movements can withstand the most bouts in a week. Especially by the way, I think bench press can actually handle more than press in spite of like we know that there's a way to press that shouldn't beat your shoulders up, but it does seem like the standing up with the weight in your hands and your shoulders and everything that's going on with, especially kind of the rear delt and infraspinatus and whatnot, you know, you can beat up your shoulders if you're doing both. And so the first thing I would do is drop one of those press movements, but the frequency continues to go up and that's because by the time they're advanced, if they're pressing two or three times a week and they're bench pressing three times a week, I can't get that much volume in if they were only doing those things two times a week each or 1.5 times a week, like you just couldn't do it. And so we often manipulate volume with those upper body lifts by just increasing the frequency. How many heavy reps can a person do of a pressing motion in a given workout? You know, 25 to 30 would be the most I would ask of someone. So if you want more volume, where the heck are you gonna get it? You're gonna have to add a day. And we end up adding half of a day a week when we go to the four day split. That's right. And then later on, we'll even add another slot in a four day split. So a guy I'll press for either or, and then he'll do some bench press of some bench press variant. And then we'll have him press again and he's gonna do a pressing variant at this point. So we've added a slot in his four day split. Oh, what you doing on an upper body day? I'll do it on upper body day. So I'll usually add one of those to a lower body day. So I'll bench and press on the two upper body days. So I'll do both. So that gives you your four slots and I'll add a fifth slot to one of the lower body day. So I'll squat and then I'll either press or bench press and I'll deadlift or whatever that variant is at that point. It depends on what you wanna do. Like if he presses competition press, three sets of fives, you know, something vanilla, and then you have him bench press, it probably something less vanilla. And then you add another slot. I got him on the ropes. He's already fatigued. So now it doesn't take as much weight in that third pressing slot. So then I can use exercise selection because I got him on the ropes. He's already very fatigued. So a little extra work goes a long way. But if I have a guy that I want him to have lots of heavy in his hands, then I'll do what you're talking about. I'll put that extra press at the end of his squat and deadlift day because he can move something probably heavier that day for that extra slot. So now we're at exercise selection. So we've talked about adding sets, reps, slots. We've talked about frequency. And now we're at the exercise selection. We can select exercise variants of our four main lifts to either put more weight in their hands or less weight in their hands. Yeah, and I think let's give the caveat to first that we know, and I think that there's almost nobody that would argue with this, that for strength, I'm sure there are some, but in general, nobody would listen to this podcast would argue this, that for exercise variants to help drive a strength adaptation, especially a strength adaptation on the four main lifts, and those variants better look really similar to the four main lifts. Yeah, people talk about carryover. Does it carry over? If you want them to carry over to the four main lifts, they better look really similar to the four, they better be pretty specific to the four main lifts. So something that is still a barbell, right? Dumbbells don't carry over very well. Really light doesn't carry over really well. Single leg, single arm doesn't carry over very well at those sorts of things. And so what we're trying to do is, just like you said, we're trying to choose a variant that either increases the weight we can handle. And as a trade-off often has a reduced range of motion or decreases the weight we can handle, but increases the range of motion. That's almost always like the only exception with that is a tempo piece, which is usually the same range of motion, but done slower, therefore the stress goes up. And because it's slower, there's more time under tension and therefore you use less weight. But with everything else outside of tempo, what we're doing is, is it's more weight, less range of motion, less weight, more range of motion. Yeah, a lifter seems to be able to do X amount of work in a given lift. And remember from our junior high physics, work equals force times distance. So if we make D go down, F can go up. Or if F goes up, D has to come down. So we can talk about like the deadlift. On a deficit deadlift, you're gonna pull the bar over a longer range of motion. D has gone up, so F almost has to go down. So the weight on the barbell has to go down. And then the rack pull, we can move that rack pull up to two inches above your knee and you can maybe pull 30% more than your one rep deadlift, you know? Sure, so when I pulled a thousand at a 18 inch deadlift, 18 inch deadlift is just below the kneecap. I pulled a thousand at a strongman, silver dollar deadlift, strongman meet. Now here's why. Lots of guys dropped out in the 800 range and then I pulled a thousand at 800. The bar wouldn't bend enough to get just above the kneecap. But at 900, the bar got just a little more flex and you could get your kneecaps under the bar and put yourself in a little better position. And then I was able to lock out a thousand in the same thing. Of course it's strongman, so it's straps and hitching. And you know, if you ever watch me lift, I've got a clean hitch. I've got like a pretty nice hitch. It's not like this weird, ugly monkey humping hitch or anything, but yeah, so you're exactly right. So here's the question. Why would we do a movement that reduces the range of motion but increases the intensity? Well, what are we trying to accomplish? Well, in that case, we may want to train that range of motion, right? We may want to increase the strength that lock out in the example of the rack pull. We may want to do that. Or a board press or a slingshot or a pin press. Any of those. Pin squat, even. But oftentimes I want to give them some more training stress, but not as much as they would get from pulling from the floor from the deficit deadlift. There are some people though, well I'll tell you there are some people that the rack pull just devastates them. That's also why these templates don't work all the time. You know, I often put a rack pull in to actually reduce stress. It's heavier weight, but reduce stress. For most people, I think a rack pull tends to be a lesser stress event than a full range deadlift. But every once in while you find somebody there, it's not, it's the opposite. Yeah, there's something about the time under tension it takes to get the thing to come off the pins. I think that tears up certain people. And I think they're a pretty small minority. It may be a minority of one, one bob ten. No, it's not. Well, and here's the other thing. My other experience is talking about specifically a rack pull. When we talk about a rack pull, the first several weeks you do it, it's really hard on your body. More so than even most other novel exercises. By the way, there's an argument out there that the novelty of the exercise increases the stress and that helps you get stronger. And I would agree with the first two thirds of that statement. The novelty of the exercise does increase the stress. But novelty doesn't make you stronger. Just because it's novel doesn't mean it makes you stronger, right? I think skateboarding wouldn't make me stronger. Yeah, what you'll find with most people when they rack pull is especially if you set a rack pull where the kind of where most of us do it, which is like an inch below the tibial tuberosity, a little bump on your shin. You started about an inch below that. So the weights, I don't know, three inches, three, four inches off the ground somewhere there. So it's reducing the range of motion of a deadlift by three, four inches, right? Most people deadlift less the first two, three weeks they deadlift, they can't rack pull as much as they deadlift. They do it and they're like, man, why is this so hard? It's a reduced range of motion. Well, because you're out of no man's land, there's no tightness there. You set up, you can't get tight. You're used to getting tight at the bottom of a deadlift. Yeah, we like to start. I think me and you both like to start. I learned it from you. Start our partials in no man's land. No man's land is that place where the lift slows down. Four or five inches off the bottom of the squat, an inch and a half below the knee, right above your hairline and the press. We like to start them in that place because we wanna train that place as much as we can. So we talked about, we can vary the intensity, we can vary the volume, and we can vary the exercise selection. I wanna go back to volume because we didn't carry that all the way out. We can add slots in the week, right? We talked about that. We can add extra bouts, but we can also look at that volume for a longer time horizon, right? Weeks or even months for these advanced blocks of training. Yeah, you have to. Again, I think tonnage is a better indicator. Here's why it's a better indicator. I'll give you a simple math example, right? Which can you do more weight on? Three sets of eight or eight sets of three? Eight triples. Obviously, so it's exactly the same volume, right? It's 24, but it's a higher tonnage, which is why I think that that tonnage number matters. That tonnage number matters, right? Like, it's a tonnage is a good quantifiable metric for volume. It's not the only thing that matters, right? I certainly wouldn't put it above PRs. Although I do think a tonnage PR is kind of an interesting thing to keep, but I also think that at the point where the weight isn't heavy, we could all do German volume training, do 10 sets of 10 at 60%, and that's a tremendous amount of volume, but did that make us stronger? We need a coefficient to put on the tonnage that will also tell us something about how high the intensity was. Intensity, yeah, sure. Yeah, so we need to take our tonnage and then maybe divide it out by the average load on the bar for each of those. I think that would give us an integer that would tell us something about what was going on. The smaller the number, the better it would have been actually. Yeah. That would be an interesting way to do it. Yeah, that's, yeah, I like that. We like Saber metrics for lifting. Right. We'll create these new metrics where it actually, you know. We've already created the Reynolds, which is the fatigue unit, and then the Hamburg, which is the recovery unit, and then we need to put a quick coefficient. I know you're not a sports fan, and I'm not a sports fan anymore, but I used to be, but the movie Moneyball, you're familiar with this movie? I have heard that it exists. I'm sure you've never seen it. There were some guys that came out, they were the Oakland Athletics years ago, early 2000s. They didn't have any money. They were a poor franchise, and they just became these sort of very, they really honed in on statistics. And a very simple one in baseball that makes sense is that for years, batting average was where it was at. What is the guy's batting average? What's his batting average? And then they came out and said, well, wait a minute, on base percentage is actually far more important because you could walk, right? Some guys walk a lot. Well, a walk is exactly the same thing as a hit. That's what they said. So what is the difference if a guy walks, if the guy, there's four balls and he gets to walk to first base versus getting a hit and he has to run to first base. What's the end result? First base, that's the end result. And so they said, well, that's a better metric, right? So I think what we're doing here is to say, look, there's clearly, there are limitations to using any of these single metrics outside of PRs. I think PR is the metric that like, if you're continuing to set PRs in different rep schemes, different set schemes, different, whatever, I think that that's the main driving force. But as you start to look at these other things, the problem with volume alone doesn't take into account intensity. Tunnage does take into account intensity except that you can still play the game and keep driving the tonnage up and not have enough intensity to drive a strength adaptation. And what you're saying is, there's probably a metric we could come up with that utilizes both tonnage over average intensity, right? Is that what you said somewhere in that ballpark? To get a number that say like, okay, now we can actually see what kind of progress we're making. That's interesting to play with it. I know we got a bunch of stats, nerds that listen to this. Let's figure that thing out and we'll plug it into some of the numbers that see what we come up with. Yeah, we need an intensity weighted tonnage number that we use. I think that would tell us more. Cause like, you know, I gave the example of my man Tim in the 36,000 pounds of tonnage for his press. And so, you know, trying to figure out what we would do next, it would be very useful for me to know what the average intensity was during that 36,000 pounds. It would let me make better programming decisions. The way it is now, I'm gonna have to actually go back and look at every program press workout that he did during that cycle, then iterate on that. And so the weighted thing would be better. So let's wrap it up. Yeah, we believe, I believe, I'll speak for you. There are only these three things that we can do when we program. And those three things give us a great deal of variability. You know, millions of options actually when we do the programming, but every decision that you make will boil down to manipulate one of those three things, the intensity, the volume, or the exercise selection. And to look at it any other way is I think to overcomplicate it. It's complicated enough because of the number of potential options that are available. So looking at it in those basic ways, I think is the cleanest way to do it. You could sit down and look at the man's program and say, hmm, we need to drive intensity this cycle. And then you know, because there's an inverse relationship between it and the volume, that the volume will have to come down. And then you can use variance. So you can drive the intensity by reducing some of the volume. And then you can also use variance to allow you to put more weight in the guy's hands and by using partials and things like that. So you can look at the problem at hand, think about the three options that are available and then use the variance inside those options to then get to the goal that you need for your trainee. That's a good general way of stating it, although I think it's also important to state the practical for the vast majority of people who are listening to this podcast, the goal is to get stronger. That's exactly right. So here's what we know. Regardless of what the goal is, as long as there is a goal, stress must be increased over time. We know that stress has to go up over time to keep making progress. Whether your goal is to run a marathon or whether your goal is to squat 800 pounds, right? But if your goal is to squat 800 pounds or to just get stronger, then while intensity is a variable that can be manipulated, the end goal is that intensity always goes up. Always goes up. Like it has to, right? And again, I'm talking about intensity, not just in terms of percentage of one rep max, but actual one rep max or actual load on the bar or actual magnitude, whatever you want. Like the actual weight on the bar, if the goal is strength, that is what the strength is force production. If for force production to go up, the weight must go up. Now we do recognize, and hopefully we flesh this out decently today and we'll do so in future episodes as well, that we can contribute to force production increases via manipulating volume and making volume go up. So certainly that is an important variable to use. But ultimately, ultimately, intensity has to go up if the goal is strength and ultimately stress must go up over time in order to keep driving that adaptation, past two. That was an interesting conversation for me. I hope other people enjoyed it too. Yeah, me too. Thank you so much for listening. This again, the Barbiologic Podcast and we will talk to you guys in just a couple of days. Thanks.