 Welcome to barbell logic rewind. So this is the barbell logic podcast. I'm Scott Hamburg. This is Matt Reynolds. He'll give you this whole CV here in a minute. We're gonna talk about an introduction to advanced programming today. Man, you sent that to me in a text message and we never prepare for anything that we do. Because why? Because we already know it. Because we're professionals. Right. No, because we wanted to have fun with this I think is the actual reason for I would agree. You know, if it becomes a job, probably not going to be fun. But when I saw that come through, I thought, gosh, you know, how do you do an introduction to advanced program? Because the thing about advanced programming is once you need it, you've already done all the introductory stuff. You've already done LP. You've started to understand some of the principles of the structure of the application model in an intermediate programming. And most people that are in the advanced arena kind of know what to do. I don't think so. I disagree. Yeah. Well, I think maybe, okay, maybe they know what to do for somebody else, but they don't. But they lack the objective. I don't even know that's true. I actually don't know that that's true. I understand why you're saying that and it makes logical sense. I just actually think my experience over the last couple years has been in it. In fact, it's not true. Yeah. Okay. I think that most people just don't understand advanced programming. I think that a lot of coaches don't understand advanced programming. Right. No, there are some coaches that have a great deal of experience with intermediate and advanced programming and those sorts of athletes and can be a great deal of help. But the average coach makes none of those representations. So to say otherwise is to be arguing something that no one claimed. Sure. I have some experience. Sure. Training advanced athletes. Those were friends that have taught you. Matt has taught me. In fact, this podcast came really from you teaching me. You know, we were having these conversations about these things. I was an intern at the time for you. We thought, gosh, we might as well roll tape on this, right? It's good. So that's where the podcast came from. But I have some experience with advanced athletes, but the advanced athletes I have aren't enormously strong because being an advanced athlete isn't defined by how much weight you're picking up. That's correct. Sure. So you can often have a 66-year-old lady who's a deep advanced athlete. Right. But not very strong. And is damn lucky to pull 185 off the floor first. Yeah. When you're talking about the load on the bar. Sure. And the magnitude of the weight makes a difference here as well. It makes a difference in advanced programming. So there's a little word about advanced programming from Hamburg. Yeah. So that said, I think good coaches, good barbell coaches, should at least strive to have a handle on advanced programming, right? Just like we should strive to have a handle on how to coach the snatch and the clean and jerk and things that we probably shouldn't do those things. Well, the general public shouldn't do those things probably that much, but should a barbell coach be able to coach those? If you're, I mean, look, here's the thing. We're constantly preaching this idea of pursuing excellence. Yeah. And if you were going to be the best barbell coach you could possibly be, then you should be able to coach all the things that are handled with a barbell. I agree with that. Right. And then in practice, the Pareto principle, I mean, 80% of what you're going to do, actually more than that, 90% of what you're going to do is helping people get through LP. Of course. Yeah. Very much is. But that doesn't mean that I actually think that the better you understand advanced programming, the better you are at coaching novices, even right? It just you start to see the big picture. It's like if you got that thousand piece puzzle, and you've got all these pieces, and they're laid out all over the table, but nobody gives you the box top, right? And you don't understand what you're actually putting together. And so you don't have the box off, you start to put the puzzle together and you get a piece over here and you get a chunk of puzzle pieces over here. And but you got this big like piece missing, you don't really understand how it all fits together. I used to talk about this when I was a history teacher. And most kids hear history, what kind of issues you teach? All history, world history, American history, mostly like those two. You know, I have a minor in the Arab Israeli conflict. Did you know that? It's true. That's a true story. No, I did not know that I do I have a minor in the Arab Israeli know what you have a minor in that the history of the Arab Israeli conflict. I just really liked the professor. And is there a PhD of that? I think that's what that guy had or like, yeah, I think he did. I think he had, I don't know. Anyway, it was good. So everything's coming into focus now, right? I know. I would recognize that kids, some of them would know more pieces of the puzzle than the other in the grand scheme of history, they would know like about the Revolutionary War and or they would know about the Civil War, they would know about like these just big chunks of time. This is why memorizing dates is important. Because you actually have to understand how it fits in the big picture. You have to understand the ribbon that binds it all together. And if you don't get that, if you don't get the whole box top of the puzzle, it doesn't work. It's like you can't fully understand even the beginnings of this. If you don't understand the end, it's the reason exactly the reason the way you do online great books, like you have to understand these things chronologically because you recognize this is how Socrates influenced Plato. This is how Plato's influence Aristotle. This is how right and you go right down the line, like we can't get it otherwise. We don't really understand it in a very clear sort of manner. And programming is the same way like, okay, everybody can understand novice LP. But not everybody understands intermediate programming. Most people don't understand the way you go from novice to intermediate. And then even less people understand what advanced programming looks like, and not just advanced programming, but how we move from intermediate into advanced. And this is how we started to really flesh out this idea really on this podcast and really sort of just live while we talked about it. This idea is a pickup track right of minimum effective dose of complexity isn't what we're actually doing. Just changing a single variable or the least number of variables that we can to make the smallest change possible to continue to drive progress, right, in order to increase stress. And over time, that stress recovery adaptation cycle becomes longer and longer and longer. And so it looks like this. And so we've walked all the way through those things in the Barbie logic podcast with regards to novice programming, and in regards to intermediate programming, and in the process to go from one to the next. But we really haven't touched advanced programming yet. It's because here we are 100 and whatever 10 episodes in whatever we are. Congratulations, by the way. I know, right? We've crazy crazy done. It's nuts. It's been awesome. It's actually it's been one of the joys of my life to be able to get this stuff out. And you know, and now we've really turned to the YouTube channel and doing sort of a similar thing in an easier digestible format, certainly more highly polished than you and I are on this podcast with less F words and other things. But it was fun. We're sort of at this point now that if we do what we say we do, which is walk through a systematic logical progression of all things sort of strength. It's time to talk about advanced programming. Yeah. So the novice can recover and put more weight on the bar in 24 to 72 hours, 48, 72 hours. Intermediate can put more weight on the bar, maybe on a weekly basis. Sure. And these are, you know, these aren't hard festivals. It's a heuristic. It's a way to think of it. H-E-U-R-I-S-T-I-C. And an advanced trainee is going to take, you don't know, a month or longer to put more weight on the bar. Let's say to set PRs. Yeah. PRs are really the ultimate driving factor for us, right? On everything when it comes to strength. Now, I mean everything. Like I track what's my double overhand single bedlift PR? What's my squat PR with knee sleeves? Yeah. What's my squat PR with no knee sleeves, knee wraps? What's my parallel squat PR? The parallel squat. What's my quarter squat? So no, I mean, yeah, of course, like we're constantly pushing for PRs. You know, you were talking to your client, Sean Richardson, about right now he is in this place where he's sort of in late, intermediate, early advanced programming where he's setting a new five rep PR every six weeks, a new three rep PR every six weeks, a new one rep PR every six weeks, right? In sort of that order and then starts the cycle over. And we've done an episode on RPE and I was thinking about when we were talking about the episode for RPE that RPE for him doesn't matter. Not yet. Because based on the definition, you just gave an advanced program and he's making progress and sending PRs every six weeks that would consider it advanced. RPE doesn't matter for him because I don't really care how hard the new five rep max is. I just care that there is a new five rep max. Even though you could put the weight on the bar every six weeks, you can get a personal PR every six weeks for five, three and ones, the training paradigms intermediate. Right. Yeah. That's why I think like, look, the weight on the bar certainly matters less than how long it takes you to recover and make progress from PR to PR. But I actually don't think that's the only thing. I think it's the right way to organize programming in talking about novice intermediate advanced, but I certainly do think magnitude on the bar matters. I think that total number of sessions matter, how long you've trained matters, like all those sorts of things like. Yeah, so let's keep going with this characterization of what these things are. So we say with novice recovers in a certain period of time, the intermediate puts weight on the bar after a certain amount of time in the advanced training gets a personal PR, which is different than weight on the bar, right? Sure. Maybe it's a new five rep max or a new five set of five max. Five by five maxes. And because the magnitude of the weight is often so great for the advanced trainee, it takes a long time to accrue the stress because they can't get it during a paradox. Yep. So darned heavy that they can't even do enough work on a Monday, get a PR on Friday. Correct. They can't do enough work on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Sure. To get a PR on Friday, let alone get the recovery. Sure. So in the paradox where the weight is so heavy, they can't move enough of it to get stronger. That's right. So how do you do it? So we have to start to do some trickery to spread out that accrual of work, that accrual of stress and manage their recovery so that they do not die on the platform, right? And then are able to exhibit an increased ability to produce force at some time in the future. Sure. And depending on how advanced you are, dictates how far in the future that time would be. Correct. I just recently got a deadlift PR, which is not an enormous PR for anyone but me. Yep. 17 months. As your coach, I'm embarrassed. Well, I mean, it is what it is. I was a head case. I probably missed one earlier in the year that I should have gotten. Yeah. But even if I missed that one that I should have gotten, I still think it was probably 11 or 12 month thing for me to have gotten that. Yeah. And you've had a lot of life stuff going on. You've launched another major business. You've, you know, like there's just been all kinds of crazy stuff going on in your life. And so training. It's real. Sort of not really taking a backseat, but more so a backseat than it did not long ago. And the amount of stress it takes for you to to drive progress is a lot more stress and your body really wasn't in a place where it could handle that level of stress. No. When you looked at the additional life stress that was going on in your multiple jobs that you carry between data storage and SSOC and online great books and all these things and the barba logic and the podcast. I mean, you know, you're juggling lots of balls right now. And so I haven't hit a deadlift PR in three years. Is that right? I think it's been three, maybe four years. I pulled 705. How long ago was that at the gym that I that's two and a half years ago? I think three years ago, three years ago. OK, I think it's been five, six, seven years since you've had this and I pulled 725. Hold on. I pulled 725 at a strong at that strength load. You mean I did 1600. So that's that would have been 2000. This is a great pod. That's in 14. So 2014, so four years since I pulled 725. I pulled 650 last Friday. It's pretty good. I'm getting close. I get it. You guys are like 75 pounds away, 75 pounds away when you pull 725 ain't that far. Yeah, 11 percent. And I was on a stiff bar, not a deadlift bar. Listen, I pulled 730 on a deadlift bar. I'm not going to tell you it was on a deadlift bar and it still counts as a PR. That's a PR. Yeah, you weren't taking a while. You pulled 650. No, I wasn't. I just pulled it in normal training. It was fine. I pulled 555 the next week because I was crushed still from the 650 pull a week before. So we'll see what I pull this week. I've got a heavy pull. I got to do this week. Some people are like, tell us about advanced training. I think we're telling you about it. Yeah. So what can you say about it? Well, I think there's some big picture things. So here are some big pictures that occur. So if we follow the progress of minimum effective dose changes in complexity, right? So we're going to change the complexity as little as we can from time to time. Why do we do that? So we know what works and what doesn't primarily, right? So could you change multiple variables at one time and have it work? Sure. You bet. And that's what happens is you abandon this template and do that one. Correct. Which is why it's always been done. So let me be clear. That's the way I've done it for the vast majority of my career. 18 years. You finish this program, you go to the next program. And then we kept chewing on this in the car and we're like, but that's not actually what works best. Here's what brought that out because we know that you do LP and you put weight on the bar three times a week. And then that doesn't work and you go put weight on the bar twice a week because you drop out. We're talking about Wednesday, light day, Monday and Friday look the same. And then you go text Smith and you do it once a week. So yeah, three, two, one. Yeah, cool. They're like, why do you do that? And we're like, well, wait a minute, do you actually even go from three sets of five on Monday to five sets of five? Or would it be better to go three sets of five to four sets of five to five sets of five or whatever way? And on Friday, would it be better to peel off two of the three sets of five on Friday or should we just pull one of those out and keep driving the intensity up? And then this Friday kind of become the intensity day and Monday slowly become the volume day. Like you start realizing that actually makes more sense. And where's the every 14 day PR and where's the every 21 day correct? Why is the every 28 day PR? Yeah, why would we go weekly to monthly? Why would you go from making PRs once a week to making PRs once a month? Where's the other stuff? And I think traditionally it went Monday, Wednesday, Friday to Friday, PRs and then to every six weeks. There really wasn't anything four week program. Sure. And then we go every six weeks and then you kind of go to 12 and 16s after that. Yeah, because that's kind of the standard, you know, the kind of block and DUP sort of which I actually think every advanced program is just either block or DUP. Yeah, so they're all the same. You get to the point where you're an intermediate programming. You're making progress once a week or say once every two weeks. You're training three days a week, full body days. And at some point, one of the bigger changes we make is we go from three days to four days. We do that because the amount of stress in a single day and the amount of time it takes to complete the day becomes too much and too long to get it done in time that our general population people need to get it done. Right. Like we can't go in. Most of them can't go in and do a two and a half hour long workout. The time thing and the paradox where they just absolutely cannot do enough work in a sense. It's just too much. And so we take that same amount of weekly work that's occurring in three days on three full body days and we split it to four days, but we split the days into up or lower sessions. Yeah. And in the beginning, it's the same amount of work. Yeah. It's basically the same amount of work, but it's spread out over four days, which means now the workouts are shorter, but there's more of them. So we'll do the four day split and we split it up so that you do pretty much the same amount of work that you were doing with the three day program in the course of seven calendar days in four sessions. Correct. Now, why don't we do a nine day split? You could. It just makes it easy for the calendar. I think it's the reason we do. Well, I think that it doesn't buy you anything. I think that extra rest between squat sessions doesn't buy you much. So on the four day split, you're getting two days of rest between your squat sessions. That's right. And let's say right amount. That's the right amount. So it's two days and three days. If we spread that out to three and four days. Right. I don't think it buys us anything. In fact, we can start to detrain depending on who the person is. So the four day split experimentally that we've determined that that's kind of the sweet spot. Yeah. And so then when you hold on this four day split, then you can start to add things and embellish the four day split. So that's usually where it's not the only time to do this. But for me, that's when I start to ring in the supplemental lifts. So now I've got my squat day. We've talked about this already. We've done a four day split episode. So go back and listen. But you've got your squat day and then I'll start doing a deadlift variation on the squat day. So I'll do essentially it's usually a rack pull or deficit deadlift. So that's going to be somewhere between four working sets in that session to maybe as many as nine total working sets. You might have five squat sets. Maybe that day and maybe three, three to six, three to six deadlift sets because it might be six sets of three. So that's six sets of four. It could be four sets of six, it could be five sets of five or whatever. Right. So five sets of three. And if you wanted to add some more work in one of those, then you're going to have to do something else on that session. So that's where these things come in. You might squat plain vanilla, three, four, five sets of five, then do your pulls, then you might do pot squats. Right. And so another variation, you might do leg press. You might do heavy prowler pushes or sled drags. And that is the place where we start to add accessory. And by the way, the accessory movements for me tends to be far heavier on the upper body stuff. Accessories is different than a supplement. Supplement would be something entirely different. A chin, a curl, a barbell. What makes it a supplemental lift? Start there. It supplements the work that we do in linear progression, typically. And so in my opinion, there are supplements because they work the antagonist muscle pair. Right. So the barbell row works the antagonist to the agonist that you work in the bench press. OK, that's fair. I know there isn't an actual that's actually not a bad way to think of it. Although I tend to still do that, I would still call both those accessory movements. But I'm not right and you're wrong. There isn't a definition. No, I'm right. You're going to have to do this, but I call supplemental lifts variations of the main lift. So for me, if it's a variant of the bench press or a variant of the press or deadlift or squat, it's a supplemental lift. Or even if it's a clean or so those big barbell movements are supplemental lifts. Now, so let's go back to my maybe is right. Let's talk about my OK. So yours is the antagonist. So on a press, the antagonist would be the chin. It's actually the pull up because they have the same grip. OK, that's fine. You're working that be an actually like scottism is. Yeah. Now, I actually put curls in that, but they're really accessories to the chin. Right. So like a big, heavy guy can't do enough chin sometimes, but he can work that bicep curl and it supports his chin, which ultimately supports this president's interest or accessories to the press and the bench. Yes, of course, I think they're supplements. OK, hold on. We're going to work because they don't work the agonist. Yeah, it's fine. It's similar. It shares movement. So I think we should table this to the accessory to the accessory episode quitter. So for now, the idea is this. Once we get to the four day split, we get to a world of possibilities to open. That's the point. The world of possible and we can start to bring in supplemental lifts, accessory movements, additional volume. And as time goes on, when we went from sort of, let's say, a Texas method style or heavy light medium style of training, where there's sort of a volume day and intensity day and maybe a light day for at least for some of the lifts. And we move that to a four day split. The total amount of work is basically the same, which means that over time, in order to drive the stress up, we must increase the amount of work. We must increase that via either intensity or volume. Now, we get to the point where, because we're so advanced, we cannot do enough intensity and volume, combination of intensity and volume on the main barbell lifts alone to continue to drive progress without bonking. And so we have to start adding additional slots. So that's the movement. So the bonk gets sort of sling for you. You're not recovered. You can't recover. You're not recovered. And you go in the next session and your third warm up feels like a work set. Correct. Oh, no. Correct. What is that? Yep. So I like to ramp up the intensity or the volume or both or something. We got to get the tonnage up in some way. So we'll often, I often start putting reps on three by five, four by four, right? Six by three, five by four. Yep. And I start six by four, five by five. And I try to add reps, address it and I might not be putting weight on the bar, but I'm building this person's capacity to do the work over time. And then you get to the point where it's just dumb. I'm not going to have a guy do eight by five. Yes. It gets to the point where it's too high. So then what do you do? Well, then you got to go pick one of these analogous lists. In the case of the squat, you're going to have a safety bar squat, right? Having box squat, having pod squat, tempo squat, tempo squat, right? Hell, you might have some west side belt squat machine somewhere. Sure. Now, you might even have a giant guy. Now we've got a leg press, maybe we've talked about this in the supplemental movements. When you pick those variants, you really have one of two directions you can go. So you can pick a variant where you can handle more weight on the variant. Rack pull. Rack pull, right? High pin squat or box squat. Or you're going to do a greater range of motion or a slower tempo to get more stress via the greater range of motion or tempo, which is really sort of a function of volume. So that's interesting because that idea is not covered in most of our programming. But that's clearly what's going on, right? So we can increase the time under tension. Time under tension. Time under tension clearly causes training stress. Of course. So deficit, deadlift, how much do you think time under tension carries over for your competition lifts? Like if there's a continuum of supplements that carry over, right? Where I think a tempo squat carries over more than a leg press. Let's use something like a deficit, deadlift, because I'll answer a question with a question. We know a deficit, deadlift drives up your deadlift. I have enough data at this point with my clients to know deficit, deadlift drives up the deadlift. The question is why? Is it because the increased time under tension? Or is it because it forces you to pull heavy weights under a less than efficient starting position, a greater range of motion, starting position, so that when you pull that and you're in a better, more efficient position to pull, it just feels so much easier because you've gotten used to pulling in a less efficient position. I think it's a third thing. OK. Where work equals force times distance. You do X amount of work. Sure. You do more work. Correct. You train, train, train, and you can do W equals the amount of work you can do. OK. Where work equals force times distance. When it comes to show time and you reduce the distance, you can still do X work. So you then it can exert more force over the shorter distance. Very well, maybe true. Here's how we could test it. You could do a rack ball from this eye. You might double your deadlift because you can do X amount of work. Sure. When D is very, very small, you can drive F up way, way, way, way, way up. Sure. I think that's what it is. Sure. Yeah, that makes sense. That's fair. I've still used that low deficit deadlift, like a one inch to it's even a single mat, a half inch to three quarter inch deficit deadlift. The last few weeks I've experimented with that before with very advanced lifters and had them do all of their deadlifts standing on one mat. That's a mental toughness. And then pulling that and then they go to a meet and they're like, oh, I feel like I'm in the best position ever. It's like I'm playing mind games with them. Yeah. And it seems to work. So anyway, as we become more advanced, we're able to do those things. So we start to add the supplemental list where it either increases the amount of work, time, under tension, range of motion, all those things are sort of same. And those are I would all argue those are all sort of functions of volume on some level, right? That's the time of tension is a volume, right? That five sets of five of a deficit deadlift because it's more work than five sets of five of a regular deadlift. You had to move more. You had to move the same weight more distance, right? Or whatever, then becomes a functional volume or the one that is a rack pull, which becomes really in a function of intensity. We're able to lift more weight and we're able to do that as we move closer and closer into or into advanced. I can't logo the time under tension thing. You can't what? I can't logo the time under tension thing. I think we have to permanently add that to the training variables. Not that I want to do body building time under tension curls, right? But what good does like a hyper maximal squat walkout? Do you there's a psychological effect, right? You get used to standing up under something very, very heavy and walk it out and you get the knee shakes and all that stuff. But man, you've got to get your abs super tight. Like you can't do it casually at all. I think there's a training effect there and you stand there for 30 seconds with 20 percent over your PR. I think there's a training effect. Yeah. Yeah, we've experimented with that some. You know, I've talked about this a lot that with press starts where you go five percent over your press and just try to press start it. And then everybody magically hits a PR on week three with a press start weight that's five percent heavier than their all time max. So I actually you'll be mad about this. I actually learned about the walkouts. This is from Jen Thompson, you know, bench press specialist. Yeah. Like she'll just do these holds. Oh really? Crazy holds. 500 pound holds for her. Yeah, like she presses in the mid threes. I think bench presses in the mid threes and she'll unrack 500 and just then rack it like every week. How well? Yeah, it works. So we've talked about all these sorts of things before. And so people are like, what's new here? The thing about it is we're constrained by, of course, person's ability to exert force and do work or work is different than force. Work is force times distance. Sure. Their ability to exert force and do work in the calendar. Yep. And their ability to recover from that stuff. So we end up doing all of these tricks to get the tonnage up so that we can increase all their abilities, their ability to do the work, their ability to exert the force and their ability to recover. We want to increase all of those things. Sure. And we have over time with a large training cohort found that we can make change by change by change. And we've made a lot of changes that didn't work, right? Yep. We've learned stuff that doesn't work very well. So we talked about this with Andy Baker in a High-Low-Medium episode. He talks about High-Low-Medium and we kind of all know what that is by now. If you haven't, go back and listen to that. Texas Method, in my contention, is actually a High-Low-Medium program. Heavy Light-Medium. I mean, I'm sorry, Heavy Light-Medium. Yeah, it's high. I get it. And then Andy will stretch it out so that he ends up doing a heavy week, a light week, and a medium week. Sure. So then his high is Heavy Light-Medium isn't a weekly program. Well, actually, it is a weekly. Right. So he does a micro cycle. Right. There's still a heavy light medium day on the heavy week. But the heavy week has higher stress across the board. Yes. So it's the highest stress week and then a light stress week and then a medium stress week. So he goes, if you're looking at a calendar, YouTube friends, if you're looking at a calendar, it goes Heavy Light-Medium from left to right on the calendar. It's much bigger. But it also goes Heavy Light-Medium from top to bottom on the calendar. That's exactly right. And then you can go two heavy weeks, two light weeks, two medium weeks. Of course. Yeah. We're in block nearly. And this is what happens, right? And so then you get to the point where I eventually Hang on. I got to complete my picture. You go, HLM like this, two heavy weeks, two light weeks, two medium weeks, three heavy weeks, three light, three medium. Skip a heavy week because it was too darn heavy last time. Legume and D-load. Now we're at light, medium, heavy. You're 100% in block. That's right. And you did it all with minimum effective dose changes. And I think you can try any changes you want. And then if you keep the ones that work, right? Like if you had 40 years to train a guy, he never gets injured. And you try anything that you want and you keep the stuff that works and continue to make changes. I think all roads lead to block. I think they go through block, ultimately. And all roads lead to. And then they end up at D-U-P. Always, right? And then death. And then death. Because D-U-P is high frequency. So you get to the point where blocks. Now you're running a block system that's high volume for a block, right? Three to four weeks of high volume building work capacity. Three to four weeks of transmutation phase, which is moderate volume, moderate high volume. And you're moving from moderate intensity to high intensity. And then the final phase, which is very high intensity and you peel off all this volume. That's very, very heavy. And you go from that on a four day split to two lower body days, two upper body days. And then how do you keep adding stress? You have to increase frequency. You have to increase frequency. If block starts with the accumulation phase at six, that's five. What are you going to do? You're going to go to eight sets of five? Yeah, you could. You certainly could. But you know what else you could do? Instead of going six sets of five one day and a max set of five the other day and three sets of five back offs, you're talking about 10 sets of five total. You could go to 12 sets of five over three sessions. Right. So we started off squatting three times a week. Got two darn heavy. We backed off. We went to twice a week of the four day split. By the way, we're talking about heavy, light, medium. And so there are some people that are listening to this going, and I don't hamburger's talking about that. And then the same was block. I can do heavy, light, medium and block. Of course you can. Right. All of these things are philosophical principles. So here's the here's the problem. When somebody takes a program as written says, that's the program and any deviation thereof is no longer the program. You're looking at it wrong. It's not a point. Their concept is conceptual. Texas method is heavy, light, medium. It's the same damn program, right? It's just a variant of that program, right? Heavy, light, medium, heavy, that medium where all the days were like the heavy day is everything's heavy. The light day is everything light. The medium day is everything medium to the heavy day is just the higher stress day and you do one heavy movement, one light, medium, one medium and you do the same thing throughout and you have a light stress day, a heavy stress day and a medium stress day to the point that you go to a four day split and you do the same thing to the point that you go one week at a time to two weeks at a time, to three weeks at a time to block. So all of a sudden like what I'm going to do now I'm going to add eventually I'm going to have to squat three times a week. I'm going to have to bench three times a week. I'm going to have to press three times a week. I'm going to have deadlift three times a week. Hello, DUP. Right. Now you're there. I have to bench five times a week. That's where it goes. Now, what we're talking about life, they'll go on vacation, they'll get hurt, the whatever, and they'll never get themselves to the point where they're actually having a bench press five times a week. I certainly know that that certainly is a possibility for somebody who's, well, I haven't missed a week of work of training in nine years. Well, I guess you're going to have to bench press five times a week. That's the deal. But for most people, life eventually will get in the way. You'll get sick, you'll get hurt, you'll get injured. And what do we do when that happens? Yeah, a little stretch of LP. When I go back to LP, because it works, it works. So you were talking about these heavy light medium in terms of the stress and not necessarily the weight. You just did that. That's actually how I think about it. That's why I tend to say, hello, medium, right? I don't necessarily, particularly for an advanced guy, I don't necessarily think about it in terms of how much weight is there because it really is about stress, stress, because, like I said earlier, in my opinion, all roads lead at least through block to DUP, I totally agree. And so as they're hitting through block, the H day or the H week, it might not be able to really actually be that heavy, but it can be darn stressful. That's right. That's why I'm more stressed. That's why I get the Freudian slip about high, low, medium, because for me, I think about it in terms of the stress. Now, would I be safe in this sort of introduction to advanced programming? We'll talk more and more about advanced programming over the next several months, I'm sure on the podcast that we believe that for 99.9 percent of the people, everyone's going to start at LP three days a week. They will move into a heavy, light, medium, some form of program, which could be Texas Method Old Man, Texas Method, actual heavy, light, medium, whatever. They're going to move into that. Right. They will eventually move into four day split. That will eventually transition into block and that will eventually transition into DUP. So LP to heavy, light, medium to four day split to block to DUP intensity in LP. So the singular thing we're driving up is intensity. Volume is the same. Frequency is the same. It's a heavy, light, medium. Now we have to actually start to. We're doing both. We're doing both, right? We have to actually start to wave both volume and intensity in order to increase stress across the board. And that waving is what we call periodization. Periodization, right? There is essentially no periodization with LP. It's just linear. That's the point to four day split because we can no longer get the amount of work done in three workouts that needs to be done. And we can't recover from those in three. We can't squash and smash three times a week. That's correct. So now we have to go to four and it's not just about going to four, but it's actually that you've got two lower body days and two upper body days so that you have more time of rest between squats or lower body days and more time of rest between upper body days. By the way, at this point, when I'm doing programming for someone, I am programming lift by lift. Correct. You might get to one of those things like you're going to get there probably on press before you get there on deadlift. Maybe. Right. Doesn't matter. But the idea is that you don't automatically become intermediate at all four lifts at the same time. Right. That's right. So you make the transition one lift at a time, but eventually you'll be there on all of them. Well, yeah, but everybody's lifts are in different stages for everything. I think that also characterizes the advanced trainee as you've got to go lift by lift. Right. Yeah. So a good way to say that is this is that I know for me at this point I can really only make progress on the bench press via driving up volume. Volume is the thing for me that drives my bench press. I can't do it with intensity. Intensity tears the peck off the bone for me. Right. I can only drive my squat via intensity volume. I can't do because my hips right now, not because I'm a snowflake. It just is. It just is the thing. His hips are conical. That's true, actually. The ball is actually a cone is a cone. So there's a round slot and he puts this cone in there. And so it doesn't touch. I mean, it touches in certain places and does it can't float in there. And what are you going to do? So you have hip dysplasia, like a French bulldog. Yeah. And then my press and my deadlift are a little more normal where I can drive them up with both, with a variant of both. So, you know, I still tend to lift heavy, but if I don't continue to do the back offsets and I slack on the back offsets, the progress will halt. But also if I just do the back offsets and I don't do the heavy, the progress also halts. And so that's pretty standard. And so we have to take one lift at a time. I'm starting to coach Miss Nikki Sims. Internet superstar. Internet superstar, Nikki Sims. And the first thing I asked her was like, what's worked? What hasn't like, give me a starting point. So I know, and she said, well, you know, volume works well for me on deadlifts. Can't just keep driving up in Tennessee. I need some volume on the deadlifts. And a lot of people can't and I don't need volume here. Right. And so she's deadlifting north of four. So she is advanced very individualized. But the point, I think that's the takeaway with this introduction is that everybody will follow the same yellow brick road here, moving Oz from LP to HLM to four days split to block to the UP everybody. And we do it one step at a time. We don't go from LP and then just flip the switch and be doing HLM. Although you can, you can, but it just makes more sense to us to change that single variable at a time. Yeah, I love that stage. So you go PR Monday, Wednesday, Friday, PR, PR, PR, PR every week. You get three. I love that stage. I love the stage where you get twice a week. Yeah, we're Monday and Friday, Monday and Friday. Man, I love it. And I love the stage where you get them every Friday. Yeah. And I love it when you get them every other Friday. I love it. And then even you get them every third Friday, then once a month and then every six weeks. And I don't want to skip those. Yeah. And traditionally, you win three times a week, then once a week, then once every six weeks and then once every eight to twelve. Yeah. Now, arguably, that wasn't so bad because you might get one of these PRs, one of these eight week PRs. How it might be 15, 20 pounds, one of the big lifts, though. Sure. So were they losing time? I don't know. I don't know either. I don't know. You know, sometimes a guy can go get a 10% PR as an early advanced guy after 12 weeks of training. It's hard, though, to ask a client from a business perspective who's making PRs every four to six weeks to wait for 12 to 16 weeks before making one. Well, let's don't even make the big business argument for people who aren't semi pro. Sure. For people who aren't on my time to train. It's a really long time to ask them to train, you know, to string together eight to 12 weeks of unbroken sessions in order to get that realization of essentially perfect training. That's really hard to get there when, you know, that brings up a good point. If you're an intermediate guy and you're in Texas Method, if you're in Texas Method, let's say you need all three sessions in the Texas Method, arguably, maybe not. You might not need the Wednesday, but you need all three sessions to get the PR that week. Sure. And if you wreck one of those, you lose the week. Yep. It's not that it wasn't for anything, but you really kind of lose the week. Flash forward and you're on a six or an eight week program. You honk that up very much. You lose a month or two months. That's exactly right. And I really want to avoid putting my client in that situation. That's exactly right. Because the kids get food poisoning or the kids get the stomach flu and then you get the stomach flu and you lose six weeks of training. Yeah. So I think I call her out on this this episode or the last one, but I love her. She's great, but she just flushed the last four days down the toilet. Well, yeah, so she yeah, but the problem was we knew training was going to have to take a back seat for a couple of weeks and we're going to have to like deload her and work back up. So like, look, we've got to hit some numbers so we have something to chase to this next round before you leave. She's like, perfect week before I leave, it'll be perfect. I'm ready to go. Not a big deal. Not like the day before, but like Miss three workouts. Well, yeah, and she's a really good lifter and she's made lots of progress and she'll do just fine. She's excited to train when she gets there and she'll need it for some stability and it's going to ground her in a new place. But but it's just like that. You know, we've got a great training cycle and all of a sudden you just you flush it down the toilet. You got to be really careful. It's one of the things I don't like about block that I actually like about DUP. DUP is actually a little more forgiving. You're a little more ready to be piqued at any given time on DUP in a block. You're not. So if you get in a block and you get sick for a week, like, I mean, I've had clients that get sick again. You get sick in transportation for a week. It's over. We got to restart the whole thing, right? If you're like, oh, I'm six weeks out from a meet and I'm in transportation phase and I get the flu and don't train for a week. I got to change the whole program. Like, no, you were in the middle of transmuting and nothing got transmuted. Right. Whatever the hell that word means. So nothing transmuted. Yeah, you were able to sublimate your work capacity to force production. And so it's not very forgiving. So yeah, you're on a 12 week program. You screw up a week. 12 weeks is gone, right? It's a problem. So no, it's good. That is a little intro into advanced programming. We'll talk a lot more about it. Yeah, we keep delving into it a little bit more, a little more. And I know that it's frustrating for people because they want it to be more prescriptive and they would really like us to say, this is how you do this thing. Well, like, again, I think that we got that point where we were saying, like, look, if you don't think you're going to pass through an HLM, a four day split, a block and DUP, you're wrong. That's where all of this goes. Yeah, that's where all of it goes. Yeah. And so you can name your program whatever you want to name it. You can call it Shiko, Shiko's DUP. Right. You can call it West Side Conjugate. That's block. German volume. Sorry, kids, show me the program. I'll tell you what it is. And if it doesn't fall into one of those, it's not a good program. Probably not. It is one of those. Yeah, if it's not one of those, it's using some concept like muscle confusion or whatever. And you just can't, you know, nobody gets any world records on this. No, correct. We're still looking for strength. It's an important thing to say early on. That's right. So if you're trying to be an advanced cyclist, you're trying to be an advanced bodybuilder, you're trying to be an advanced crossfitter, it's going to be different. You know, CrossFit truly does true concurrent training. High-level crossfitters have to be good at everything. They have to be almost great at everything, but they can't be world-class at anything. But they're a journalist. You know, I just saw Camille LeBlanc. She just did an Olympic weightlifting meet. I've been following her for a while. She seems to do that after the games. All the time. Almost every year. And, you know, that's a great idea for one of those people. Well, there you have it. The thing about advanced programming is you've got to pay attention to who the individual is and know where they are. Everybody, after they get out of intermediate, it's advanced from me to Eddie Hall. Yeah. So there's a lot of variability in how you would treat that. So if you've got any questions, you need to coach. Send us some more questions about that, actually. And that will help us figure out where we need to go to help kind of elucidate these ideas. Again, follow us on Stitcher. We haven't talked about that in a while. Follow us on Stitcher, Google all of your sort of Android outlets. By the way, did you know that the Android phone is the Camaro of smartphones? It's the Pinto. No, it works, but no finesse. No finesse. If you send me a text on the screen, we're not friends. Right, it's pretty simple. Go check that stuff out and tell a friend about us, and hopefully we can leave the woodpile a little taller when we found it. Thanks for listening.