 Welcome to Barbell Logic, Rewind. This is Scott and I got Matt over here with me and I wanna do this in the pre-roll again. We do this for free, we love doing it, but it's a big help to us if you'll go to your favorite outlet, whether that's iTunes or Stitcher or whatever it is, YouTube, even if you're watching these videos on YouTube and give us a good review, that's a big help to us. It helps us get more listeners and helps us spread the gospel of strength. We're gonna talk in a minute here about Reynolds Old Man Texas Method. People know it exists out there and there are a lot of people that wanna know what the heck it is. Sure. And I have people ask me all the time what it is and so we're gonna expose that. Let's talk about Old Man Texas. First, we'll be telling you a little bit about what Texas Method is, right? Texas Method is the textbook example of intermediate programming. In an office program, we go up in weight every time we go in and train. So we train and apply stress, we recover and we adapt and we can express that adaptation the next time we go in and then we become an intermediate. We can't do that anymore. We can't recover between the sessions but we can recover over the course of a week. We can apply a big stress on Monday in the classic Texas Method. It's five fives, big stress. We have a little deload in the middle of the week. We might do three fives at 80% of Monday, perhaps. And then on Friday, we're gonna do about 10% more, approximately 10% more than Monday for a big set of five. So that's the classic Texas Method which is a man killer for older people and less than optimal athletes. So you've tuned that down or maybe up, modified it for the rest of us. So when I think about Texas Method, I think about to stay in the heart and soul of Texas Method, you've gotta have a volume day on Monday, a lighter day on Wednesday. It's not a deload day, it's a light day. And it's not a deload. In an intensity day, a heavy day on Friday. And so can we keep that feel without losing our soul? And so it doesn't become something that is not Texas Method, but make it so that it's something that guys who are middle age and older, because Texas Method was written for guys like Chase Lindley and Steven Gunn. These guys are 19, 21 years old who also have a lot of time on their hands. You can train and recover. They're big and strong and they're just like walking bottles of testosterone. So what happens when we're 50 or 40 or 60 and we can't handle that amount of volume? So much has been talked about this lately and so I am confident that the stance for the vast majority of lifters who are over 40, say over 40, that we know that they can handle the intensity pretty well. They can stay heavy. Yeah, so that big, heavy set of fives is not a big problem for an older person. That's usually fine, but the volume kills them. And frequency also will kill them a little later. So actually it seems like volume starts to kill you first, like the volume you just can't handle. And then after a while, you can't squat three times a week. You can only squat twice a week. But in the beginning, usually the frequency can stay the same. The intensity continue to go up. So the driving metric is intensity, but the volume has to come down a little bit from the traditional Texas method that five sets of five. And so when I say old man, Texas method, and I don't just give it to old men, as a matter of fact, you just kind of, matter of fact, you may have named it old man, Texas method. No, I think you named it after me. Oh, that may be, that's true. That sounds better, right? It could be young woman Texas method too, right? They're low testosterone by definition, you know? Only the interesting thing is that most women, especially middle-aged women, as well, can handle a little more volume because of the neurological inefficiencies that women have. The intensity, it's harder to make that the single driving factor, because it doesn't give them enough stress. So a single set of five at deadlifts doesn't provide the same amount of stress on a female as it does on a male. Yeah, they'd be a lot better with two, three sets of three or whatever. So you were saying in the keeping of the spirit of the Texas method, you know? I think that it's more like that the Texas method demonstrates like three really important things for intermediate programming, which is, you gotta nail a guy with some volume, then you gotta give him a break for a minute. But he still needs some more volume to grease the groove and he probably needs a little more stress because he couldn't do seven sets of five on Monday, right, so he still needs a little more stress. So we hit him again on Wednesday with something a little less, but he's still greasing the groove, he's still getting some stress. And then by Friday, he's recovered enough. So it's a tinker toy box, you know, of tools or toys that show us how to program for an intermediate person. It is, and actually I've heard Sully say this too, although you start walking a fine line that you can't think of Texas method as the stress recovery adaptation. So it's not like the Monday is the stressor and the Wednesday is the recovery and the Friday is the adaptation, it's not that. You have to have Wednesday, it's not just a recovery thing, you have to hit them with Wednesday. Yeah, so Wednesday, what most people don't know about who haven't done it, is that Wednesday is actually never easy. It's always hard because you're not recovered from Monday. If Wednesday is easy, you move to intermediate too early. Right, right. Or the weights are just way too light still on Monday or something. So it's Monday is supposed to beat you up enough that Wednesday you're not recovered. Yeah, the first time I programmed that for somebody, they do their five fives or their three fives, you know, in the case of Old Man, Texas, and they'll be like, man, I'm looking forward to Wednesday and I'm like, yeah, yeah, you bet. And then they do it, it's almost as hard as Monday. Yeah, so you know, Monday they're squatting 315 for their volume and then on Wednesday they're squatting 265 and they're like, it's gonna be nothing. And they do 265 and like, oh, this is so slow. It's felt worse than Monday. Like right, that's the point, right? So because the idea is that the stress recovery adaptation cycle no longer takes 24 to 48 hours, it takes an entire week. And so we actually have to accumulate fatigue over the course of the week and then really recover essentially over the weekend. And so that we can be ready to go again the following Monday. So did we even say what it is? So Old Man, Texas. No, I'm about to. Go ahead, sir. So these are the changes that I make. So we've laid out what Texas method is in the spirit of Texas method and keeping into the spirit of Texas method. Here's what Old Man Texas method looks like. Monday rather than five sets of five on squats just becomes three or four sets of five on squats. And that just depends on really two things, age and how far on the bell curve they are on the athletic spectrum. So if they are 45 and relatively athletic, they can do four sets of five as opposed to three sets of five. And if they are 60 and very much general population, normal, not very athletic, three sets of five is four sets of five seems to be too much, right? Now five sets of five will kill them. And so we do three sets of five on squats. On Monday, we do the same reduction. So 10 to 20% reduction on Wednesday for two or three sets of five, again, depending on recovery and what we're seeing on a week to week basis. And so usually I'll start them at three sets of five on Wednesday. And when the weight becomes heavy enough that the stress is intense enough then I can drop a set out on Wednesday and just go two sets of five as opposed to three. And then Friday is one heavy set of five for squats. So the only thing that's different between old man, Texas on squat and normal Texas method is the Monday session basically. Right. Yeah, so I wanna reiterate this. Wednesday is not a D-load, right? So you said they get an option of 80 or 90% of Monday and they can do two or three sets of five. If you're setting this up for yourself you don't wanna set it up so that Wednesday's rest. You don't wanna do that. Like it needs to be an RPG eight and a half. So if you do two sets of five and you're done with that second set of five and like I smoked those, you better do a third set. Yep. And you probably should go up another 10 or 15 pounds and make sure you've gotta get a little bit of grind on that, right? And so any of it does heavy three sets of five, four sets of five, five sets of five as an intermediate on Monday cannot be recovered by Wednesday. It's not possible that that's what being an intermediate is. And so then that's the squats and we continue that on for a good long while. Over time, it also gives me a really good opportunity to get a little bit of peaking. And so I can actually move from three sets of five on Monday eventually to five sets of three. And then sometimes I'll even go to four sets of three and then three sets of three and then maybe two sets of three with a couple of backups. And so again. For your Monday. For my Monday, right? And then I may go up to work up instead on Fridays after I've run this for a few months and I'm trying to peak somebody. Maybe they're doing the strength lifting meat in the fall. Then we'll work up instead of a max set of five on Friday, we'll do a max set of three. And we'll run that for a while. And then eventually we'll do a max double and then we'll kind of be peaked going into the strength lifting meat. So you can do that. It gives you that opportunity as well. Peaking process from going from the three sets of five or four sets of five on Monday and one set of five on Friday with the lighter Wednesday to a true peak to a let's test our max is usually about a six week period, maybe eight. So six to eight weeks total. You know, people that I'm coaching right now I've got actually quite a handful of guys are doing squats in their triples right now as opposed to fives. Now do I think that triples provide enough stress long-term to keep initiating that adaptation that I need? The answer is no. But it certainly works well for a short period of time to peak them and get them that strength expression. And so at some point, I think one of the things that I talk about with Jordan Feigenbaum a lot is one set of five enough or one set of three enough to be a stressor enough to drive strength adaptations. And in general, my answer is yes. But over the long-term, if all ever do is a top set of three and it tops at a three again, it tops at a three again. Like that's, you know, like I can't keep making the way to go up forever. What a guy might get progress on triples for like six weeks. Maybe. Yeah, the high end, the aggressive end. And so what Jordan would argue is that a top set of three is actually an expression of strength. It doesn't really create the stressor enough to cause a stress to cause the adaptation. I actually don't agree with that entirely, especially when you're not adapted to it. So as long as you haven't been adapted to that top set of three, it's a super heavier weight than you've ever used in the past. I certainly think it can be enough stress to drive adaptation, especially among an older population. But I don't think it lasts forever. No, it doesn't last forever. And not only is it maybe a stressor or even what Jordan says in expression, it's good practice. Like sure, you know, so if you're gonna be peaking for me, you need to be unracking lots of times. Like you win a lot of first reps. So eventually you get down to the singles, you know, so they're practicing moving a heavy single. Because when, you know, as a novice, you've always got five reps to get a good one in, you know, and they're all submaximal, even if it's hard. So we don't get that luxury, we're an intermediate and it's gonna go to the main. Yeah, that's another reason as a meat approaches that I like things like five sets of three as opposed to three sets of five, because it gives you five first reps instead of three first reps. That first rep is the only thing that matters in a meat. Yeah. Right. So that's why we do squats on the Old Man, Texas. The way we do presses and bench presses is we often will still alternate press and bench press, but we start to play with the rep ranges there as well. And so I'll often do most older guys can handle four sets of five or even five sets of five on press and bench press because it doesn't recommend. So they might press on Monday, five sets of five or four sets of five. They would bench press on Wednesday, three sets of five. They would then on Friday work up to a five rep max or I can start them out doing five sets of three if I want more volume and work them towards a five rep max or top set of three. And then the next week it would flip flop and they would bench twice and press. Once the idea there is there's no light day in the pressing, the pressing and the benching. There's a volume day and a heavy day and a volume day and a heavy day. So any variation of three sets of five, four sets of five, five sets of five for the volume day and for the heavy day it could be multiple sets of three. It could be as much volume as five sets of three. It could be one set of five. It could be two sets of three. It could be down to one set of three over time. The key for the intensity day, the heavy day is that the weight continues to go up. Right, so in the beginning you said you might have a guy press on Monday five fives at a hundred percent. Okay, just for example. And then on Friday you might have you move five triples for like a hundred and ten? A hundred and six hundred? Correct, okay, okay. Exactly right. Yeah, I haven't done that, but I dig it. And then the idea is like what you're doing on the intensity day is that the weight constantly goes up. And so when the volume is such that the weight can't go up anymore, then we're gonna drop the volume first and keep driving the intensity up. And so every time I do the intensity day, so let's say instead of using percentages, let's use pounders. Let's say, let's say for sake of argument, they're gonna bench press their intensity day on Friday is 200 pounds. And they're gonna do 200 pounds for five sets of three. So that's 15 reps at 200 pounds. And then their next intensity day is gonna be three, four more workouts later, right? Bench intensity, then they're gonna press normal and they're gonna bench volume and then press again and then bench so you're still like four sessions away from doing bench intensity again. The next time you do bench intensity, the intensity has to go up. And so if I'm gonna do 200 pounds, four workouts before I've gotta go to 205, four workouts later, if I can still do five sets of three, I'll just, I'll hang on. You bet. And when I can't do that anymore, I'll go four sets of three or three sets of three or one set of five or, and so, but I like triples there as we move along. We've done tons of fives. Remember the person that's doing this often has come from all of these fives on the linear progression. And so basically the press and the bench press are just alternating between volume and intensity. So you get a bunch of volume on your press on Monday, your bench on Wednesday, intensity again on Friday. So next Wednesday is a midweek press. So what do you do with your midweek press, which is next week? Usually three sets of five. Just regular three sets of five at maybe 90% of the intensity day. Sure. Something like that. Yeah. Or a slight increase from the five sets of five day. It's gonna be in between those. Yeah. Yeah, it works pretty well. And what I don't do, and I'm not even saying that this is wrong, it's just that what I don't do is I don't introduce supplemental movements yet. What a lot of people do is they'll do like close grip bench press for the bench press movement that day. Is it wrong? No, it's probably not wrong. It's just that for me, because I think so systematically, so kind of I've got this pragmatic sort of systematic progression, then the rep ranges become the variable that I'm playing with to drive the adaptation and the adaptation I'm trying to drive is that the intensity goes up. So as long as I can do that, I'm making progress. As soon as I introduce another movement, I've introduced another variable and it makes it a little harder to quantify which is the thing that's driving the intensity up. There is a time to introduce the supplemental lifts. For me, it's after this step. You know, a guy that's just right out of a linear progression and is going into Oman, Texas, he's still a pretty green lifter. I don't really like introducing variants or anything yet. It's an unnecessary complication, like you can still make progress, just bench pressing. You do dumbbell bench presses at that point probably. Of course. And so it's actually, you kind of get a chicken or the egg sort of question where could you do other programming that would make you a little stronger, faster? I actually think yes. Maybe. Like swing the pendulum all the way, coming out of linear progression, especially coming out of let's say you do six weeks of Texas Method or Oman Texas Method, some Texas variant. If you put somebody on six weeks of max effort training, their maxes are gonna go up a lot. Yep. The problem is, is that you're putting the cart for the horse. You're skipping some important steps there and some important needed stressors to continue to drive this train long-term. So what I need to do is I need to continue to, so if we look at it from the systematic perspective, if what I'm doing is I'm doing nothing but three sets of five on the linear progression and I'm adding a little bit every time. And then I get to the point that I can't do that anymore and now I'm moving to where I'm making progress once a week, then to add anything else to that, to add a supplemental lift or to add max effort lifting or to add any of those things, is jumping over some necessary steps that I'm missing the progression that I would get out of that. Those stresses become important for me. So what exactly are those necessary steps you think? Yeah, so I think that you have to make, to me when I'm looking at the long-term athletic development model, the lifter. I use that term, that's actually a term that I'm stealing, I didn't come up with that LTAD. The original concept of this was actually from the Soviets, the Soviets had the PASM, the process for achieving sports mastery. And so there's some good papers written, Tom Mysolinsky wrote his master's thesis on this. It was actually on the development of the Russian conjugate system, which is different than West Side says it is. But the Soviet Union, they were always looking at the long-term model. So like, what are we gonna get out of these people, out of these athletes over the course of decades rather than what can I get out of them today? And so the easiest way to understand this is in the United States today, in sports primarily, we allow our kids to specialize very, very early. And so you get these boys who are in the fourth grade and their dad decides they're gonna be a major league baseball player. And so they pull them out of all the other sports and they only play baseball year round. So they play school ball during school season and they play AAU ball and they travel with teams all the time. And inevitably what happens is that they get burned out on baseball and they quit or they're just not developing all these like various motor patterns as they're going through puberty, which is important. And so what the Soviets did was they actually exposed all of their kids to a tremendous amount of motor patterns for a long, long time. And they wouldn't let them specialize for as long as possible. So they all played soccer and they all did gymnastics and they all swam and they all did calisthenics and they like seven or eight of these things, they all did trampoline. And so they just exposed them to as many motor patterns as possible. And then at the end, when they couldn't hold them back anymore, then it was the last possible moment where they could let them specialize and they would let them specialize. Now it was dependent on the sport. So if you were gymnastics, you would specialize a little earlier than you would in others because you kind of hit your peak at 16, 17, 18 years old. Whereas if it was weightlifting, they wouldn't let them specialize till they were 17 or 18 and they would hit their peak at like 22 to 26. And so what we would often see is that at junior Olympics, this is like in the 70s, in the 60s, 70s, early 80s, we are killing, America kills the Soviets in the junior Olympics. And when we get to the actual Olympics, they kill us. Because they have more well-rounded athletes. Now I take that same concept and I apply it to my lifters and I go, okay, what I wanna do is, I don't wanna jump the gun. There's no reason to do an eight week long program post LP. That's an eight week long program is an advanced program. Is there a time to do eight week long programs? Yes. At what point does that come? Well, when month long programs don't work anymore. Right. And so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pick these basic lifts. So for normal, especially older people, they're gonna concentrate on four main lifts. It's just the squat, the deadlift, the bench press and the press. They're gonna do that linear progression for as long as they can. When they can't do linear progression anymore, they're gonna move to a weekly progression that is the same lifts. Introduces just the tiniest little bit of variable which is this change to where I get volume on Monday, lighter on Wednesday, heavy on Friday. Some variation of that. And so if you're 19, that's five sets of five on Monday and if you're 50, then it's three sets of five on Monday, right? And I'm gonna milk that as long as I can. And then when that doesn't work anymore, then I'm usually by that time, I'm gonna try to peak one of my lifters. I'm gonna peak them and either run a mock meet at some point or I'm gonna convince them to get into a power lifting meet or strength lifting meet and do that so that I can peak them at that point. They can no longer do weekly long progress. And now I have to go to month long progress. And when I get to month long progress, that's usually when I go to a four day split. So now we're moving from the frequency, the total number of workouts frequency increases. So you're doing two upper, two lower days, but the frequency per week, but the frequency of the lifts themselves, like the squat will go down from three times a week to two times a week. Because if you're only doing two lower body sessions. So that's the next step. And then when I go to the four day split, the four day split is when we introduce the supplemental list because now a basic four day split is gonna look like your kind of primary squat day and you're gonna do a variant deadlift after the squat. And on the deadlift day, you're gonna have a variant squat and then the deadlift. And the same thing for the bench and the press. You're gonna do your main bench and then a variant press. So you might do a pin press, press lockouts. So, I mean, maybe there are stages that you don't wanna leap frog, right? Like you say, and do this total athletic development. Sure. Lifetime development kind of model. But it's also, if I have a tool that will work, why not use it? I'm sure. So a week long program, why not do a week long program before you do an eight week program? I mean, it just seems like. Yeah, it doesn't make sense. If I can make progress weekly, why would I make progress every eight weeks? Not only that, what if I can't make progress weekly, but I can still make progress monthly? Why would I make progress every eight weeks? Right. So to jump to a block training program, a 12 week long block training program or a 12 week long DUP program or a 12 week long sort of West side max effort or high, low sort of program, you're jumping the gun. Also for the guys that like the high volume that like moving to five sets of five, six sets of five, seven sets of five, eight sets of five. There are coaches that like volume. No one enjoys it to train. Right, that's what I'm saying. Nobody does. Now, is there a time when we're increasing volume, the primary driving metric is tonnage probably, right? We're looking at tonnage being a, the product of the weight on the bar times the work, total work reps. Super important. Super important. However, if I can continue to make progress by driving in the intensity metric up, why would I introduce six sets of five, seven sets of five? Because it sucks, right? Now, is there a time when you're gonna have to do volume? Yeah. Yes, but when you get there, you're not happy about it. Yeah, let's wait till we have to. Yeah, so I would rather milk the intensity first. Let's continue driving intensity up for as long as we can before I have to change the metric and introduce volume or frequency. And essentially what happens is when you get to a program like block training, that's a volume based program. It does have an inverse relationship where it starts with very high volume and relatively low intensity. It moves to very high intensity and relatively low volume, but over the course of the majority of the program, it's a relatively high volume program. DUP, daily undulating periodization, it's only high volume because it's so high frequency. So you actually don't do a lot of volume in any one lift in any one day, but you do all of the lifts pretty much every day, four days a week. Yeah. And so the frequency itself, and so that becomes the driving metric. So I can actually have programs in the back of my pocket, my sleeve that I can play or I can say, okay, when the intensity cannot constantly go up, I can use volume or frequency to drive the stress needed to break homeostasis to get the adaptation. So what Old Man Texas Method does is it continues to use intensity as the driving metric force, right? Instead it spreads it out over the course of a week. One, the intensity always goes up on Monday and the intensity always goes up on Friday. Now the Friday day for the squat is the most important day because that has to keep going up. It has to happen. So is there a time in that sort of Old Man Texas or even Standard Texas where I may have a top set of five and then back off sets of five? Sure, maybe. Because the stress becomes too high, right? So not for everybody, but that's possible. But the intensity day on the squat and the intensity day on the presses and the bench presses must always go up. And it's necessary actually for you to get your next five-fives or three-fives on the next Monday. Like if you don't do that heavy on Friday, you're gonna have hell getting the heavier five set of five on Monday and three set of five in the case. So it takes us, people overlook that. Now in Texas, it's actually, that's a place on the Texas method or Old Man Texas method is the place where I will actually start to do multiple sets on the deadlift. Yep, so I still may have an intensity day which might be one set of five or it's often one set of three or even two sets of three but often on the volume day for deadlift, I'll do two sets of five and then three sets of five because they just at some point they need the volume to keep driving the deadlift up. Remember that when we started this with linear progression, they were doing one set of five on the deadlift but they were doing it three times a week and often now you're alternating the deadlift with something else. If it's Old Man Texas method, it's not gonna be the power clean. It's probably the row. It might be the chin or it might be a combination thereof. And so if I am deadlifting every other session then it means that one week I'm gonna deadlift on Monday and Friday which is awesome. But on the other week I'm only gonna deadlift on Wednesday. So on that Wednesday day, I'm gonna beat your ass on the deadlift. I often just have them go ahead and pull twice a week anyway. Monday, Friday, Monday, Friday, Monday, Friday, Friday. Which works okay. Yeah, I've done that as well. And that's fine. That's not that big of a, I don't have a problem with that either. So coach, we got linear progression go up every other day. Got Texas method or other HLM or whatever in their week long programs. You go up once a week. Where are the damn 14 day programs? Well, so yeah, you can still spread that out. So HLM works really well. Yeah, you can spread that over like 10 or 12 pretty nicely. You can't exactly, you're right. So I should really like HLM and I would actually probably go to HLM after I can't. High low medium. Sorry, high low medium. And again, what I'll often do. When you say usually don't, you mean for these early intermediate guys they just jettisoned out all that linear progression. That's what you mean, yeah. So I'm not saying that every person does the exact same programming. In the beginning they do, right? It's linear progression. And actually as we move more towards the advanced side it becomes more and more personalized. But most of my guys are gonna do, most of my guys are gonna do linear progression for as long as possible. A Texas variant for a while. And then a variant of heavy light medium which is really just an extension of Texas method that's not quite as stressful because the stress becomes. It comes down. Yeah, right. So, and then I can also peak them easily on the heavy light medium and then we move to four day split. And there's lots of options for a four day split and we'll talk about that in an episode soon for sure. I think there'll be a lot of people that will be glad to hear a little bit about what this whole Man-Texas method looks like because I get a lot of questions and I don't think there's an article anywhere about it. I don't think there's, I don't think if you query it like in the internet you're gonna see it but you don't know what the heck it is. No, no, no. Thanks for listening. Talk to you soon.