 Besides the novelty aspect, because anytime you change your workout, it's so long as it's appropriate, you're going to see your body respond again. Besides that there are distinct advantages to lightweight training that, uh, heavyweight training simply doesn't have. There's obviously, you know, more than one way to, to, to get, you know, the kind of physique that you want. And hypertrophy, um, happens in a lot of different rep ranges. And there are advantages to light weights, just like there's advantages to heavyweights because there's value, even if your goal is maximal strength and not muscle hypertrophy. One of the best things you could do to develop your muscles, build an amazing body is to lift with light weights, not heavyweights, but actually light weights. Do you guys remember the first time like this kind of came together for you? Like, I think for the first like three to five years of lifting for me, I was, because I was the skinny kid who was trying to build muscle. And then like all the information I was reading back then was like, you got to lift heavyweight, low reps. Like if you, if you want to tone muscles and get lean, then you do high reps. I'm like, I don't want anything to do with toting or leaning. So everything I did was like six reps and as heavy as could be for probably three years before I ever lifted a weight more than 10 reps. And I remember meeting a personal trainer and this guy was like jacked. And I came up to him and said, Oh, what do you do? I think I was asked him, like, what do you do? What's the best thing for your arms? That cliche thing that everybody asks, you know, all right. And he's just like, well, tell me what, you know, you're doing. And I kind of told him how I train. He says, Oh, he says, uh, lift 15 reps. I'm like, what? Oh, my arms get smaller. He's like, no, no, no, it doesn't work that way. I remember doing it. And then like they exploded over that summer. And I went like, yeah, I thought that was just for jazzer size. I do all those reps, you know, like I figured that was for that. Until I saw this really jacked bodybuilder who was doing lightweight and multiple reps. And I was working out at world's gym. And I was talking to the guy and he was like telling me all the benefits of, you know, being able to make that weight feel heavier and like really slowing down the cadence and, you know, grinding his way through that and all that. And I was like, really, that's effective. And, you know, he was selling me on it pretty hard. And it was obviously took a guy that was like pretty jacked to even get me there. Yeah, for me, it was an article in a flex magazine. So I would read all the bodybuilding magazines and same thing. Like you, like you Adam, I just train heavy all the time. Six reps are lower all the time, no matter what the exercise was. And then there was this bodybuilder on there that goes, Oh, I don't ever go lower than 20 reps. And of course he looked amazing. And I thought, and then he talked about past bodybuilders who train this way as well, Serge Nubray is a famous one. He's the guy that got, you know, in pumping iron. He's the French bodybuilder who got like a second place, I think. And then Lou got third or whatever. Incredible physique. So I said, I'm going to try this out. And of course, because it was novel and different, my body responded very quickly. And I think I put on five pounds of muscle very, very fast. And that was the first time I learned that there's obviously, you know, more than one way to, to, to get, you know, the kind of physique that you want. And that hypertrophy happens in a lot of different rep ranges. And there are advantages to light weights, just like there's advantages to heavy weights. And if you avoid light weight training, you miss out on a lot of the advantages that you can get. It's interesting because I mean, going through, you know, sport specific training and like, like strength training, it was just about loading weights and like you're in these groups and you're always trying to figure out how I can press my max further so I can get more weight. When I started to learn all these other variables in terms of being able to load your body by, you know, holding and sustaining a pose or position for longer or like slowing it down, like how much harder it was in a lot of different directions. Not to take a left on the conversation, but since you brought him up, why did he never win? Surge? I think his physique was better. Like, and I'm going to say something that's like blasphemy, I feel like. Yes, I think his physique was better than Arnold's. You know what it is? Why? In a picture alone, Surge and Bray looks incredible. You have him stand next to Arnold. Is that what it is? Is Arnold like significantly taller? Not just taller, just a lot bigger. Is he? Yeah, he just got dwarfed when you would see them together. And Surge's legs weren't that, weren't that exceptional. Like, what do you think? Was he as tall as Arnold? He was tall, but he wasn't as tall. But if you had them standing next to each other, he just got dwarfed. And that's why. But he beat Lou in the 1974 Olympia or 75, I think it was. Did he ever win? Because I didn't think he'd never won. No, but he would win other competitions and stuff. And, you know, he looked incredible. What do you think, Doug? You're really good at judging male physiques. What would you say? Yeah, I don't know. I'd definitely go for his, personally. Yeah, yeah, Arnold's just a little too big for me. Yeah, he was up there with like Frank Zane. You know, Frank Zane had a physique like that, right? Real aesthetic. Yeah, but I mean, Frank was like small and lean, right? And Frank was one of my favorite physiques for sure, because I think I identified as like the skinny guy and like that looked more realistic to me. Yeah, no, look up 1974 or 75 Olympia and look at the lineup. And then you can kind of see when he stands next to Arnold, he gets, you know, he gets. See, I've seen all this and that's what makes me say this because I don't think he does. I think Serge looks put together. But anyway, he did high volume, high rep training. He would sometimes get the reps as high as 30, 40, 50 repetitions. And, you know, he developed an incredible physique. Now, even Arnold, OK, even Arnold, who went through periods of, you know, heavy training and powerlifting also would incorporate higher repetitions in his training as well, because he identified that his body would respond great when he would switch it up. Yeah, but besides the novelty aspect, because anytime you change your workout is so long as it's appropriate, you're going to see your body respond again. Besides that, there are distinct advantages to lightweight training that heavyweight training simply doesn't have. Boom, what's up? It's mind pump time. Here's the giveaway for today. I'm going to give away Maps Prime, Maps Prime Pro and Maps Anywhere. You may be wondering why that combination. First off, it's a very popular three workout combo. But also we're running a promotion this month, which ends August 14th. Where we take our most popular workout combos and only make them $99.99, so I'm going to give one of them away. It's Maps Prime, Maps Prime Pro, Maps Anywhere. Here's how you can win. Leave a comment below in the first 24 hours that we drop this episode. Subscribe to this channel, turn on notifications, do all those things. If we like your comment, we'll notify you in the comment section and you'll win that combo. Now, everyone else go to mapsaugust.com. Remember, this ends August 14th. And what we did is we took our most popular workout program combinations. There's a lot of them on there. There's a bunch of them. It's like, for example, one of them is Maps Aesthetic and Maps Split. It's a bodybuilding combo. So we have a whole bunch of combos. Each combination is only $99.99, which is less than the price of one program. So it's essentially buy one, get one or two free. You got to check this out. We're ending this on the 14th because it's a crazy sale. Again, it's mapsaugust.com. All right, here comes the show. The first one, and this one's an obvious one. And this also highlights what a lot of trainers experience, which is we're usually way better with our clients than we are with ourselves. Like I was a way better trainer with my clients than I was with myself for a long time. And I would always go lighter to make sure that they had perfect form. Whereas when I train myself, I would sacrifice form in the pursuit of going heavier. And there's tremendous benefit to having perfect form, tremendous benefit. Well, we're always battling our own ego. And I think that, yeah, we're always better training our clients in that direction. And it was so much better to manage the quality of each rep with a lighter weight and being able to really be focused and conscious of how your body was maybe wavering, or you're able to make those micro adjustments a lot more effectively without overloading your body. Well, it's really difficult to correct form on somebody when they're doing four to six reps and like towards, you know, you're working at 80, they're working at 80 percent of their max load and they're moving away. And they're a beginner, like they're they're all over the place and they're letting the probably the weight just drop down right away. So to be able to critique form, I mean, it was almost impossible. So I actually started all my clients on a lightweight protocol first so I could get the form down. Yeah, because there's a few things that lift the weight when you're training with weight or resistance. Obviously muscle, muscle is one of them and controls muscles, the central nervous system, so that's all connected. But you can also use leverage so you can adjust and change your leverage so that the weight becomes lighter or feels lighter. You can also use momentum, meaning, you know, like a curl is a good example. I could swing the weight up, which will allow me to lift more weight than if I were just very, very stable and stationary lifting the weight. So those two things can do that. And leverage typically how you adjust your positioning to give you better leverage is you you compromise your form, right? So like another example would be a bench press, you know, you can't get the weight up and a real common way people will instinctively adjust the leverage is by pushing their butt up off the bench, right? You see someone's butt come off the bench and they can lift more. Another way and this is another way, real common way that people will use will adjust their technique to get better leverage is to shorten the repetition. So like a full squat or a squat where you're going below parallel, you're just not going to be as strong as one where you're going either to parallel or above. And you'll see this where someone will add weight to the bar and all of a sudden their rep becomes an inch or two shorter, right? So yeah, they're lifting heavy weight, heavy year weight, but the rep, the rep now is shorter. Is that a, was that a good trade? No. In fact, we say this all the time on the podcast that form and technique is paramount. That's the most important thing that you can pay attention to, because an exercise done properly, forget safety and we'll get there. That's part of it. A exercise performed properly just, it's just give you better results. You just get more value from muscle building, fat burning, sculpting your body with a better rep than you do with a worse rep, regardless of the how much heavier the weight is. Well, you'd see an issue too in the strength world where I was kind of like coming through where you'd get that momentum. Like you wanted to build that elastic potential energy. So you'd sell, for instance, for like a bench press, you get the bouncing of the chest to get, you know, just to get that momentum to now, you know, where I get halfway up just from that momentum, I can extend, you know, using my muscles at that point. But, you know, and technique wise, you know, to slow down and really like get through like each phase of that contraction was important to establish first. Well, good luck trying to teach a client how to connect to a muscle with really heavy weight. I mean, there's so much going on when they when they're trying to struggle through five or six reps that and you're over here trying to teach contract your back contract and then their shoulders are firing, their triceps are fine. They're just trying to move that and grind through that weight. So I think one of the huge benefits of going to light is if, which is so important to teach, especially when you're talking about building hypertrophy, like building muscle is the ability to connect to the proper muscle that we're trying to work in that exercise. And so going slowing it down so I can communicate that while they're lifting is almost impossible with really heavy weight. Well, think about this way, right? So I'll use the bench presses as an example. I'm going to come up with these are arbitrary numbers. Okay, but let's we know that the prime muscles involved in a bench press is the chest, the shoulders and the triceps. Now, it's much more than that, obviously, but those are the prime movers. And let's just say for argument's sake that the chest is 70% of the lift. Okay, and then you have, let's say 15% that goes to the shoulders and then the remainder goes to the triceps. Well, let's say you have a weaker chest, but stronger shoulders. Well, your number may look more like 65, 25, for example. But you want to develop your chest. You really want to work on your chest. Your shoulders are so strong that they're lifting more than what would be considered ideal. Well, what happens when you add more weight is you're going to stay at that ratio. Your body is going to use its strengths in the most efficient, effective way possible, lift the weight. But what if I want this to be a real chest press? What if my goal of doing the bench press is not to lift the most weight, but rather I want to develop my chest. I want to get my chest from doing 65% of the lift to doing 75% of the lift or 85% of the lift. How can I do that? Well, I can't go heavier and do that. In fact, if I go heavier, the opposite's going to happen. I have to go lighter, concentrate and focus on making these weaker muscles in the case of this example will be the chest. Do more of the work that can only happen if I go louder and connect to the target muscle. So this is why you see people with lagging body parts do a compound lift that's supposedly good for that body part like, oh, squat's good for the glutes, but my glutes keep lagging. Why the hell are my quads growing all the time? You got to go lighter and make the glutes do more work. And that only can happen if you go lighter and connect. I think, yeah, it's a problem if you don't really spend that time connecting and being able to understand the muscle recruitment process. It's a big part of it being able to have access to muscles. So like it and you see this too, if you're just trying to flex a random muscle and you can't do that. That's something that you can't do. Like that's something later on, like you're going to find in these compound lifts where you need to make these adjustments. If I don't have access to that, that's going to be a problem that's going to follow you later. Well, I remember, and I don't know if you guys recall or remember this, was being able to identify somebody who struggled with this by the way their body was developed. Right. So I'd see like a guy who could like bench press like more weight than I would be to bench in 315 plus working out and he'd have these massive delts and tricep and he'd have like no chest. And I'd be like, that's so weird. Like this dude benches 315. Why doesn't he have like this massive chest? But then when I, when I understood biomechanics and started to watch the way the guy would, yeah, he would, he would be benching with his shoulders. Yeah. Triceps. He's rolled forward slightly, right? Or a flat back as he's, as he's benching and he's pushing everything up with his shoulders and his triceps. So he's, and you know, he's lifting, he's benching because he knows you want to build his chest, but to your point of the ratio and percentage is like, you know, when it should be a 60% chest exercise and maybe split between the shoulders and arms from there, he's very loaded on the shoulders and triceps and getting very little activation in the chest. And so they're developing that way. And this is not just true with compound lifts or complex lifts. This is also true with isolation exercises. Like for example, a lateral, right? It's a common shoulder exercise. You ever see somebody who has weak shoulders? Yeah. Who's like they have lagging shoulders do laterals. It look, there's a lot of trapezius involved. There's a shortened range of motion with the shoulders. How do you fix that? You got to go way lighter, cut the weight way down, get into the proper position, deactivate, right? You're not really deactivating, but your goal is to deactivate the muscles that take over and focus on the target muscles. You can't do that when the weight is heavy. You just can't because when you're lifting a heavier weight, your body is just doing what it can to move the weight up, which means it's going to move the way it always does, which is why you have a lot of movement, not the muscle at that point. That's right. The other point that you brought or you bring up is the injuries, right? So the lower injury risks with lower weight. You know, we had an opportunity. We were just hanging out with Chris Gethlin, right, who's almost 50 years old, lifetime natural bodybuilder and lifter guy looks phenomenal. And when we were talking to him, did you hear him referencing his routine? Oh, yeah, he goes real high rep now. Yeah, like it was like 50, 40, 30. Yes. He's lifting in the 50 rep range and stuff like that. And the guy looks great. Now, obviously he's built that physique over years and years of probably strength training and lifting and cycling through and stuff like that. But he predominantly now lifts in this super high rep range. And I believe it was Dexter Jackson, who was the same way like this, right? Like super high reps. And one of the things I noticed, I mean, I noticed this when we all got together because before we all started hanging out, I was in that kind of Dexter Jackson bodybuilding type of mentality where it was high reps, super sets. I was always chasing the pump. And then I started hanging out with you guys and I started pursuing more strength. And now I built a ton of muscle and I got bigger, bigger that way. But I have to be honest, I had more joint issues than I ever had. Now, mind you, I'm also older now than what I was. Probably in my 20s. Probably would have been, it probably would have behoove me to actually done lifting like that when I was in my early 20s. And I didn't start doing it until my 30s to start lifting that way. But one of the things I noticed is that, you know, my joints start talking to me when I'm consistently lifting really heavy and they just feel so much better when I'm at a high-resent risk-reward ratio, right? And it's like, yeah, if we evaluate that based off of like, so yeah, when I was younger and I was really trying to like build that foundational strength, like I would lean a little bit higher on the risk factors in terms of like what types of exercise include the amount of reps, the loading. But yeah, and as you scale that, it's like you have to readjust. Look, we'll get to the chronic pain part because that's a different point. But this is just pure injury, okay? If I have 400 pounds on my back on a bench press and my form deviates by 5%, my risk of injury is way higher than if I have 225 on the bar and I deviate just 5%, right? Because when you're really strong at a particular movement, you're really strong by doing that movement a particular way. You have to deviate, stabilize, you have to kick in. You got to get other muscles to kick in to stop the weight from moving in a direction you don't like. My knee moves a little left or right or my elbow moves one direction or not. When there's more weight on the bar, it's way harder to stop that momentum. You ever have a deadlift that's real heavy and have the weight shift a little bit and feel your QL want to rip out of your back, right? So this is just what happened. So the injury, this is just higher. Yeah, to that point. I mean, I don't think I can recall a single time in my entire lifting career where I actually got injured lifting 15 plus reps. I don't think I've ever been injured that way. But I've been injured enough times for sure. Hitting PRs or doing singles, doubles or triples or five by five routines where I'm really pushing the weight. So yeah, to that point, you're right. Like it's so much easier to control the weight when it's like that. Then you're less likely to get hurt. And if you mess up on your form with lightweight, you can jump back into good form. It's not as bad. You mess up with your form with heavy weight. And now the risk injury goes through the... Fatigue's really the only thing like stopping you at that point and instead of like pain or like other signals around your joints. Or you just can't do it. Or you can't do it. All right, so this next one is very true with high rep. And this is why most people enjoy higher rep training, which is the pump. So the pump is what you feel when you work out and the muscle fills with blood faster than it gets rid of the blood. The technical term is transient sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. It feels really good. A lot of people like it because of the way they look for the next 20 minutes or so. But there's a real muscle building benefit that comes from it. So just the swelling effect that happens in the muscle sends a signal that tells the body we should probably build some muscle. There's also sarcoplasmic hypertrophy that happens in the sense more permanent, not transient in the sense that your body's ability to store more glycogen, which is muscle energy, fluid, blood, blood vessels, all the structures that are in muscle that are not muscle fibers actually increase in size as well. So when you look at a muscle and you look at the size of a muscle, most of the size of that muscle is not muscle fiber. Most of it is fluid and non muscle fiber structures. This is one of the reasons why body builders look bigger than power lifters, even though power lifters are so much stronger is because of this effect that you get from the pump. And it's way easier and more effective to get a pump with higher reps than it is with lower reps. Now, the one thing that I think I wanna caution or warn because this is something I got trapped here for so long because of this reason. I remember, again, the time where I started lifting high reps, I saw the huge gains, it was a new adaptation. And then I also started to like the way I looked because I was all pumped up all the time. And so I found myself chasing the pump all the time. And I think I neglected how much strength training that I should have been doing over a good, I don't know, probably 10 years there where I was lifting, where I was constantly chasing this because it does have tremendous benefit, but like any other adaptation, like sooner or later, the body will adapt to it. You'll kind of maximize the results or getting from that and it's important that you kind of move out. Oh, there's benefits to heavy training as well that you don't get from light training. But what we're talking about here is just the benefits of light training. And if you think that you're not gonna get the same muscle building effects, right? From light training, you go with heavy training, it's not true. You'll get great muscle building effects. Now, of course, we've said this many, many times on the show, you wanna be able to utilize and train through different phases and utilize and take the advantage of all these different phases. But one of them is light training and one of them is the pump. It is way harder to get a crazy skin splitting pump with five reps than it is with 20 reps. You do one set of 20 reps on squats and your legs are pumped. Well, the science to support what you're talking about is also the same science that supports what we've learned about blood occlusion. It's the same concept, which is something I know you didn't list on here, but that's super lightweight and you are basically hijacking that idea of sending as much fluid into the muscle as possible. And we wrote a guide, I know we haven't talked about that guide in a really long time, but we wrote a guide on blood occlusion, but the same science that supports what you're talking about right now of sending all the fluid into the muscle and the benefits of that for building muscle are the same benefits that you're getting when you do blood occlusion and that same concept. And why that's so powerful and useful is, and I don't know if this is on here on your points either is, but for rehab purposes is like when you are at a place where you have just recently injured, going really heavy at that time is a really bad idea because you could risk getting hurt again versus staying lightweight and pumping blood in there instead. And I think that some people like me that would be more focused on strength training exclusively would be worried that this would affect their PRs. They basically have to start over again and this would affect their strength going forward when in fact they had the opposite effect where I felt more stamina, more muscle endurance in terms of my lifts going back and the carryover that I experienced after going through a hypertrophy block that really contributed towards new found strength and stamina together. I broke through so many PRs by getting too stuck in a low rep phase and then doing higher reps and then going back to low reps and then I'm stronger. That happened many times. What you're talking about too is strength stamina. I remember when I first saw this, I had two trainers that worked for me. One was a power lifter, one was a bodybuilder and they were very classic like stereotype, right? The power lifter a lot thicker, kind of heavier looking, very strong bodybuilder, aesthetic physique, the whole deal. And we would have these discussions and they'd tease each other in the gym and it was really fun. Well, anyway, they worked out together one time and it was so interesting to watch how the workout progressed. So the workout started and now here's the mistake the power lifter made, he followed the bodybuilder's workout and I say mistake because it was a competitive, you can tell the workout got competitive. The workout started with the power lifter lifting way more weight than the bodybuilder but about 45 minutes into the workout, the bodybuilder started lifting more weight than the power lifter because the power lifter strength stamina just wasn't there. Set after set after set, volume training. That was just about it. Yeah, as you say, Adam would throw these supersets, I mean destroy me, dude. This is how Justin I used to lift when we were in our 20s when we first met and we were working in the same gym and we'd lift together and he was way stronger than I was definitely and he definitely identifies more as the strength power athlete and I was so the bodybuilder guy. So we'd lift in the first 10, 15 minutes of our training session, he was stronger than most of us but by the back half I was moving more weight. But that was because I shortened those rest periods through and all kinds of reps, throw some supersets on him, but gassed his ass out. And strength stamina is not, it's a type of endurance but it's really your ability to continue to express strength repeatedly over and over and to recover fast enough to express that strength. Now what are all the mechanisms that work there, right? So there's obviously benefits cardiovascular there, right? Because your heart rate's increasing and then- Oh, hypertrophy. Oh, big time. I mean, you build muscle. That's why bodybuilders train that way. No, but I mean like the ability to increase the gas tank like that. Like obviously it's coming from your strengthening your heart because you're shorter. ATP is replenishing faster. You're replenishing glycogen faster. You don't get that lactic acid buildup. You're training your body to be able to do that faster. You are and it's really interesting that you can, and it's funny, you know, we know that muscle fibers are broken up into two main categories, right? Fast twitch and slow twitch, but it's way more complex than that. There are fast twitch fibers that act more like a hybrid between slow twitch and fast twitch. They've proven you can morph them too. Yeah, I noticed that it pushed out that lactic acid response in terms of like that burn, whereas like it just would limit you after a while. Like if you worked, you know, specifically exclusively more on hypertrophy when I go back in, I wouldn't have that like, you know, after so many sets, it was like I could keep going. Yes. Now this next one is, the next point is explosive speed training. So I remember seeing this firsthand as a kid, I actually went to a powerhouse gym as a teenager because I had heard about this gym, it's a powerhouse and I was, you know, big into working out. And I'd never seen an Olympic lifting area. They actually had a room with a platform, which was rare for a gym in those days. I mean, you see platforms a little bit of a place. Now back in those days, it was rare to see a squat rack, let alone, you know, an area with chalk and bumper plates. And I saw it and nobody was in there. And I remember I was doing my normal workout and then I heard weights dropping. And I looked in there and it was just very muscular, obviously Olympic lifter. And they had not a lot of weight on the bar. It was like 135 or 185, right? Which it's, you know, I would have thought this guy was lifting so much more, but he was lifting it so fast and so explosively, like doing snatches and cleans. And he wasn't doing tons of reps, he was just doing it super fast. And so I asked this guy, why don't you, you know, lift heavier? I thought, you know, strength training or whatever. And he goes, no, no, no, I'm training. I want to move this weight as fast as possible. That's what makes me explosive. And that's when I learned that explosive training, you can lift heavy weight and try to move it explosively. But if you want to move explosively and fast, you got to use lightweight. You're expressing that fast twitch response. It's a totally different, completely different feel. If you haven't done that and you haven't gone through, I mean plyometrics on some level too, we're talking about speed, power, you don't want to use any weights, but like in terms of like using, you know, doing Olympic lifts and all that, the value there is really the acceleration and how quickly you can get through the movement. Now, would you, would you guys attribute that to, because obviously if you're moving a weight that's extremely light for that exercise for you, the amount of muscle damage that you're probably gonna do in comparison to a slow, grinding, heavy rep is gonna be probably less. So do you think the benefits are coming from most of the CNS training? Oh yeah. Because what you're doing is you're basically training your operating system to be able to fire explosively when you're used to doing like this kind of slow or grinding type of thing. Now the better- The demand increases, so you do get really sore, but it's a little less damage. But the better you get at it, the more muscle damage you get. What I mean by that is you have to learn, you have to teach your body how to contract forcefully with maximal effort in a short period of time, which is not, this doesn't come naturally if you don't train this way. Like you ever take a bodybuilder and have them do like a kettlebell swing explosively and watch them turn it into a front shoulder raise? Yeah. Because they just don't know- It's not slow, it's coming up? Yes. They just don't know how to do that, right? So when you first do it, whatever force you generate is not what is gonna cause damage on your body because you're not really generating a lot of force. But as you get better, you get better at within a second, generating tons of force. And then it does become a damaging- So you turn that amplitude up quite a bit. Yes. And then it really affects the muscle. This, by the way, is the most- It's not the only, but it's probably the most valuable type of strength that you get in sports. You could get, look, I don't care how much you could squat and deadlift for a PR. If the guy or girl next to you can move and express their strength twice as fast as you, you ain't gonna catch them and they'll hit harder than you and they'll do everything stronger than you because of the speed that's involved. So although grinding slow strength contributes to speed power, the only way to train for speed power is like, wait, you can't, so if you could deadlift 500 pounds and you wanna do fast deadlifts, you gotta go down to like 200 pounds to be able to move the bar quickly and with that kind of explosive power or whatever. This next one's the opposite. And that's the value of slow reps. Very slow reps. So 10 second, 15 second negatives and positives. You wanna talk about breaking down your rep into small pieces and perfecting every single quarter inch of that rep and connecting to the muscle through every single quarter inch of that rep. Put some lightweight on, give yourself 10 to 15 seconds negative, 10 to 15 seconds positive. It feels like nothing else. I just saw, yeah, one of my friends post a video of a squat with that they did for like a one minute eccentric. Oh God. So you just look at this just very incremental, like quarter of an inch by quarter of an inch down to get down 60 seconds and then hold. And it's just like a completely different feel to the exercise like completely. Well, this is, I love this. In fact, I did it real that I know it's kind of going viral on our Mindput Media page right now where I was talking about the eccentric portion of the exercise that nobody ever does like four seconds. And I used to take it to like 10 seconds with clients when, cause what I found that was really nice. I go really, really light with the weight and then have them do it. And we'll just use like a bicep curl cause it's so basic to explain to people everybody sees what it knows what a standing bicep curl looks like. And I'd have them do like a 10 second rep. But then what I'd be doing is walking around and I'd be moving their shoulders, pulling their elbows back, telling them to stick their chest up, correcting where their cervical spine is. And like, I'd be all detailed. And you can't do that if you're moving the weight at like a normal cadence that most people do. So slowing the repetition down and then basically segmenting that movement into like 10 parts and really getting them to understand the way they should be holding their body while they're doing that movement. Great for teaching. Yeah, so there's two ways I do this. One is for the hypertrophy benefits of a target muscle. So I can really slow down and target, like, oh, I want to feel this right in my hamstrings or I want to feel this right in my lats. So I'll go real slow, real light and I can do that. The other reason is if I do like a complex lift or a compound lift and I have a little bit of twinger pain and I can't quite figure out what part of the rep is causing it, then I'll do a super slow rep. And what I do is I adjust my rep as I'm moving the bar to where it doesn't hurt anymore. Okay, that's where my shoulder feels good. And then I'll do some reps in that position, which will train it so when I go faster, it's the same thing. Yeah, and I would do that with some of my clients, especially when we're doing a barbell squat and you realize where you lose a lot of the support and stability. So sometimes like because of momentum being a factor in some of the times when they do squats, when you really slow it down and go through each one of those angles, like you can see where there's a disconnect and then you can address it. Totally. Now, this last point was kind of what you were talking about, Adam, which is it's a lot easier on the joints. Now, why is it easier on the joints? Well, if your technique is off by one or two degrees, which isn't that bad. In fact, it would be hard to even see by watching someone do a rep. It would be hard for me as a trained professional to look and say, oh, that's one degree off or two degrees off, right? But let's say you work out that way day in and day out for a year, two years, three years. What is being stressed most with that slight deviation in your joints? The knee isn't traveling the way it should perfectly. So the kneecap is kind of pushing to the left a little bit on that groove on the femur, right? Or the shoulder blade isn't depressing quite the way it should. And over time, you develop nagging joint issues and you're like, well, I work out well. I take care of myself. Like why is it that my left elbow tends to bother me a little bit? Why isn't my knee gets a little bit sore, right? If you go light, those slight deviations don't make that big of a difference. And then back to the original point, the first one, which is you perfect your form and you can obviously see correct that issue. That's the key is the form, right? You go heavy that you have that risk a little bit more of just slightly being off and how much you're wearing on the joints. I think of like, imagine a door swinging, right? And the hinges are your joints. And imagine like some Justin's big ass hanging on the door while you close it. Like now, honestly, even Justin's big ass hanging on that door swinging, it'll be fine. At first. There's no idea the amount of pressure and stress that's going to those hinges. And after years and years of Justin swinging on there, eventually those hinges are coming loose or they're gonna start to separate or pull from the wood or what are we talking about? This is if you put Doug on it. You got at least five or six more years. At least five more years of Doug hanging on there. But I mean, that's what I visualized that. And to the untrained eye, you see the way that door is swinging both with Justin on it or off of it. And it doesn't look that different to you, but it just slightly being off enough could be putting that pressure on that hinge or on those joints. And that's why the form is so important. But if you do have really, really good form and technique, the muscles are what's supposed to be taking all the stress and a movement like that. That's right. Yeah, and the body just is, it's always trying to assess how much force output to give you, how much power output to give you based off of how stable your joint is. And so to be able to slow down and understand where you're losing that support. So you're losing that muscle tension and that ability to sort of get that force to go through and ground through your body. That's really what you wanna be concerned with is being able to slow it down and hyper focus on that. Yeah, I'll be quite honest. And again, I'm a much better trainer with other people than myself. This is that last, this last point is what always makes me go to lighter training. And it's, I wait too long, right? I wait too long in heavy training because I like it so much. And I start to feel my joints. So then I go through a cycle of lighter weight and every single time I do it, I always go, man, I gotta do this more often. Oh, I'm building more muscle. Oh, I feel so good. But I get stuck in the other one. By the way, this is why every maps program is phased and why every maps program will include a phase that has higher rep training it. There's every single program we have. To force you to do that. Even our power lifter program, even the one that's for power lifters includes some elements and phases where you're training in the higher rep range because there's value, even if your goal is maximal strength and not muscle hypertrophy. Look, if you like our information, head over to mindpumpfree.com and check out our guides. We have guides that can help you with almost any health or fitness goal. You can also find all of us on social media. So Justin is on Instagram at Mind Pump. Justin, you can find Adam on Instagram at Mind Pump Adam. And you can find me on Twitter at Mind Pump Sal. This one's really important and that is to phase your training. If somebody trains for a full year doing a bench press and they're always aiming for five reps, if you compared that person to a person who did a bench press where they did three or four weeks of five reps, but then they did three or four weeks of 12 reps and then three or four weeks of, let's say 15 to 20 reps and then they'll throw in some supersets, at the end of that year, you're gonna see more consistent progress from the person who's moving in and out. And less injury.