 Welcome to Barbell Logic, Rewind. This is Barbell Logic. I'm Scott. I got Matt with me. And today we're going to talk about how do you know if linear progression is coming to an end? How do you know when the end is nigh? Yeah. So some of this we want to talk about. The reason you think you're done with linear progression is because you're missing reps, right? The idea is linear progression is I can add weight every session and if I can't add weight every session because I'm missing reps. Well, that's if you're an honest person. A lot of people are like, oh, it's hard. It's over. Yeah. How many people do we have sign up for the online coaching? They literally mean linear progression for the last two and a half years. Right. A lot. I mean, 40 percent? 40 percent, probably. Yeah. I'd say just under half. Two years. And you know, you actually haven't been running for the last two and a half years. You've been screwing around in the gym. You did linear progression half-assed for six weeks. You took off for a month. You did it again. You restart over and over. Every time I got hard, you reset, you did something else. You screwed around with strong lifts. You did five, three, one, three times in there when you weren't even close to being ready for it. That's what they mean. Yeah. So are you resting enough between sets? So in the beginning, how long do you need to rest between sets? Three to five minutes. Yeah, not that long. Three in the beginning is just exactly 180 seconds. Yeah, it's totally fine. And then as the novice progression progresses and it gets heavier and heavier and the first set becomes a grind and you know the second and third set are going to be grinds, how long do you need to rest? No more than five, really. No more than five? No less than five. No, once it becomes a grind. Once it becomes a grind? I don't know. Five is plenty. See, I would say longer for squat and deadlift. So let's say you squat 365 for a set of five. Right. And it's a grind on the first set. Well, if you're 365. Okay, so it's weight-dependent. We're running towards the end, yeah. Okay, we might go eight minutes, nine minutes. Okay, so the idea here is that obviously not only are we linear progressing our intensity on our weights, we're probably linear progressing our tight trading up the rest periods on our work sets. Does that be fair? Yeah, I tell people that we're resting not to get our heart rate down though. Sure. I mean, you know, we don't want to get back into the bar if our heart rate is still two or five. Right. But it's not, you know, we're not waiting for it to go back down to 65 beats a minute though. We're trying to get the lactate out of our muscles, gather ourselves mentally again. Yeah. And sometimes that takes eight minutes, ten minutes. Yeah, and so really, really heavy. Remember, if you're hitting your weights, your rest is enough. The problem is when you start to miss, then you have to go, and I get this all the time too with clients where they say, well, you know, I went five reps, five reps, four reps. I feel like I wasn't quite ready to do the third set. I probably should have waited an extra minute or two. And you go, yeah, you should have waited an extra minute or two. Right. The workouts in linear progression should not take two hours though. Really at any point, 90 minutes should be enough to run three exercises. Yeah. When you're not that strong yet. And so. And if you rest in more than 10 minutes, you probably got to warm up again. Yeah. If I rest more than 10 minutes, I'm cold. Yeah. Right. And also I think the rest needs to be longer for lower body than upper body. So on a super heavy deadlift, if I've got a couple sets of grinders, which if I'm in linear progression, I probably don't unless I'm a female doing two sets of three. Then I may need to rest 10 minutes between deadlifts. But for bench press, if I rest 10 minutes on a bench press set, like even if I'm doing 385 and 405, I feel cold. And by the way, I've torn both my pecs. And so cold pecs are not what I want to bench with. So I'd need to make sure the rest is adequate between sets. It can't be too little. It can't be too much. You'll know if it's too much. You're going to the barn. You'll feel cold and you'll feel stiff. Right. Feel super heavy on your back. And you just don't know if you can do it when you're cold. The second question is like such a duh sort of question. But if you think you're at the end of linear progression is, are my weight jumps too high? We get reputation for being it's five pound weight jumps on the lifts for as long as possible. Wrong. It's any weight jump. Right. So what we do is in the beginning, if you're a male, you may jump 10 or even 15 pounds of first several workouts on squats and deadlifts. And then it goes to five pounds and we run five pound jumps as long as we can. And then it when we can't do five pound jumps anymore, we go to two and a half pound jumps, which means you have to have 1.25 pound weights as a male. It's going to get there much faster on the upper body lifts. On the upper body lifts, it's going to start with, it probably is going to start at five pound jumps. You get a 10 pound jump the first couple of workouts. First press. Yep. And bench. And then it'll go to five pound jumps for as long as possible, which will be not as long as squat and deadlift. And then it will move to 2.5 pound jumps. So a guy of normal height weight stature, 30 years old, he's going to go to two and a half pound jumps where? On the press. 155? 145? On the press? 30? What do you say? Man, you know the ones I get? I don't know. Yeah, 130 would be pretty good. All right. Yeah. 30 years old? Yeah. Pretty young. 130. 135. Yeah. I see that most guys slow down in that 135 to 155 range, and most guys in their linear progression on the press at 175, 180. Yeah. I've got a couple guys on it right now. They're like 207. They're still hitting 207.5. So that's a really good press. That's for three sets of five. Then I got another guy that's doing it right in that same ballpark, 205 for five sets of three, which is a solid place to go. So yeah, are you making small enough jumps? What if you're a female? What kind of weights do you need? Well, you need half pound plates probably. Yeah. You've got to have a set of fractional plates. Yeah. You know, people have a hard time finding those things. I'll put some links in the show notes. There's a company called Iron Woody that makes a good, that makes a low cost set. There's a gentleman who owns a machine shop who sells them just through like PayPal. Yeah. And they're actually, they're probably the best ones. They're actually really nice. They're really nice. They're steel. I've got an Adder set. Adder, ADER. You can get those from Amazon. Actually, our name is on Prime. And of course, Rogue probably makes the coolest set. But they're also the most expensive on Rogue. Now, Rogue is not typically the most expensive on stuff, but some of it is just shipping on those things. Those are the Rogue ones. They're like $10 a pound or something. Yeah. They're nice though. They're fun. Hey, 2020 Matt here. And at the time of this recording, we didn't know about microgains. We love Rogue Fitness. It's one of the best fitness equipment companies in the world, but we would absolutely recommend microgains for microplates, for those fractional plates. It's micro-g-a-i-n-z.com. They're high quality, coming in a variety of sizes. They're made in America, competitively priced. If you use discount code logic, you'll get a discount off of the fractional plates there as well. So go to microgains to get your fractional plates. Yeah. So, you know, if you're a gym owner, maybe get the Rogues. And if you train not at your house, if you train at a gym, at a PowerLation gym, at a Globo gym, at a CrossFit gym, you're going to need to put those in your gym bag. Yeah, carry them with you. Yeah. And so females are going to have to make jumps in the one pound, one to two pound range on the upper body lifts, what, seven, eight weeks in? Yeah. Somewhere in there. And of course that depends on age. Yeah. Carry your microplates to the gym. And if somebody gives you the side eye or the stink eye, just ignore it. Yeah. Because you're right in there wrong. Yeah. Right. You're probably going to get less stink eye about the fractional plates on the bar than you are on the bent over low bar squat. We get more, especially if you're a female, right? Like, we get this all the time. Let me show you how to do that. That's right. We're going to mansplain how to... Hey, listen. Here's how you squat. Listen, you don't want to go that low. You're going to hurt your knees. And you don't want to bend over that much. You're going to hurt your back. What's funny is how rare are guys that have women come up to them and tell them that. You know how often that happens? Never. Unless Nicki Sims is there. Right. She's like, look, you need to do this. Well, you need to bend over. But for our females who are doing low bar starting to do squats, you know, rarely is the case that they can perform three sets of five of low bar squats correctly without some idiot coming up to them in the gym and telling them that they're doing it wrong. Well, Charity and I have trained at a public gym. We were in linear progression, so we weren't terribly strong then. But I guarantee you, if we went now, there wouldn't be a single guy at an average gold's gym that squats more than Charity. Well, I use this all the time with my online coaching clients with Rachel. Guys, you can verbally abuse men typically a little bit easier than you can do. If you force a man to compare himself to somebody else, he tends to rise to the occasion. Not always, right? He tends to rise to the occasion. Females, and this is a blanketed, bigoted statement, I totally understand. Please don't email me. This is from my experience. It's 23 years as a coach. They're already comparing themselves to everybody. So you don't need to, right? Like I've noticed I coach both Charity and my wife, Charity, your wife and my wife, both of whom are very strong middle-aged females. But if I force them to compare themselves to each other, they're going to get pissed at me. Right. However, if I compare my wife to one of my male clients, to the male client, so if I have a male client who deadlifts 315 for the first time for a set of five, I say, man, awesome. You're only 20 pounds off my wife's best deadlift for a set of five. Right. It gets what he does. He gets over 335 for a set of five, right? Or the first time. So she's got a deadlift of 402 at 40 years old and a couple C-sections. And she's a soccer mom who just doesn't even care about this that much. She doesn't take it super serious. She just lifts real consistent. And so when you get a 40-year-old guy who's struggling with a, you know, a 175-pound squat, you know, look, my wife squats 355, he tends to pull his britches up and put his big boy pants on pretty quick and stop complaining about his 175 squat. Which brings us to question number three. Are you eating enough? Probably the most important question is when we start to look at the stress recovery adaptation cycle, because we have tested decades and decades and tens of thousands of people on this program, we know that the stress is appropriate to drive the strength, the change in homeostasis needed, the disruption in homeostasis needed in order to get the strength adaptation. As long as rest is enough, stress, recovery adaptation. The recovery has to be there, which means as a coach, I can control the stress, but I can't control the recovery very well. I don't have a handle on that, right? That's communication between me and the client. And so when the client needs to recover, I have to make sure are they sleeping enough at night? Are they eating enough during the day? And not only that, I actually look at additional stressors in their life as a part of the thing that steals from recovery, right? So is there stress in their marriage? Is there stress in their job? Are there stress with their kids? Are there financial stresses going on? And that requires a pretty intimate level of conversation between me and my client. I can't have a client that is on the verge of divorce and won't tell me that they're on the verge of divorce because it affects their training enough, right? So are they getting seven, eight hours of sleep at night? If they're not getting seven or eight hours of sleep at night, are they able to take a nap during the day? That's a big thing for me. If somebody's like, hey, I'm only getting five or six hours of sleep at night, I go, look, you got to get an hour nap every day. And I want the hour nap before they train. Typically, I want you to sleep and then get up, eat your pre-workout, get to the gym and train. Are they eating enough? In general, if a guy is eating 225 to 250 grams of protein a day, that's pretty much what you need. How often do you prescribe a guy less than 225 grams of protein? Or more than 250? Yeah. Unless he was a very small guy. I'm not even being funny here. If you had a guy that was 5'2", and weighed 125, I probably wouldn't put even 120. Yeah, sure. It's probably not enough, especially if he's under-eating already. So we can just titrate that up as well. And those guys exist when we train them, and that's fine. Yeah, and they're going to need 220 grams of protein three months from now? But they don't need it in month one. The same sort of thing there is if they're eating 140 to 150 grams of protein, that's solid. That's pretty good. Most females, when they come in, they're eating 47. Yep, that's right. They're eating just under 50 grams of protein. And they'll say, no, I eat meat at every meal. Okay, look, you cut a chicken breast in half. You had half of it for lunch, and you had the rest of it for dinner. Right. And if you actually log your food, you're going to find out that these ladies are eating 45, 50, maybe 60. It's easy to take our stance and then make a straw man out of it. Look, we're talking about 220 to 250 grams of protein. 250 grams of protein is 1,000 calories. That's right. It's not that much. That's not a lot of food. And then we want you to get some carbs. We want you to get some fat. I'm not going to put you on a go mad, even though, actually, if you were compliant, I would because you're a younger guy and you can tolerate it and you're tall and you're skinny. But we put some carbs and some fat in there. We're going to get you at 2,800 calories or something like that. It's more food than you've ever eaten, eating like a sumo wrestler. This is not like Mr. Creosote, Monty Python levels of gorging. Here, we're talking about we're talking about eating in an appropriate way for a strength athlete. And the first time you go... No, I'm not going to say the first time. The second time you go in and train linear progression, you're a strength athlete. That's it. And you have to eat like one. And if you don't, you just open yourself up for heartache and failure. Yeah, it's hard. It's hard. Well, the recovery is as much of a piece of the stress recovery adaptation cycle as the stress is. And so we push on the stress and then we forget to push on the recovery. And I think people tend to take this recovery, just like you said, too far. They go, well, it makes people fat. It's go mad. Listen, like, we're all running business, right? We've got over 500 clients and we wouldn't have a low churn rate if everybody that hired us, we made them fat. What we do is every week, you take your body weight, you take your waist measurement. If you're a guy, if you're a female, you might take your waist hips, right? Three measurements. And we monitor the weight increase and we monitor the waist. And so if the waist is growing too fast and the weight is going up, but the waist is also going up a lot, back off the calories. I really look at three criteria. One, are they hitting their numbers? Two, if they're underweight, are they slowly gaining? Are they slowly gaining weight? And is their waist staying the same or very slowly going up? So underweight people, men and women, hypothetically a 5 foot 10, 145 pound 20 year old man starts on linear progression and I would put that guy on go mad. I'd have him drink a gallon of milk every day. It's full of all kinds of hormones that make beef cattle get giant. And I want him to benefit from that same stuff. But his waist is going to go up and here's why it's going to go up. It's not because he's getting hog fat, it's because he has zero muscle mass around his spine. No spinal erectors, barely has any abdominal muscles, anything like that. Abdominal wall, obliques, erectors make your waist circumference go up. So for these guys that have this body dysmorphia and are afraid of getting fat, I also have them by the little kit off Amazon where they can do the little body fat pinch thing and have them pinch right there at their waist. I'm going to be like, you're going to put two inches on your waist but it's because your back is at your feet. Your skin caliber number is not going up because it's going to be minute. Super small. Yeah, yeah. It's a big thing. Even if we have an obese person that starts training and starts the linear progression often their weight will actually go up for the first couple of weeks. So like for example, let's just say a hypothetical 300 pound male will often gain five, maybe even 10 pounds in the first two or three weeks but that guy's waist is going down. He's putting on muscle mass and he's devouring that fat in order to make that muscle mass. So we have to be rational people and not just think about one thing like body weight. You have to think about the whole picture. We have to eat like athletes. If you're six foot tall and you weigh 154, you don't lift barbells and you work at a desk. That's probably an appropriate body weight for you. Sure. And whatever you're eating to maintain that, that's appropriate. But the minute you go the second time, the first time you go, you're trying it out. The second time, you're a strength athlete. You've got to eat something different. You're not a computer jockey anymore. You're a strength athlete. Yeah, you're eating for performance. It's the same reason that we train, right? We train whether we feel good or not. That's the difference between training and exercise. We exercise to make ourselves feel good today to get hot and sweaty today. We train regardless of how we feel. Oh my god. We eat for the same purpose. It doesn't matter whether you're hungry. It doesn't matter whether you want ice cream or pizza or whatever. We eat for performance. So we make sure that we're eating our first. Of course, some of this depends on whether you're underweight or overweight. If you're overweight, you eat for performance, which is you eat your protein every single day and you limit your carbs and fat because you have plenty of energy needs stuck on the sides of your ass. You do to drive your squad up. And if you're a 135-pound, six-foot-tall guy, you don't. And so you have to make sure that your energy needs are there, right? I mean, look, the reality is that most people don't need five, like even underweight guys don't need 5,000 calories a day. You tie trade up to that number. It would be stupid if you're already eating 2,000 calories a day and you're underweight to jump immediately to 5,000 calories a day. You can jump to 2400 calories a day and probably make progress for a month. And then when the progress slows down, you jump up another 100 calories per week. That's what most of us do. 100 calories per day per week, right? So instead of 2400 calories a day, we go to 25. And we do that until it doesn't work. And then we go to 26. And we do that until it doesn't work. And then we go to 27. And we do the same thing with people who lose weight. People who lose weight, maybe they're eating 3500 calories a day to start. And we put them on 3300 calories. And what's amazing is if we change their macronutrient profile and we put them on, make sure they're eating enough protein and then just enough just enough carbs and fat to fill their calories, they'll probably actually lose weight at 3300 calories. They've been eating 37 or 38. No, look, lose fat. Lose fat. Yeah, maybe not weight. Yeah, right. And after the first couple weeks, it'll be some weight as well. Right. And then when that stops working in the plateau, we drop their carbs and fat a little bit more, but we pretty much keep protein the same. So it's weird. You need to gain muscle or you need to lose fat. The protein needs in general are pretty well set, right? They're pretty well in that 225 to 250 for guys and pretty well in that sort of 140 to 150 for women. And of course there's a little bit of variance there, but the top end of that bell curve, the high point of that bell curve is wide. And for 90% of the people out there, like those protein numbers will work and then we just manipulate carbs and fat to get the desired effect. Yeah, nobody got fat eating too much protein. And never happened, right? Like it can happen in a laboratory and having a real life. Yeah, so I need some help by the way. I've got a paper that I've been like that's been on the back burner. I need somebody out there to help me find the numbers that will tell me what the calorie and nutrient requirements are to synthesize a pound of muscle. Like I know that people are now cloning and growing muscle cells in Petri dishes. You know how many calories that takes. Yeah, what are the nutritional requirements to synthesize a pound of muscle or any given quantity, I don't care. But we know what those numbers are for fat and we know what they are for some other tissues, but I have not been able to find it for muscle. Apocryphally it's about 5,000 calories to build a pound of muscle, but to find it in the literature and actually prove that, I have not been able to find that. But we do know that it takes about 3,500 surplus calories to make a pound of fat. And we do know that it takes more calories to make the muscle than the fat. But we're kind of getting into body image stuff and weight loss stuff. But we're really trying to recover so we can pick up substantially heavier weights every time. Right, so a quick review. We've got to make sure that our recovery is enough between sets. But to make sure that we're making small enough jumps on the weights and we have to make sure that our rest and our food are adequate to drive the recovery needed to complete the stress recovery adaptation cycle. Those are all important. There are other things, by the way, other things on this recovery cycle that I think are important just to note that I also think that we kind of poo poo on. Those are the things that actually make us feel better but aren't proven to aid in the recovery process. And I do think they're important because I think if they make you feel better, it's important. So things like for me, I'll tell you one of the things I do, when I read, it chills me out and it helps me recover. I like to read, right? And I actually, it's like it's, now there are certain things that I read that don't, right? If I read a big business book that gets my brain going and I'm taking notes and stuff that's not it, I've been reading Lonesome Dove lately. It's a great book, right? And it relaxes me and it chills. If I'm sitting down and I'm working that does not relax me. No. It's hard. It's just so unhappy with the current situation in the world. Yeah, sure. Nothing will piss you off. Yeah, and then we do things like, look, I do Epsom salt baths and I've got a pool and I've got a hot tub, you know, whatever, whatever floats your butt. Those things I think are important because they make you feel better, not because they necessarily have been proven to aid in recovery, but a lot of times for me, if you're wired like I am to just be kind of overstimulated and run, run, run and go, go, go, I have to do a lot of things in my life that kind of chill me out. It's a wonderful thing. You know, I think that if you cut yourself an ounce and a half of some old gritty cheese, that'd go a long way towards that too. You know, it's just, you can almost meditate on it. Yeah. You take a sip of it and you can just like focus on that. Yeah, by the way, I'm going to share with you after a while about four of the top-end goat cheeses, local goat cheeses, all different types of goat cheese and they're on all different levels of stank. Stank, you're the better. Well, yeah, me too. They're so good, but I mean, you know, they're real creamy and Brie-like and some of them are like hard as rock and salt, crystal, both delicious. You know, it's good. So there is a fourth question. Well, I want to go back to the stressors. Okay. I want to tell a story. Sure. So, I don't know when it was, probably three weeks ago, Charity and I had to put our friend Watson the cat to sleep. We got him right after we got married. He was 19 years old. Maybe. Maybe. And you know, we love the guy. He was doing very, very well. He was 19. He was 19 years old. Yeah, that's old for cat. Yeah. And he was enjoying himself and doing well for the, I've been told this like, you know, three or four days before and then he wasn't able to do the things he liked to do. Yeah. And arthritis and it was the right thing to do and it was time. And so we took him to the vet and we loved him very much and we had to put the guy to sleep. And then we went home and we had to train. Yeah. Did you do it? We did, you know, we did at it. That's what my grandmother would say. We did at it. You know, we had, I don't even remember what was programmed. I don't know. But it was a struggle. Oh, this is horrible. Yeah. This is absolutely horrible. Of course. But it kind of got us out of that though, too, right? You know, we didn't have to like sit in a chair and just focus on you know, what had happened that day. So that much is good. But you know, it was not a great training day. Yeah. It was not a great training day. So these things, you know, car wrecks, breakups, pet deaths, so on. They affect the training and you're going to take them into, you know, argument with somebody at work. All that stuff has a real effect that has to be considerable when we're looking at our training, especially when you get to be working on the margins of your ability, which you will be as a late linear progression person and intermediate. Yeah. At the end for sure. We miss Watson. I'll put him in the, I'll put a picture of Watson. We lost our 16 year old cat. Same thing. We've got a cat three months into our marriage. Scotch. Scotchie, we called him. Butterscotch. But I called him Scotch, obviously. Like, I'm naming him after Whiskey. I lost him about two years ago. I am not a, sorry for all you pet lovers out there. I'm not a big pet guy. I'm not a huge animal guy. My wife and girls are huge animal people. And I just, I spontaneously broke out in Sobs for about two weeks after this. And I think a part of it is for me, for you as well. It's like what they do. For me, for you as well. It's like what the cat has seen. It's like that cat has been, has watched my marriage struggle and then flourish. It's watched the birth of my kids. It's watched the, and that's the struggle for us, right? Like even, I don't even have no idea how much consciousness the cat actually has and understands. That's the painful part is like that cat has been there through all of it. It watched us eat bologna sandwiches because we couldn't afford anything else. It watches. We'll put two dollars a gas in our car. It's, so it's been through the whole thing. And then you lose it. Oh my God, that's the last 16 years of my life. Like the cat just sat on the window sill and watched what happened to my family. And I think that's the thing that crushes us. Yeah, Watson. He's named after James Watson, by the way. And then his sister, we also had her put her to sleep last year. She was Francis. So she's like Francis Crick. Yeah, was discovered. Nice. And, you know, he'd been with us our entire marriage. You know, he's like the first crew. He'd been with us our entire marriage. And he, he and his sister made my house a home. Yeah, cool. So before we wrap this up, there is a fourth question that is important, especially for middle age and older men. Yeah. And what is that question? Have you had your testosterone levels checked? Testosterone. Testosterone. Yeah, it's really important. Yeah, you know, there are studies out there. Maybe I'll research them if it's some of the show notes. Maybe not, depends how lazy I am. They show that testosterone levels are just dropping in the West and we need them. We need testosterone. When women do too, you know, they need progesterone, estrogen and some testosterone to recover properly. So women should get that stuff checked as well, especially if they're, you know, 35 or older and having trouble recovering. But for men, I think 40 and over and they're having trouble recovering, they need to check. So I was as tired as hell. Having double vision, trouble concentrating when I read, not terribly interested in work, sex drive, et cetera, et cetera. Well, that's always been pretty good. I've never slept well. Never slept well my entire life. But if you see pictures of me when I was a teenager, I wasn't terribly high testosterone then either. So I went and Witten got it checked and of course you go in and you talk to the guy, the doctor, and then you go get your blood tested and then you come back and it's like a three week deal, just get a simple answer. And I went in and he says you've got testosterone of an eight year old. Of an eight year old? Yeah, of an eight year old kitty cat. I was like 259 39 years old. No, it was 180. Oh my God. Yeah, it was literally an eight year old. Doctors, I know, I know. I'm familiar with standard testosterone. What is that 180 micrograms per deciliter? Is it nanograms? Nanograms per deciliter. It needs to be 8 to 1200. Doctors would argue with me. Anything over 400 is normal. I had a guy that got tested at 311 the other day. Like a 28 year old guy and the doctor's like, you're low normal, you're fine. I said, go get a different doctor. When you go get a blood test for anything, Red Blood Cell Count, anything you'll get the lab back. You guys have probably all seen it. Sometimes I have a bar graph on there or sometimes they just have a number and it'll tell you high, low, medium, whatever. And that number is not a clinical level. It's the statistical, it's where you fall statistically within the testing cohort at that lab. Who do you think gets their testosterone check, old people? If you're in the normal range for that lab, you're just right in the middle of all the old bastards that went in because they had a skin tears and they fell down the stairs or whatever. It wasn't too long ago. It was late summer here, 2017. Centers for Disease Control lowered their clinical levels for testosterone to around 300. I can't remember exactly what it is. Being normal, 300 no, it's not studies show that it was enormously higher in the 80s and previous. The average guy walks around here now with much, much lower testosterone than his granddad did at that age. After I got on testosterone replacement therapy I just felt normal again. There's no rage or anything like that but I was able to engage in difficult work, difficult reading serial, recovered better. I just felt normal again. I don't feel any I'm not like extra handbrake. I just feel normal. I think we should be clear. We're not talking about performance enhancing drugs here. If you want to take super physiological levels, you want to take a gram, a thousand milligrams of testosterone a week get the F out. You're listening to the wrong podcast. That's not who we're talking about. We're talking about hormone replacement therapy. We're talking about those of you who have testosterone. This is manopause. You're in manopause. That's right. Men who have testosterone that is far too low need to bring up their testosterone where it is actually normal, which is probably somewhere in the 800 range would be ballpark area 1200 looks awesome. A little better, but 400 too low. You have X number of receptors for the testosterone. If you super saturate your blood but it doesn't really do anything for you anyway you can take five grams a week and it wouldn't give you much of an enhancing effect anyway. We're just trying to be normal and so ladies have known about menopause and there have been replacement therapies for them and it's been widely accepted and understood in the medical community for decades. Decades and decades. Meanwhile, your dad sits in a chair and watches TV and everybody says, you know, dad sure has mellowed out as he aged when he's worn out and his hormone levels are in the basement. He gets a cut on his hand, more in the yard, he can't heal. Right, like these guys their hormone levels are terrible. Well, and I mean, a big piece of this too is that comes down to quality of life, right? Dr. Sullivan talks about this, what barbell training does and certainly normal levels of testosterone play into this is that I want to have an incredible quality of life right to the end and then I want to die. Boom, dad. What I don't want to do is have a decline of quality of life and they die and if you could go to most people at 50 and say, hey, the quality of your life is going to depreciate significantly over the next 30 years. You're at peak Reynolds, you're 50. This is the best it gets and it's all downhill from here. Most of us would choose to die earlier. But if there was an answer that said, hey instead what you can do, as you can keep the quality of your life better and better and better and then just drop dead of your heart will stop or go have a car accident or whatever at 80, I want that. My friend Doug used to say that he wanted to die like wrestling a bear or because his gun hung in a holster. That's how you want it again. Because his gun hung in a holster. Doing an old fashioned shoot out. Perfect. Those are the questions. When we come to the end of linear progression, we have to ask primarily is recovery enough? Are we recovered enough between sets like acutely? Are we recovering long enough from a systemic sleep between session period? Are we eating enough primarily? Are we eating enough protein? Are we making small enough jumps? Is our testosterone levels adequate for us? To be fair ladies are your levels appropriate as well? Yeah. We've started to see some hormone replacement therapy for women with testosterone like 25 milligrams a week, things like that to bring there. 25 is a pretty normal dose for them. Same sort of thing. And if you're old enough, if you're an old enough female, you will need that actually. But the reason we bring up the men first is because like we said earlier, hormone replacement therapy for ladies is much more widely understood by the medical community and even the lay people and it's really kind of an infancy for guys. Yeah. We beat the hell out of this. Yeah. Let's wrap it up. So thanks for listening to Barba Logic. We'd love to have your reviews. If you love the podcast, we'd love to have reviews on iTunes. I think you can leave reviews on Stitcher. You can also leave reviews on Facebook for us. Any of those would be great. Yeah. We need you guys to spread the word. Thanks so much.