 Ladies and gentlemen, we're back, squat day. I got heavy squats. I'm gonna work up to a single, drop down three. Welcome to the video. Silent Mike, silent Avi. We're gonna smash away, she's got a D-load week. I'm gonna go heavy. Then back in biceps. We got the Abamos playlist going on. Three-day holiday weekend, I'm feeling good. Hip hurts a little bit. We're jamming, man. Let's go. Instagrammer to ever live. I'm so damn skinny, I'm hidden behind this pole. I disappeared. You can't even see me. The bar is lifting itself. That's crazy. How's the single going? You can just rub it in, bro, cause I'm 34 and ain't got a wife. Yeah. That's the majority of the Q and A today. Bunch. Asking for a friend, people wanna know, what the hell do you wanna know, man? I'm getting old and I'm lonely. That I'm trying to adopt a dog for the last two years and I can't even get one of them. Can't even pay for love. Can you imagine? I got a little nephew tyke, that's plenty, bro. That's plenty. The single feels good. We're only back squatting two weeks, right? It's like the second low bar day. Yeah, so we're low barring. You know what I do hate? Everyone's semantics about high bar and low bar. Maybe we'll get Coach Avi's opinion, but like, cause stereotypically, when you're talking about like, ripped tail, who made the five by five very popular and the low bar very popular. Talking about sitting back and into your hips and like one, two, three, everyone's squat looks like this. Yeah, we got low bar and high bar. And then you compare it to a weight lifter who has a lot more knee flexion, their knees heading forward. They're way more upright in their squat than the bar's way higher. To me, what your lower body does in a squat and what your upper body does in a squat are totally different. And then two, like who cares about the semantics of categorizing it? I don't know, like you play basketball, you play basketball. It's not like, oh, he's this guy. Like no, like you have certain skills or whatever, but I place the bar somewhere and then what my lower body does is to be most efficient it can. I can put the bar really high and have a hip dominant squat. I can put the bar really low and have a quad dominant squat. That's what I think I move the most amount of weight with. So that's what I do. The bar's a little bit lower on my rear delts. Someone's asked me about like mid bar. I'm like, even if I say, yeah, I'm a mid bar squatter. What does that mean? Who fucking cares? Is it comfortable, repeatable, and do you lift the most amount of weight efficiently that way? But right now, bar's real low. I got a little bit of a quad dominant squat. Historically, my biggest squat's about 590 and I had the bar very low and it was in heels and a little bit more hip dominant. That's just how she rolls. But yeah, still losing weight, still getting leaner and we're going to see where this takes us. And it's really difficult because I feel my hamstrings and glutes wanting to activate and engage in this squat made it as more dominant, quad dominant for me. So at the top, I feel like I'm just muscling it up with my quads and my hamstrings and glutes are like, I want to use this, but I can't engage them. But I had a friend who gave me some tips on it because they said like, high bar as a variation helped him with his low bar. So I was like, okay, I'll learn from him. And basically, now I place the bar even though it's still high in my back but I place it on the thicker part of my trap versus like on my trap, a little more mid bar so that it's more comfortable. Tries to use my lats together or my rear delts keeping my elbows forward to engage my back because I also don't know what to do with my elbows. For high bar, I feel like there's much more movement than with low bar and it's also teaching me how to keep my pressure evenly distributed on my feet throughout the movement. I hated high bar, but now I'm trying to learn from it instead of cry about it and try to like, okay, I could get something from this and get stronger somehow. I think I still need to give myself some time with high bar to see how it's like translating over to my low bar. It would probably be person to person. Maybe someone needs work with their quads, filling their quads and high bar allows them to be more quad dominant instead of like hips then I would do that. When I pulled 705, I hadn't touched over 585 which is like 80% for six months. And that was just what based on training off. I didn't have like a real plan. I had a very loose plan in my head. So how did you do it? If 585 is RP7 and then three months from now I move it at a five, you don't think I got stronger? Like my top end strength is going to go up. You don't have to, you don't, no one handles tens to get stronger. All you need is the full muscle recruitment. You need to get better at the lift, the scale of the lift. You need to build more muscle when you can. And then you need to recruit more muscles when you can. And so like you can do that through hypertrophy stuff, getting close to tens. You do it through strength stuff, getting through tens. Or you can take some maximal weights and move them really fucking fast. You still recruit the same shit. So what does your volume look like at 585? Then I just tapered it down like normal. So like maybe five sets of three all the way down to like one set of one. And then I would raise or lower the second deadlift day, raise or lower the squat day. Just kind of volume it all the way down. And then I just handled heavy singles and all three, all four of my days. Took six days off, pulled like 400 and fucking. Took six days off. I'd probably deadlift like 400 a week of. Taking how much time off is another like controversial thing, but it depends on how you train. Like some cats will take two weeks off, but that's because they're overall like one, the stimulus is higher because they're squatting 1,000 pounds. So the systemic fatigue is just higher. Regardless if you're that strong, it is just more shit. We're still all flesh. And then two, like if you handle a shit ton of volume for a very long time, then yeah, you'll go out of shape fast. Like you, you handle a good amount of volume and a good amount of frequency. If you just take six days off, you're gonna get out of shape and won't be able to represent your one right max. So you gotta keep that bottom line. You keep your bottom line in a taper, that's all. But if your bottom line is low. Six days is a lot for me. Like I've been another day for skill retention, but even then probably just like going straight. Well, it was deadlift only. You know what I mean? Taper retention is all different, right? Deadlift only, plus I'm old as shit. Plus ladies in general and the smaller folks, can officers let you handle more shit. They recover faster, but you can push them harder too. It's like an engine with like an intercooler on it. They're for my car heads. Like she's a turbo charged, but she's got an intercooler. I don't have a turbo charge, but I don't need an intercooler. Rev harder, recover harder. You said I'm cooler? What? You said I'm cooler. No, intern. Okay, cool, awesome. Thank you, that's all I needed to hear. Approximately how much percent do you think your strength decreased? If you guys refer to our first fat loss video, I kind of talked about how strength wasn't like a number in my mind. And I go into some detail on why, but here's why you get weak when you diet. One, you're losing leverages. You know, benching, there's just more cushion. There's more cushion, there's more cushion. Squatting, there's more cushion. It obviously depends on how much you're losing. You know, losing 60 pounds, I'm now down like 65 pounds. There's a lot of gut that's gone. So I have less stuff to balance, embrace against. And although fat isn't functional, it doesn't technically move the weight. The levers do help, the rebound does help. Two, and maybe even bigger, is that you gotta eat less calories, right? We're gonna be in a deficit. So less calories than my body needs to maintain its body weight. And so my energy in general, your energy in general, will go down. So the amount of effort we can put into life into lifting goes down when you're in a calorie deficit and when you're dieting. So there's a lot of little factors there. Some people end up deadlifting more, generally not always. You have to cut carbs eventually, right? Doesn't mean you have to go zero carb, but you're eating less carbs because that's one of the main macronutrient sources. Fat's the other one we tend to cut. Protein, we tend to keep around the same. And carbs hold water, carbohydrate within our muscles. And so you have less water, less energy, less cushion again in your body. So there's a lot of factors. With me, we talked a little bit about the mental health stuff and why I just wasn't training. My strength has dropped from my best ever, but that's when I was training six days a week like a professional athlete, you know? And I was 215 pounds, not when I was 250 and kind of chunky. I can't really say a percent. It's gonna depend on the person, your training age, how fast you cut. But my best suggestion is cut, get to a healthy body weight or what you like. And then you can maintain and you'll be able to build that strength back. Maybe not to exactly where you were, but pretty soon. So I've got a couple more weeks, I'm probably gonna cut and figure it out. And then I'll maintain and watch my numbers start to move up. They're already moving pretty good. So the squad of 475, I'm gonna pull 500 for three. And I know those aren't my top numbers, but we're gonna smash them. So once I get a little bit more food in my system, I'm gonna start eating some maintenance. You guys will see the strength gets right back to where it was. Difficult to start how that whole process goes. Yeah, I think it's really hard to start. One, we were just opening the gym. So I was coming over this mental health hurdle where I felt like I'm tied down in a straight jacket. It's kind of like a fear of mine, not a fear, but like, I don't know what it is where like a sputter man like zips your ass up. And then he zips your ass to the ground too. Like that kind of feeling, like claustrophobia or something, like panic kicks in. I felt like that. Like mentally I felt like that. So then physically I felt like that. And then we opened the gym. I have a ton of empathy for people going through it mentally, physically, emotionally. And maybe I should give myself a little more compassion, but there's also times for others and myself where I just say like, man, show up, shut the fuck up. And so at that point, it was time to show up and shut the fuck up. And so we had to remodel this whole thing. We're low on employees. I had them at Seabassier where I was low on help. I was low on friends. So I'm running, you know, getting here about 5.30 in the morning and not leaving here too. Two, three, four, five, six in the evening, plus everything in between. Not only say I was exhausted, the mental health was not there. The physical shape was out there. I was out of shape. And there was a couple like many rebounds. I tried to get back in the lifting, I couldn't. So the biggest thing, and I talked about in the other videos, the biggest thing you can do is set yourself up for success with preparation and setting things that are attainable. So rather than, all right, man, I haven't trained in two years. Let's hop on a small love junior and hit six days a week bench. Like that's just not realistic. So yeah, in the beginning I just started three days lifting only. I live for an hour and that's it. No cardio. I didn't worry about my food or I started like ordering out but only ordering like healthy food out. Right, no more fried food. Let's get a veggie in a day. Like all these baby step, do that for a month or two and then next baby step. Long story short, it was very difficult. But that's how it has to go. All right, I'm gonna drink a gallon of water. Okay, I'm gonna get one veggie in a day. And then at this point, you know, fast forward a year and a half, I'm getting two veggies in a day, two fruits a day and chugging water all day. Training four times a week, cardio five times a week, right? But I didn't just go from nothing to something. I went training twice a week, then three times, then four times. And then even for a second there, I pushed it a five and I could feel myself like, all right dude, this is probably not it. Mentally and physically, let's not push it. This work's still going crazy. I have less hours in the gym but just as many am I working on the gym? Yeah, it's hard. And I think it's hard for anyone. I'm just as human as you, man. Just because the paycheck comes in from the fitness industry because I'm a fitness professional doesn't mean it's easy for me. I like helping you. I like communicating with you. I like educating. I like entertaining. But I don't wake up every day stoked to go do tricep push downs and get a pump. I don't get stoked every day to rip my shirt off and pose in the mirror. I don't get stoked for a deadlift PR. I don't get stoked to eat a salad a day. Those things don't excite me, man. I'm really not about that life. What I am about is helping you share my journey, creation, building community, building culture. And so this, this allows me to build that culture. This is just the vessel. The barbell's the vessel. Fitness is the vessel. YouTube's the vessel. Seabass's magic hands are the vessel. But trust me, it's just as hard for me as it is y'all. Ladies and gentlemen, quick accessories. I'ma bang this thing out. Hopefully that answers some of your questions. Again, on Instagram, I'm selling Mike with 2Ks. Join our Discord and link it below if you wanna communicate. If you have any questions on fat loss fitness. Anyway, I can help you. Let me know. We over me, man. Be a part of something bigger than yourself. New videos every single Monday and Thursday. We'll catch you in the next one. I'm out.