 Welcome to Barbell Logic, Rewind. You know, I thought it'd be useful, just fun to do a little rap session to talk about my development, that what you've been doing with me since I started working with you, because I didn't get to a 605 deadlift overnight, right? This took four years, and during that time we changed a lot of things as you got to know me as an athlete, and as I advanced as a lifter. And so some other questions I get frequently, besides like, why are your feet so close together is, like, did you do that using three by five? What's your nutrition look like? What does your programming look like? So I thought, I know we can't get too detailed, but sort of give people a broad overview of like, what did I do when I started working with you? And then what was the philosophy in changing my programming as I got more and more advanced? And then we can also talk about nutrition too. Yeah, I actually think they're tied together. And so it's essentially two workouts, three times a week. So a workout A and a workout B. Workout A is squat three sets of five, press three sets of five, deadlift one set of five, that's work sets, and that's the same weight across for those, right? Workout two is squat three sets of five, but a little heavier than you did the day before, two days before. Bench press instead of press, three sets of five, deadlift one set of five. And then you just keep alternating workout A, workout B, workout A, workout B, alternate those every single week for as long as you can, adding about five pounds per lift for as long as you can. And that's exactly what you did. And eventually you can't do that. Or if you did, you would squat a thousand and deadlift 1200. That would be awesome. That would be awesome. It gets you super motivated for training. Cause like I remember when I first started working with you and the next workout, the night before I'd be super excited is like I get to go up five pounds. That's right. It's a PR every, every single workout as a PR. So that's like super, super motivating. So that helped really help establish the habit of training for me. That's right. So then as that starts to slow down and usually squatting heavy three times a week becomes difficult. So we often move to like a Wednesday or middle workout light day. So you still same sort of programming, but instead of going up on Wednesday, you would go to like an 80% of what you were doing for three sets of five. We ran that for a little while. So that stopped working. And then we moved to a four day split, right? And so we- So what's a four day split? So a four day split is two upper body days and two lower body days. And you're doing three full body days. Right. You're squatting every workout. Every workout, you're benching or pressing every workout and you're deadlifting every workout. And so what you do when you move from a three day split to a four day split is you take really the same total amount of work and you just divide it up over four days. Now you're gonna squat and deadlift twice a week and you're gonna bench and press twice a week. And so we did that. And then at the point that that stops working, you start doing things like manipulating one variable or one small change at a time, what we call the minimum effective dose change. So we look at your programming and we say if the programming has been working and it now plateaus, in traditional programming theory, what you do is you just stop doing that program and start a new program. And the new program looks nothing like the old program. But we never really did that with you. We took your program. We said, this has worked really well. It started to plateau. What's the smallest change we can make to maximize the return on investment? And what that did was that gave us good data about the change. I would be lying if I said that every change we made worked perfectly. It didn't. No, it didn't. But if it didn't, we knew what didn't work. And if it did, we knew it worked. And so we might start to reduce your volume, especially you say on your second lower body workout of the week and increase your intensity. So you might go from three sets of five to two sets of five to one set of five to two sets of three to whatever, things like that, back offsets, but making sure that the weight continued to go up on the bar. And on the other day, we might actually reduce the intensity a little bit or how heavy the weight was that increased the volume from three sets of five to eventually four sets of five to eventually five sets of five. So now we're doing sort of a heavy volume day and a heavy day that's low volume. And when we couldn't make progress every single week and hit PRs every week, by the way, PRs are the guiding metric that we use in programming, right? That's all really that matters. And I don't mean like a one rep max all the time. You have all these PRs in your book, like you keep your three by five max, your five rep max. Five rep max, yeah. That's the big one for me, one or five. Yeah, or three rep max. We can get three reps sleep. I've got clients that keep, this is my squat max in knee sleeves, not in knee sleeves, in a belt, belt hole four versus belt hole five. And that's fine because what we're doing is we're chasing PRs all the time. When you get to the point where you can't consistently make PRs every week, because the amount of work and the weight that you're doing gets so much and so heavy, then we have to allow for some periods of a little more recovery and we start to make progress once every two weeks and then once every three weeks and once every four weeks. And we get to that spot. We started to bring in some supplemental exercises like the deficit deadlift, rack pulls, box squats, tempo squats, squats with chains and deadlift with chains. We put chains on the bar and what that does is it makes the weight lighter at the bottom and as chains hang off the bar they get heavier and heavier and heavier as you get to the top. It works that strength curve, that kind of natural strength curve that we all have. So what those like, the supplemental list like is it allows you to do the movement of the main lift, but it's not so hard on your body. I mean, they are hard, but like not as hard. Yeah, so what it really does is it's a partial movement with heavier weight like a rack pull like where you're doing a partial deadlift and you can usually do more weight or it increases the range of motion. So that sort of gives you more time under tension and more hypertrophy or more theoretical volume but the weight is gonna have to come down a little bit. So if you were standing on two inches of mats and you were deadlifting, you would deadlift a little less than you would deadlift without the mats, right? And so we do that for all the lifts. We do it for the squat. We'd have supplemental lists for the bench press. We talk about that on the Barbell Logic channel a lot. We go through a lot of those how-tos for how to do that. The key on supplemental lifts and for you, especially we did is our supplemental lists were very, very close to the main lift. So the further away you get from the main lift, a Bulgarian split squat, one foot, single leg on a Bosu ball squat doesn't really make your squat go up. But a squat that you just perform a little slower like a slow tempo descent and a fast ascent will carry over pretty well. Pause squat will carry over pretty well. A box squat will carry over pretty well. Chain squats. Those are all very similar to the main movement. So that's what we did. How long was I into my training with you? This, so I did the three by five for like three or four. I mean, how long, I can't even remember. Four months. And by that point, we still weren't doing a lot of supplemental stuff. No, none. Actually, I typically do none. We're doing accessories, which are different. That's right. That's things like bicep curls, barbell curls, pull-ups. Chins, dips, some body weight stuff. Chins, dips, or lat pull-downs if you can't do chins, things like that. And what's the purpose of that? Just for additional slots, for additional fatigue or stress that doesn't stress you to the point of overstressing the body, right? So what we're really trying to do is we're trying to build some hypertrophy there as well. So hypertrophy is really based on sort of muscle fatigue and the amount of time under tension that hypertrophy occurs as the muscle fibers fatigue over time. And so we'd fatigue them as much as we could from the barbell lifts. Then we'd sort of further fatigue them with a little more work with the accessory movements. But yeah, very little supplements. And then the supplemental lifts probably didn't come in, what do you think, year and a half? Yeah, probably between a year and a half in. And it starts very close. Think about a bench press. The first supplemental lift we're gonna do with a bench press is a close grip bench press. Right. So we literally take your bench press from here to here. Yeah. And that's the supplemental lift. I mean, how's that changed? So what that's gonna do is that's gonna close the elbow angle a little bit more, give you a little bit more tricep work, and then also elongate the range of motion, right? So if I'm here, now I've gotta go a bigger range of motion on the, so it's gonna take a little, it's gonna take the pecs out of the movement a little bit. That's gonna put a little bit more on the front delts and a lot more on the triceps, which for you, because you struggle with the lockout. So you could bench press to here. And so that's the other piece of the supplemental lift. We look at the weak point of the lifter. And for you, it was the lockout of the bench press. You could throw any weight off your chest, six, eight inches off the chest and then it would stall. And so I wanna work that so that that weak point becomes strong. So the old adage of you're only as strong as your weakest link, and it's very trite to say, but it's very much true when it comes to strength training for sure. So that's what we did. We just kept making these programming changes. Eventually you got into advanced programming, block training, which is really still a four day split. And then you get to the point where you can no longer make progress on just a traditional four day split. And we have to start adding volume. And when we do that, we typically add volume by adding frequency. And so we would add a fifth, either bench press or press. And now you're bench pressing three times a week and pressing two times a week. And we would add a third squat back to the mix and be a lighter squat, a less stressful squat. And eventually we added a third deadlift in the mix. And that's called daily undulating periodization. That's really probably the most advanced style of programming you can do. And by the way, this is key. You don't wanna do that if you're a beginner for a couple of reasons. Right. So I think a lot of people will see this thing, oh, Brett did this in the 605, so I need to do that. That's right. Not only probably not. Definitely not. Yeah, and for more reasons than you think, most people looking at advanced programming think that looks fun. Is it fun? No, it sucks. So the guy that makes the progress the longest on the most simple programming. That's what you wanna do. Why would you do complicated if simple works? So let's start simple. Let's stay simple. Let's add a step, literally just one step. Let's see if that variable change worked. If it did, we know it worked. If it didn't, we know it didn't and we changed the variable and we just keep making intricate, small, tiny little, tight-trading, minimum effective steps. And that's what we've done for the past four years in your training. Right. Another important point to point out is that you don't need to do this sort of advanced stuff if you just wanna be generally strong. That's right. Because I think a lot of people think, if I do three by five, then I gotta move on to this block training. Not necessarily. Maybe you do three by five sort of as a maintenance. Yeah, and you can just maintain. Because, and then you do like mud runs. Yeah, perfectly fine. Whatever you want. That's fine. But you have to make that choice. That's right. And I remember having that conversation with you. You remember having that work. Yeah, it's like, what do you wanna do? Yeah, I said, you are strong enough at this point. This is probably two, three, or two and a half years at this point. I said, you are strong enough for anything that life would throw at you at this point. There's nothing that life is gonna throw at you where you are not strong enough. Do you wanna do mud runs with your wife? Do you wanna just get in better shape? Do you wanna do lots of cardio? And you said, no, I just wanna keep getting stronger. Yeah. I said, okay, well, if we keep getting stronger, then we're gonna move to more competitive things. If we do competitive, it's actually not as safe. It's not, yeah. I've been battling, that's another component too. Once you decide to go down that route, you're going to have to battle injuries. You have to. Just aches and pains. Sure, but. I've dealt with that. Now the question is, is it worth, is the increased strength worth the aches and pains for you? Yes, for me, because I just enjoy it. Yeah, me too. You lift with absolutely perfect form. So you don't hurt yourself because of bad form. Sometimes you just hurt yourself because of overuse, right? You just get some tendonitis and you've never had a major injury, right? No. So the worst injury you've ever had was you tore your hamstring. No, sprinting. Sprinting, which was not programmed by me. Right, I just did that for fun. Yeah, that's right. You were just like, I'm just gonna go see if I can beat my sprints from when I was in high school. I think it was like hamstring tendonitis. That's right. It was like a year and a half. That's right. And so we had to rehab that, but you know, you've had some adductor tendonitis and some elbow stuff and some shoulders, but in general, nothing major and you're really strong and you've put on 40 pounds of body weight and you've lost two inches in your waist. And you know, you're up about 40% in strength, right? Somewhere in that ballpark. It sounded like that, yeah. So it's been a blast. And we've done that all with small incremental changes along the way. You are probably the most consistent client I've ever had in online coaching. And that's the difference, man. Like you just don't miss. It's really, really rare that you miss. And you know, people that watch your channel, they know what a busy guy you are and you're doing business and you travel and you've got family and they're a big part of your life, but you make time for training and you get it done. And that means you've got a lot of blue collar days where you've got to just punch that time card and get in and get out. But here's that. I'm consistent because I enjoy it. Yeah. It's not just because like I'm super, there's days where I'm just like, I mean, I'm tired, but even in those days, I'm like, I'm just, I gotta go train. Yeah. I'm gonna go crazy. Even like when I have a low grade fever, I'm like, I gotta go train. We were talking about that earlier, that idea of motivation over discipline. Like that discipline's easy when you're already motivated to do the thing. Right, right, right. If you love training, then it's great. Now that doesn't mean that for most of us, there are times that you gotta do white knuckle discipline things for a short period of time, but that white knuckle discipline isn't very sustainable. And so for you, because you've just really enjoyed training. And there's times when I've had to change your programming a little bit where you're chasing numbers and chasing numbers and chasing numbers. And you got to the point where it wasn't super enjoyable. Yeah. Yeah, that happens. It takes weeks to make it more enjoyable. Like, okay, well, let's just have some fun in the gym and kind of maintain right now. And really, we approach diet the same way. You've done the same thing with diet. Yeah, I think nutrition's another important aspect of this because that goes hand in hand with the training. Yeah, that's right. There's been a lot of change there. So like when I started working with you, I was doing like low carb, higher fat, high protein. And we kept with that. You didn't make any changes with that with my diet. So let's just keep doing that. Let's see how it works. Let's see how it works. But then there's reached a point where like, I was bonking out during the middle session. And so we started making changes with my diet. That's right, one step at a time. And so we started increasing your carbohydrates and reducing your fat. Now, protein always stays high. If you're a strength athlete, you're gonna eat a lot of protein and you do. And it works really pretty well. And so of course we make careful choices with your carbohydrates. You try not to eat processed carbohydrates very much. You eat a lot of single ingredient carbohydrates that don't affect your blood sugar in a negative sort of way. But it's the same sort of that minimum effective dose change with nutrition works well too because if we had said from the very beginning, Brett, here's the perfect diet for you, right? You gotta eat this much protein, you gotta eat this much carbs, this much fat, track it to a T, this much fiber, you're gonna do cardio, you're gonna take fat burners, you're gonna do all these sorts of things. It's just not sustainable. It's not sustainable long-term. And if you're a type A driven neurotic sort of person and you can do it, what will happen when you make all those changes, you change everything about your diet and you get rid of all the bad habits and you replace them only with good habits all at once. Is it'll work really, really well for two, three, maybe four months, which is great. And then you're gonna stop making progress and then what are you gonna do because you don't have any more cards to play. And so in nutrition, just like in programming, I kind of always wanna hold some cards back in my hand so that when things plateau, I can take that and play that card. And so we did that with you. And so the nice thing about your nutrition is that you knew you were in this for the long haul and you didn't have to, so you heard some of your fans a few years ago, we put some body weight, you got a little fatter. So I did a YouTube video explaining what happened to Art of Manliness videos. And everyone said, you got so fat. I did, I was chunky, but it was part of the plan. Art of Process, that's right. Well, I never had you drink a gallon of milk a day. Never did that. Wasn't for you. And then you put on the muscle, got really strong and it was really pretty simple to pull off the fat. You started pulling the fat off. It was just a slow to moderate process one day at a time. And I remember going to eat lunch with you at Tulsa one day and you walked in and I was like, oh my gosh, your waist had gone down four inches or so at that point. And now your shoulders were wide and you had that V taper and you looked like a professional athlete. And I hadn't seen that. And you went from skinny to sort of muscular and pudgy. And then we pulled off the pudge and now you're just muscular and lean. It made a huge difference. But it's that long-term thing. Yeah, so that pudge point, I don't remember how many calories I was eating, but yeah, my waist got to 39 inches from I think I was like 35, 36 inches. Weight got up to 220, 225, which is the heaviest I've ever been. But then, yeah, muscle, the progress in the gym was going up. But there reached a point where I just didn't feel good. Sure. You got that weird feeling you're always pulling your t-shirt off your belly and just getting winded. So you're like, we need a... Time to pull back. Time to pull back. So we reduced the calories, took a break from driving the weight up. Tried to maintain strength. Tried to maintain strength, lost the weight. And suddenly... It wasn't even that much weight that you had to lose, right? You had to lose about 10 pounds. 10 pounds. So I've been hanging around about like 215, 215. But at that point it was 10 pounds on five inches in your waist, right? Because you went from like 39 to back to 34. Sometimes 36. So yeah, then like I did a cut last year. You got down to 33 and a half. But then my gains started going down. I felt like crap. Sure. And I was like... And it crossed the balance. I feel good at 34 inches. That's right. True. But so yeah, I think that the takeaway from this is that there's not one thing that you can do forever that's gonna allow you to keep making changes, right? Or going... Making progress. Making progress. So you're gonna have to adapt to make some changes. But the way to do that is to make one change at a time. Because you've found a style to train that you enjoy, that it's easy to stick with it and it's sustainable. If you don't, if you hate lifting weights in the gym, if you hate getting stronger, like you can't stand it, it's just not sustainable long-term. I mean, look, I'm never gonna run marathons. That's not what I wanna do. But you have viewers that are watching. They're marathon runners. And they love it. It's amazing. I'm super impressed by guys who can do that. That's right. And so if you enjoy that, find the thing you enjoy. If the thing you enjoy is running on a purple treadmill and reading Cosmo Magazine, that's not really training, right? That's exercise. Now if you're one of our moms or just somebody that's been said until your whole life start and do anything. I'm not making fun of the person that's doing the best they can on January 1st, but ultimately you have to train for a goal. And so you've got to set a goal and pursue that. And for you, it's strength. And for some people, it might be a half marathon or a 5K or a marathon or whatever those things are. Biking. Biking. Right, so. And we like doing that. We like biking. You and I like rucking. We'll ruck to that. Like those are fun and do that with our families and stuff. So find the thing that you enjoy, but that you work towards a goal. And if you're working towards a goal, that changes it from exercise to training. It makes it sustainable. And then do the same thing with your nutrition. Just find the one thing that you can change. It's going to make the smallest impact on your life, but the biggest impact on your goal on your return on investment. And do that. And then just track it for seven days. And if you did it perfectly for seven days, then add another habit change. And if you didn't, stick with the same habit change until you can get it. And if you find that the habit change that you're trying to make is something that you hate. Right. Change the habit. Right. You got, it's not going to happen. Yeah, for me with the nutrition, it was if it fits your macros, what's the game? Because like I want to be able to eat with my friends and my family. If we have, you know, if I go to a friend's house and they have spaghetti, it's like, well, I want to be able to eat spaghetti, not be the weirdo, sorry guys. I got to eat the chicken. But maybe there's some people who are like that and that's fine. And all your friends are keto, paleo, carnivore heads. Great. That doesn't fit my lifestyle. Sure. Do what fits your lifestyle and fit your personality. That's key, right? And so it works really well. It's worked well for you and the clients of ours that have figured that out have found the thing that they really enjoy, they're the ones that make the most progress because they're the most consistent and consistency is key. And it's not about discipline, it's about motivation. And certainly there are days that you still have to get out there and do it. No, we're not doing it. The discipline stuff for me is like the conditioning. Like I don't enjoy conditioning or Metcons. No. But I have to do it because I know it's good for my, you know, cardiovascular health, metabolism, blood glucose. So I got to use discipline on that. But like the other stuff I just do because I like. Well, and even with the cardio, we try to pick the things that you kind of enjoy or that you hate the least. Right, exactly. And so, you know, you're like, man, I really don't want to get on an exercise bike and do an exercise bike for miles and miles. I can't stand it. So we, you know, we'll do circuit training and body weight stuff and, you know, do your accessories and circuit and get your heart rate up. And we can do things like that and works really well. And by the way, part of this is because I've been able to coach you so long, I've really been able to figure out what you enjoy and what works for you. So if you're a coach hopper, hop from coach to coach. For program hopper. Yeah, or program hopper. That's right. Which, you know, and that's a big, certainly for us, it's a big point of contention because we try to actually coach people. Like I've watched every heavy set that you've done for the past four years. Every heavy set you video them. I break them down, we train together some. Just getting programming is not the same thing and your coach can never truly learn about you and who you are if all they're doing is giving you a template or a program. And so for us, we've developed a relationship over the years where I know exactly how you like to train. I know how you like to eat. I know what's gonna make you struggle. And so, and that's not because I'm great. It's just because this takes that long a time to really fine tune your programming and your diet to get it to the point that we need it. And so. You're also kind of like a psychologist sometimes. For sure. Right, because they're just like, there's like a head game that goes on with training sometimes and sometimes you need some guy to tell you, no, you can do it, you're fine. Yeah, there's a finding the balance or there's this dichotomy between do I need to chew this person's rear end and motivate them like a drill sergeant? Right. Like do they need a butt chewing? Right, kind of Jesus moment. Yeah, that's exactly right. Or do I need to encourage them and just say it's gonna be okay. You did fine. It was just a rough day. You didn't sleep last night, whatever. And so. I'm super hard on myself. You are. You typically just encourage. I mostly encourage. Yeah. So I'll tell you like, well, I'll even make comments some of you like this, this set sucked. Yeah. Blah, blah, blah. You're also very in tune with and you give me good feedback on how your food was the day before. Right. How your stress is. Stress level. How your work, stress, sleep, all those sorts of things. And so that's, you know, and it's funny. Like over the years, like we started with a complete client-coach relationship and we're really good friends now. We hang out all the time. And I think part of that is there are a few people on earth that I interact with and you interact with probably more than we interact with each other. Because you're training four times a week and we talk almost every day. And, you know, when I have business issues, I call you up and use you as a mentor and vice versa. And so it's a, it's been a good relationship. And that's the way a healthy coach-client relationship should look. Yeah. Well, that's another point too. Like you can do this stuff on your own. You can. It is possible. Of course. But if you're, I mean, I think a game changer was getting a coach. Yeah. That's like, I don't want to be like too salesy here. Sure. Because again, you can do this stuff on your own. But it's nice to be able to offload all that thinking about your programming and your training to someone else and just say, here's what you're going to do today. That's right. And I don't have to think about that. That's right. That's another nice component. Yeah. And the nice thing is for people who don't have a good coach in their town and their area, you now have access to a fantastic coach online. And so, you know, we've got a lot of people that live in rural America. They don't have access to a coach in their town. American military guys, British military guys stationed overseas, or just maybe you do have a good coach in your town and you just can't get your schedules to match up. And so you can train in the convenience of your own home or your own gym at the time that you want. And that's a big part of it. And so it's been a blast. It's actually been one of the great joys of my life. And then doing content for the Barbiologic YouTube channel and the podcast has been phenomenal. You know, it's just been great for us. We have a similar business plan as you do. And then I just want to produce content for free. I just want to give the content away. And a lot of that is just because so much was given to me that I want to be able to give that back out to people. I don't need people to pay me for the content. And so the service stuff online coaching pays the bills, but we're going to keep driving content for free. We're not going to charge you for the content. And so you can find all sorts of stuff about us there with Barbiologic. And we sort of try to walk people through in a systematic progression from the very beginning of where they start through these minimum effective dose changes in programming and training and safety and form and nutrition and conditioning. All those things start at the very beginning because it's a very good place to start. And we work our way through. Cool. Well, Matt, thanks for doing this little wrap session. It's a lot of fun. Yeah, thanks for having me, man. Thanks for being in my guest room. This is pretty nice. Fair pan shakes. Thanks, man. We'll do it. Look each other in the eye. Got it. That's the way you're supposed to do it. That's right.