 The next question is from TheRealRashton. What are your thoughts on forced reps with the help from a training partner? I've read that it's excellent for muscle hypertrophy because it basically puts you past failure, thus recruiting more muscle fibers. Do you guys think this is a good idea or could it be too taxing on the CNS if performed too frequently? Man, who picked the questions today? I did. Good challenging cry like where you're going here. Yeah, so, okay, so back in the day, I read this, there was a flex magazine and I put out this article and it said the five keys to mass building or something like that. I had a picture of Mike Moderato and I can still remember the cover. He's a deceased bodybuilder, but back in the day it was this huge muscular guy and then in there, one of the five keys to building mass was forced reps and they said exactly that. It recruits more muscle fibers, it's a high intensity technique. They also said something about partial reps and negatives and so what do you think I did after I read that article? I applied everything on my body. Yeah, and then of course later on I just did lots of forced reps. In fact, this is the thing you did with your workout partner back in the day. If I had a workout partner there and I'm bench pressing, the reason why they're there is not to watch me lift, but rather to get me to squeeze out three or four more reps. This was extremely detrimental. In fact, years later when I not only stopped forced reps but actually stopped going to failure and did maybe two reps before that, my body responded like it'd been asleep for years. It was like, what the hell is going on? Forced reps is way too much intensity for most people, most of the time. Going to failure by itself is in that same category, but forced reps is a whole another level. Ask me now how often I do forced reps. Never. Ask me how often I did forced reps with clients. Never. It's something that is just way too, it just doesn't give you more benefit because the detriment of the forced reps counters it quite a bit. I've never been more sore in my life than after doing forced reps. I'd like now thinking back to that, like the workouts, like preceding those forced rep workouts, I remember I could barely even move my body. That's part of the problem though, as a young trainer, you used to think that that meant that you were gonna get the most muscle from the ball. You're growing now. Yeah, no, I was in the camp. I remember the reading, I remember reading the study and I remember like going, oh my God, like I need to train like this. Like every exercise I was training this way. If I had a workout partner 100%, they were there. I wanted to do two more, barely touch the bar, make it hard. Matter of fact, that was, I remember in our gym, like amongst all the trainers stuff like that, it was all about like who knew how to spot like perfect, you know, like it was all about who could keep you moving on those forced reps just right. So you're hitting 99% intensity on your last three or four reps. It's crazy. And then how sore you were would be my gauge of like how perfectly done that workout was. And the truth is it's terrible. It was a terrible way of training, training myself. It was a terrible way to teach any client to do that. And it's another thing that I think back to and I think, oh my God, it was such a bad trainer when I first started because, and but again, part of the motivation of what we do on here is, it was to talk about this type of stuff. That's why these questions are great. So you learned that you weren't building, you're just surviving. Well, it's hard for a consumer, right? Or the average gym goer like, this is where I feel so much empathy for that person trying to figure this out. I mean, we're trainers. We're in the thick of all this stuff. And I was still making that mistake. So how could I ever expect an average person who's coming in the gym just trying to get in shape not to make these same mistakes because there was so much stuff around it. I mean, just the last question was all about hit. You know how much that was promoted? This whole idea that you could do a shorter workout and get more results. Like that went like wildfire everywhere and trainers were promoting it. Everybody was doing it. And then now this one with four streps. I remember when it talked about going to failure like that, we've recruited all these muscle fibers and build the most amount of muscle you could from a workout. So nobody talked about like how taxing that could be on your CNS. And then also, which none of us has said anything about it. And I was, how much that would screw your form up. I mean, if you've ever watched somebody max out or do a four strep, this is what it looks like. Yeah. What a symmetry going on. Yeah, it's terrible. And when you do that, it's not like you get any more really out of the chest. You do end up recruiting a bunch of muscle fibers. All the ones you don't want to recruit from other parts of your body trying to, yeah, other parts of your body trying to overcompensate to help get the weight up. And so I can't even tell you the last time I did a four strep. It's just, it's so overrated. The training to failure, four streps is so overrated because another factor too is if you do it and you get so sore like Justin was talking about and it hinders your next workout, you go backwards, you go in the opposite direction. Even if you don't get sore. I mean, I got to the point where I would do this often. I didn't even get sore anymore, but that doesn't mean you haven't gone too far. I see a CNS couldn't recover. I wasn't getting any stronger. I wasn't progressing. But by the way, there's a myth that this is how bodybuilders train. Maybe some, but most don't. Like Arnold, for example, the most well-known bodybuilder of all time who did these super high volume workouts was hitting his every body part three days a week. He rarely went to failure. Now, when they talk about it in articles or you film a bodybuilder's workout, you know, if you're filming me working now and I really want to show how badass I am, I'm going to do more weight. I'm going to have somebody, you know, do the four streps with me to show the intensity, but they often don't train that way. And then if you look at the most successful strength athletes of all time, when I say most successful, I mean the strength sport that has the most science behind it by far is Olympic weightlifting. There's no strength sport in the world that has had as many studies, scientific studies done, like Olympic weight lifters, especially during the Cold War when the Soviet Union in particular, of course the Olympics was a great way to showcase the, you know, just communism more effective than capitalism. And one of the ways they would do is when the Olympics would come along, whose athletes were the best? And the Soviet Union spent a lot of money, a lot of energy, and they literally had captive athletes. They would take these athletes, you're living in our facility, you're eating our food, you're taking our drugs, you're doing that. And you know how they used to train them? Never to failure. It was very high frequency. They trained often at sub-maximal intensities, and they resulted in some of the best strength athletes of all time. Never, almost never trained. You know when they trained to failure, when they pushed their limit to the max? Competition. That's when you're trying to see how much you could do. So failure is not only overrated, it's damaging. I would say for most people, don't do it. Don't avoid it ever. Unless the goal is to somehow train your psyche to be able to handle intensity, maybe there's some value there. But from a muscle development standpoint, not really. Well, we consider failure the moment form starts to break down. And we also advocate for one to two reps short of that. So a lot of people, I think, flirt with this and don't even realize they are. How many people go to the last rep they could probably perform? I would have stopped you a rep or two before that. And again, just because you're not struggling or it's not hurting you more the next day, you assume you're not doing a good enough job and it's the opposite is true.