 You're listening to Barbell Logic brought to you by Barbell Logic Online Coaching where each week we take a systematic walk through strength training and the refining power of voluntary hardship. Hey everyone, I just wanted to say that we are so thankful to Dr. Jonathan Sullivan, Noah Hayden and their guests for all the hard work they put into this podcast series on strength and health. We're really proud of it and glad to be able to share it with you. These folks continued to make really important contributions to not only the strength training community but to anyone who's interested and curious about maintaining a high quality of life and as they illustrated for us our quality of life is heavily influenced by our physical abilities, but there is more to our health than just our physical capacity. We have to also take care of our emotional and mental health. So, as a bonus episode, we wanted to add this interview Matt did with Dr. David Puder. Matt joined Dr. Puder on his podcast to discuss the best exercise program for depression. Now, this is something that I've dealt with on my own and that many of us have had to work through and it can be very, very challenging, especially when you see someone you love and care about going through periods of depression and you don't know how to help them. So, we feel that sharing this conversation adds important information on how barbell training can improve mental health. He's been a guest here on the Barbell Logic podcast before. He's a psychiatrist. He hosts his own podcast called Psychiatry and Psychotherapy and he's also a client here of Matt's at Block. So, if you're at all curious about mental health and psychiatry, I highly recommend you check in on his podcast. So, we thank Dr. Puder for allowing us to re-air this and we hope you enjoy and benefit from this episode. Welcome to the Psychiatry and Psychotherapy podcast. I am joined today by none other than Matt Reynolds. He is an elite level strength training coach. He was a strongman, professional status. He founded one of the most successful online strength training programs, Barbell Logic. He is the host of Barbell Logic podcast, which has about 150,000 listeners per month. And he is my strength coach, actually, and has been my strength coach for a while. And what that means is that whenever I do my squats, deadlifts, rowing, any of that stuff, I video the last set. I put it up and he comments on it and I've done some leadership development coaching for him. So, we become friends and I'm also joined today with Kyle Logan. He's a fourth year medical student who has been working on a project looking at the effects of strength. So, guys, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me, man. I'm excited. You've been on my podcast three or four times now. I know. The reason why I wanted to bring you on, Matt, is because I have had a lot of success with a couple of my clients who have actually followed through with getting a strength coach. And I'm looking at the data from the last two years of these studies that have come out. So, we specifically said, let's only look at the studies that have come out in the last couple of years. And let's look at the big meta-analyses and let's try to figure out, like, what is the best exercise for people with depression, for people with psychiatric issues? And it was strength training and high-intensity interval training. And so, I thought, hey, let's go through a little bit of that data, not in a way that's going to bog people down. But just to kind of convince them and then let's get Matt Reynolds on and talk about the process of getting strong. Because there's a science here and it's like, I've become aware of it in the last couple of years, working with you, listening to your podcast. But I don't think a lot of people really understand this. And so, I really wanted to talk about how to go from zero, like you're doing literally nothing. Like, I have this one patient that I recently got going, she stays in bed most of the day. And so, how to go from there to, like, in maybe the 95th percentile of your age group for strength, which I think it's maybe a couple-year journey, but I think it's a worthwhile journey. Sure. And I think it's going to help people with their depression and with their mood issues. So, you know, we're speaking in this podcast to therapists, we're speaking to psychiatrists, people who are medical students, people coming up in training. And, you know, I imagine patients are going to jump on and want to know, oh, you know, what's the best program for me as well? So, yeah, all good. I think it's interesting because we can bring kind of both sides of the spectrum there that certainly we like the data and we like the science at Barbell Logic. But the real advantage I think that we bring to the table is that I don't believe there's anybody ever who has strength coached more people than us in history. We've coached thousands and thousands and thousands of people specifically for strength in this high-intensity interval style conditioning that you're talking about. And so, while the data absolutely matters, hopefully what I can bring to the table today is the experience as well. So, look, no one has tested more people in this exact realm than the coaches at Barbell Logic. Yeah. And, you know, I feel it's a huge privilege to also be coached by you because I know you've been doing this for like literally your whole adult life. And you're at the top of the game. You were one of the top, you know, power lifters, strongmen, and you're still incredibly strong. So, you've lived the life, right? So, you're not just like a physical therapist who's going to, you know, try to get help people get strong who have never really done it themselves. And you have this incredible now amount of experience in trying to help people get past roadblocks. You've helped me get past a bunch of roadblocks for myself. Like, so just to give people an idea, before I started working with Matt in, I think it was January. So, it's been about nine months now. Before that, I had been basically trying to do this all myself. I had been to a couple of conferences, strength training conferences. I had, Yep, sounds right. You know, some friends who were into it. So, we would kind of coach each other. But I had never gotten past certain roadblocks. I had gotten stuck in my lifting kind of around the same numbers. And it's been really interesting and surprising actually to see how you kind of like sequentially have helped me push past certain strength kind of like mental blocks and roadblocks because there's a psychological piece. Yeah, absolutely. And there's a physical piece going on. Yeah, it's interesting. I was just going to say it's what I hope we can delve into just a little bit in the show today is it's really not that complicated. And I think maybe that's really one of the biggest pieces, right? People have some fear about doing it in the first place. They don't know where to start. You know, the fitness world, especially the one that we see on Instagram is rife with misinformation and people who are focused entirely on aesthetics or taking pictures in themselves in the mirror and scantily clad clothing. And there is a select few people out there who are strength training really for health and for quality of life improvement. And when that is the focus, it actually isn't that complicated. So I hope we can dive into that a little bit. You talk about some of the changes we've made. They're just very simple, minimum effective dose changes, much like what you would do with your patients with prescription medication you would give them. You don't change a million things at once. You just, you know, you change a tiny thing and we do the same thing in strength training. So hopefully we can find that common ground there. Yeah, so Kyle, I want you to kind of answer this question here. So from the data, I think what we found is that the most recent articles show that increases in strength have the biggest impact on depression. So we're going to talk about that. So tell me about the studies for that, Kyle, real quick. So as Dr. Peter was saying, this is research over the last two years and we have a couple articles right here. There's a large meta analysis, 33 randomized control trials, kind of the top level of research, 1,877 patients. They were found to have resistance training to have a mean effect size of 0.66 on reducing depressive symptoms. And another interesting thing in the study was the number needed to treat was four to have one patient enter remission. And just to give, so an effect size of 0.66, Matt, what that means is like, imagine like a bell curve of depression. Sure. And you're going to move people 0.66 standard deviations from where they started. Right. That's 33 randomized controlled trials, 1,877 patients. So that's a lot of people that they looked at. And that effect size change, that is pretty similar to what we would see with medication or psychotherapy. So I literally tell people, look, strength training is going to be as good as one antidepressant. That's right. And it's going to be part of the overall picture because people don't just need to move 0.66 standard deviations. Usually they need to move around two or three to get back to normal. So it's like part of the package of what I give people. Okay. Tell me about this other meta analysis. So another meta analysis involving 27 randomized controlled trials with 1,452 clinically depressed adults, revealed an effect size of 0.96 for strength training and an effect size of 0.524 endurance training on decreasing depressive symptoms. And when you only counted endurance training lasting longer than 10 minutes, the effect size increased to 0.62. Yeah. So what this basically showed was that there is a stronger effect size, that meaning more standard deviations of movement away from depression compared to in the people who did just strength training. Right. Correct. Compared to just cardio, compared to just going out there, going for a jog, this is much more effective. What most people do when they start because that's all they know how to do, right, is to just jog around the neighborhood, which is not a bad move. If that's all you know, it's still a starting point. I would never put down a person who's trying to do some, but the studies have clearly shown that if instead, if you had to choose between one, if you had to choose between two, you had to choose one, strength training is going to give you the best bang for your buck. Yeah. Okay, go over this next one, randomized control trial of youth. So now we're talking about 15 to 25-year-olds. And specifically, I think this one's important because right now, in the midst of the pandemic, there is an epidemic within the youth of suicidal thoughts. I think something like 20% of people in this age group have had at least one suicidal thought in the last month, 20%. So this trial on 68 youths, age 15 to 25, meeting MDD criteria, were assigned to either resistance training or high-intensity interval training for 12 weeks. After this 12 weeks, no significant association was found between strength and aerobic exercise attendance, but there was a dose-dependent change relationship between increases in the YMCA bench press test and decreases in depression severity with an effect size of 0.51. So basically half a standard deviation, better decrease in depression if they got a much better bench press. They got markedly stronger. There's clear correlation with a decline in depression, right? Yep. And that's really cool because it's like, okay, then the question is, how do we get them the strongest, the fastest? Yeah. And that becomes like what we're really aiming at. Okay, we want a program that can get people stronger, that can get whatever they're lifting, squatting, benching, deadlifting. We want to get that strength up the fastest we possibly can because that's going to make the biggest impact. Absolutely. Do you want me to tell them how to do that or do you want to hold off? Hold on for a second. Okay. We're going to get that. I'm like sitting on the chair and I've got my hands underneath the seat and I'm like shaking because I can't wait to tell. Let me, I want to tell people, man, let me take the bridle off. Let me tell them, let me tell them how to do it. But no, I'll wait. Okay. Well, we'll keep teasing. We're going to build it up. Well, you know, doctors are only convinced if you show them some data. Yeah. Give me the data first. Okay. Now let's move it to practical. Okay, got it. So talk about this study, this cohort study of 6,000 Chinese participants and what they found with hand grip strength. So in this cohort study of 6,392 adult Chinese participants, they found the incidence of depressive symptoms was higher in populations with lower hand grip strength. And the incidence of depression was 11.9, 15.5, and 22.1 for the strong, moderate, and weak hand grip strength group respectively. So there were almost twice as many depressed patients in the weak hand grip strength group compared to the strong group. Yeah. And so what this really points at is there's something about being strong that decreases the incidence of future depression. So I tell my patients, look, get strong and you'll be less likely to have this level of misery again in your life. And the authors also did a meta analysis with this study and five other studies across different countries. I think one was in the UK, one was in Germany. And so the total number of patients was 26,473. And they also found a significantly decreased risk of depressed symptoms among participants with strong hand grip strength, having a relative risk of 0.74. 0.74, that's significant. So just even the hand grip strength, Matt, I don't know if you've heard of this type of study. Yeah. Made an impact. Well, and this isn't a study, right, that you put someone on an exercise program. This is looking at people who are already strong, moderate, or weak. So when you look at somebody who is strong, we're talking about over 26,000 participants and a very detailed study of over 6,000 Chinese adult participants, right? When someone has strong hands, what do you think about? I actually don't think about weightlifting necessarily. Practically, what do you think about? What do I think about? I think this person has, you know, their body is working. That's right. They've done hard things. They've done hard things, right? They've worked hard. Really, that's what that means. Strong hands, right? How many farmers, how many mechanics, how many people who've worked hard, but have never lifted weights, but they've still developed as a byproduct of their occupation, a base level of strength that they probably didn't even know correlated with depression. And then later you look back and say, you know what? What we're seeing is someone who works hard physical labor, works hard with their hands, works hard with their body. There is clearly a correlation here. Yeah. Okay. The next big point we wanted to look at is, is high intensity interval training better than moderate continuous training? So is it better to do more bursts of sprints compared to like just, I'm going to jump on the treadmill for 20 minutes and go at a steady state. So there's a bunch of studies that looked at this. Kyle, take it off with the first one. So the first one we're going to talk about is a randomized control trial of 59 inpatients. So they're in an inpatient facility with major depressive disorder. They found sprint interval training comparable to continuous aerobic training on reducing depressive symptoms with a large effect size of 1.1. The study also found improvements in VO2 max were predictive of improvements in depressive symptoms. And when you compare the two, the net training load of sprint interval training was 12.5 minutes compared to 20 minutes of continuous aerobic training. Yeah. So they found gains, you know, like the total gains was significantly associated with the decrease in the depressive symptoms. 1.1. That's huge. 1.1 effect size. That's pretty good. And remember for how long of training? 12 and a half minutes. 12 and a half minutes. So when you start talking about bang for your buck, an effect size of 1.1 for 12 and a half minutes, somebody's going to have to convince me why we shouldn't be doing that. Everyone has time to do that. That's a fantastic study. Yeah. Okay. Tell me about the systemic review and the meta-analysis of high-intensity interval training for severe mental illness. So this looked at nine articles on high-intensity interval training for people with severe mental illness. And of these seven studies examined high-intensity interval training are on a major depressive disorder, and they found a significant improvement in the mood of 0.641 following high-intensity interval training. Also of the studies examined, four of these randomized controlled trials compared high-intensity interval training to moderate continuous training as the control condition. And they found moderate improvement in favor of high-intensity interval training compared to the moderate continuous training for increased mood. So it favored high-intensity interval training is what you're saying? Yes. Okay. So the next study we're going to look at is a randomized controlled trial of 34 inpatients with major depressive disorder comparing high-intensity interval training to moderate continuous training on depression severity and arterial stiffness and showed high-intensity interval training had a effect size of 1.48 and was more effective at reducing depression severity than moderate continuous training of 1.4. But they also found that the moderate continuous training was more effective in additionally lowering peripheral artery stiffness. I think this is like diastolic blood pressure. The study only lasted four weeks with 12 training sessions. 12 training sessions. Okay. So tell me about this systemic review and meta-analysis of high-intensity interval training. So this review looked at 12 interventional studies and they found high-intensity interval training reduced depression severity using the pre and post measures with a effect size of 1.36. Yeah. So to conclude it looks like from these studies looking at high-intensity interval training compared to continuous moderate training. Both have value but the high-intensity interval training I think is a little bit better. I would say it's better. Like the net training time is less so I think compared to moderate continuous training high-intensity interval training is the way forward. Okay. And the next thing I wanted to look at is what about high-intensity interval training and strength training. So when you combine those things what we found was that a lot of the studies pointed at both of them working together synergistically. So briefly tell me kind of some highlights of these three studies you looked at here. So in one it's a large population study of over 17,000 adults and it found the combination of aerobic and muscle strengthening exercise was associated with the lowest likelihood of reporting depressive symptoms followed by aerobic only and muscle strengthening only. Okay. And then this other meta-analysis showed that combined aerobic and strength training they looked at 17 studies. They showed that it increased peripheral brain drive neurotrophic factor. Have you ever heard of that one Matt? Brain drive neurotrophic factor? I mean I think I could that sounds like a supplement. It sounds like a supplement no. No you can't get that one unless you work hard. Yes. So basically they found that low to moderate aerobic exercise did not increase something called BDNF but the combined aerobic and strength training did increase it. Yep. And we're going to talk about that in a second and what that is but basically it's like miracle growth for the brain. So there's these studies of cognitive decline in elderly people and they found that strength training decreases or halts the cognitive decline like the amount the percentage of the brain that sort of goes away every year you know that like naturally goes away. And so I think it probably has to do with this brain drive neurotrophic factor that's probably one of the reasons why there's this sort of halting of brain loss. Super interesting. So one final study here showed was a cross-sectional study of over 5,000 Australian women and found that a combination of resistance training and aerobic exercise yielded lower probabilities for depression compared to aerobic alone and the relative risk ratio was 0.61. So the reason why I think this is so important because so many psychiatrists, so many you know mental health professionals we stop at like okay great the person's doing some jogging but what I think the data says is strength training is so so important. I just want to like I want to get to kind of the heart. There's a lot more in this document and so if you guys want to look at the data we've cited everything this will be on the website we go into brain drive neurotrophic factor how it's miracle growth for the brain how it's going to be good for you we go into you know all the different other good things that strength training does for example it's good for bone health it's good for sexual health even in people interesting we found one study mat where people had um they had prostate cancer and so they needed to be on like an androgen blocker and that's like death to testosterone for men right it's the opposite it's it's really about anabolic that's right it's really opposite of testosterone yes and that's right and they found that strength training actually got their sexual function up so it's probably more than just pure testosterone that it's increasing it's probably increasing a lot of other good things for your sexual health it's good for cardiovascular health weight loss they found that aerobic training alone was not as good as aerobic training and resistance training for fat loss yep and diabetes prevention there was a big study that looked at how there was a 60 percent reduction in diabetes type two which is you know practically an epidemic of older people in america absolutely and specifically in our patient population if patients have like schizophrenia and they're on an anti-psychotic it increases the risk of diabetes and so I try to get them on strength training regimens so that they have a decreased risk of developing it okay tell me about the rate of injury in weight training because if someone's going to say weight but like it's really dangerous it causes a lot of injuries that's right so what did you find so when I was looking this up I actually thought it was going to be higher and more comparable to a contact sport but it was completely the opposite so a systematic review in 2017 looked at the risk of injury and weightlifting and they found it to be around three injuries per 1,000 hours of training and when you look at powerlifting it was around it was also around three injuries per 1,000 hours of training which is comparable to other non-contact sports and when we look at contact sports like american-style football it's 9.6 injuries to 1,000 hours of training and when you look at competitive soccer it's 53 injuries for every 1,000 hours of training 25x soccer is 25x more dangerous than weight training yep it's crazy now and and also just like here's a really important note that study which we quote quite often at barba logic in our marketing data and whatnot especially when we're working with insurance companies and whatnot right is that remember that we're talking about weightlifting as a sport powerlifting as a sport and that is not even the same thing as what we're trying to do here which is to get people generally strong right so it would be the same thing as think about soccer you can go out for exercise and kick the soccer ball around in your backyard with no one else for fun to get your heart rate up what would the injury rate be for that probably very low the injury rate that is quoted there for soccer is when you're actually playing competitive soccer the very nature of competition will make the thing because we're wired to be competitive right we're going to try a little harder there are other people involved that you could get hurt or you will get hurt more often weightlifting is no different when someone is literally trying to squat the most weight they possibly can for a single rep in front of a large audience and judges obviously the injury rate was going to go up there but that's not what we're even asking people to do we're just saying hey we want to figure out how to strength train to get generally strong yeah which is actually going to reduce that injury so an injury rate that is already low among the competitive weightlifters is going to be even lower for the average person who's doing this for general strength training that's a really good point that's a really good point and I think the other thing is with looking at that last set when someone's squatting and deadlifting a lot of the times you're looking at you know is the technique starting to fade that's right and so I think the injuries happen when you get to a place where your technique is not good and you're lifting heavy but what would happen is as my technique starts to sort of get worse Matt would decrease my weight 20% and then or I don't know 20% is probably not exact but sure yeah no it's about right maybe 10 somewhere between the two and then what he would do is he would focus on my technique and then we'd slowly pick up the weight again that's right you know okay we have gotten through the studies and now I would like to kind of get into some of the practical aspects of like okay how do we start sure so this is this is the what you've been waiting for you're taking all right taking the bridle off so okay let's start with this basic idea of you create a stress that's big enough to cause an adaptation that's right yep it's the stress recovery adaptation syndrome right there's a stress that you have to expose your body to that it's not used to and as long as it's not so great as long as it's not so much that it kills you which it shouldn't be then your body will adapt to that stress it's that simple yeah and I think a lot of people if they did exercise back in the day and that now they've been out of exercise for a long time they want to go hard yep and so they end up like going out on the weekend slaying themselves and then they're out for like six days yeah those are so sore they can't move they can't sit on the toilet because they're so sore yep that's a real bad place to be so I had this one guy for example very depressed was in the military used to squat very heavy and so I said I literally want you to start with like a third of what you used to do do three sets of five and then I'm only letting you go up five pounds each time you do it and you can work out every other day and so he started slow you know and he's like I really want to throw on an extra 25 pounds the second time I do it and I'm like no you have to start slow you have to just yep incrementally go up and by the way he could have done that weight he could have thrown 25 more pounds on but the risk was not worth the reward doing 25 pounds less is still more stress than what he's used to and so it will still cause the desired adaptation I'm telling you it's the same thing as medication and when we start to look at exercise and strength training as medicine then the goal is the minimum effective dose why would you take the maximum dose at some point you get to a minimum toxic dose like why would we even play there let's do the minimum effective dose for the desired adaptation adapt and then go up just a little bit add a little more stress each time it makes far more sense and it's far safer right so so just to give you an idea when recently I started some of that high intensity real training with Matt and he had me on the rowing machine and I used to row in college and when I used to row in college we would do three 20 minute pieces as like a normal workout and Matt he started me off with three sprints about 12 seconds each yeah 100 meters 100 meters for three rounds with what I give you 60 seconds or 90 seconds rest between them 60 seconds rest okay so that means the whole workout was four minutes yep for that part of it I was also squatting and deadlifting yeah for that that's right for the high intensity interval training and then you know four days later we did four 12 second pieces you know and then he had me do three 24 second pieces and then he had me do four 20 second pieces and then he had me do one you know one minute piece and then he had me go back and start doing you know six 12 second pieces and then you know that's right and then go up to five 20 second pieces now the reason why I'm giving this example is because most people are starting thinking I have to go do something that's so psychologically hard and it's just not necessary that's right think about the person you know you're talking about one of your patients who basically lays in bed all day what's step one for that person probably walk into the mailbox and walk them back in right right I mean it's just like you start conservative and then the next day you walk down to your neighbor's mailbox and back and then you know and you add a little bit every time that concept is called progression and we utilize progression in strength training and in energy systems training which is what HIIT is doing what high intensity you know we're training the energy systems of the body so we start very conservatively and we add a little bit at a time and where that conservative piece is for the 75 year old is going to be different than where it is for the 18 year old kid who is still in the middle of playing high school athletics like their start point will be different but it will all be conservative at the beginning and slowly add a little bit each session over time yep I've had a number of people who I will see and they'll come in with their loved one and they're on a wheelchair they might have been in the hospital for six months they had severe sarcopenia and they can barely get out of the wheelchair you know so they're basically pushed around and what I would do with them is I would grab them underneath the armpits and I would have them squat out of their wheelchair to see how strong they are and how much I would need to help and you know this one person in particular could do about half of it right yep so the reason why they couldn't stand up on their own is because their arms aren't strong enough their legs aren't strong enough to get out of the chair what then I did was I taught their loved one to basically help them squat and I said you're going to do two of these you're going to wait five minutes you're going to do two of them you're going to wait five minutes you're going to do two of them and you're going to do that every other day that's right and I've had a number of these people after about three months they can now squat out of the chair five times without any help that's right and when you can squat five times out of a chair without any help you can now walk you know that's right that's right and so literally like we've had people come in it's the state treatment program that I run they do a lot of therapy but I get them to squat as well and by the end of the program they're walking out and they are just ecstatic yeah they're so happy because their life just changed sure so when we think about let me ask you a question so with this episode being focused primarily on the effects of strength training and energy systems training or conditioning on depression with the aggregate data of most of your clients would you say that most of your clients who struggle with depression though would be a little more in middle of the bell curve for physical ability could most of them stand up out of a chair on their own on day one I would assume the answer yes but I want to make sure yeah I think I'm starting this from the very bottom because I think that's right I think that's like once you understand that you know a 70 year old woman who's been you know chair bound can do something that would potentially get her to a place where she could walk that's right and by the way we have these stories all over the place with coaching so I have a lady that I've one of my favorite clients she is now 84 years old when she came to me she was 79 she'd been a widow for about eight years at the time her kids all lived in the pacific northwest and away from here and she had a big two-story house and she hadn't even been up the stairs in the two-story house and in a couple years she had double hip replacements a knee replacement two inches cut off of one of her Achilles tendons the vast majority of her back had been fused together I mean she was just biotic woman six million dollar woman now this all happened before I met her right 79 what did I teach her how to do I taught her how to stand up out of her kitchen chair on her own on day one and we added a little bit every single day from there and now she's 84 and she deadlift she picks a barbell up off the floor with 155 pounds for sets of five and she has never had an injury in the five years that I've trained her she was struggling to get on and off the toilet she was struggling to get in and out of the car her brain was super sharp she told great stories she had incredible memory but her physical body was failing her and now she squats she presses she deadlifts now she doesn't squat with a barbell on her back you know she's 84 years old and she's kyphotic and she's but she does do goblet squat she sits on a box and she holds a medicine ball and but she can pick up a barbell with weights on it off the floor she can do that no problem right so she's done those things very slowly over the course of a four or five year period and it has completely changed the quality of her life she bought a little sports car she's completely independent I mean look for her when you struggle to get off the toilet the next stop is the nursing home that's it yeah and now she has no problem obviously walking up the stairs going to the second story of the house getting in the little sporty coupe she bought deadlifting getting around you know walking around you know the grocery store I mean it's just no problem at all so she is not strong enough to do anything that life would throw at her and this is the late in her 80s with all those surgeries and now she also has reserves that's right she has reserves like if something hit her if for some reason she ends up sick or something she has some reserves and you know people who have sarcopenia do not have reserves that's exactly right it's kind of like your 401k you know it's exactly like your 401k it's like you're putting money in the bank slowly over years and then at some point you need to cash out and the other thing about strength is like once you're strong you can get back to being strong a whole lot faster right well strength takes the longest of all the physical abilities it takes the longest to build but it also it's the slowest to lose right whereas cardiovascular like vo2 max you can actually get a very healthy very competitive vo2 max in a short period of time but if you go on vacation to mexico for two weeks and drink margaritas in the swimming pool and you come back it's going to take a little bit to get it back up to par right it takes a long time to gain and a long time to lose whereas those energy systems training is they're quickly gaining quickly lost and you talk about that time period where she's built up that 401k that physical 401k she has had to unfortunately deal with that here in 2020 with covid she's 84 years old she can't go out and train around people at 84 years old so but she had built up this great base of strength that now she's prepared herself so that any time where she now has to make withdrawals out of that 401k there's enough of a balance there that it doesn't throw her into illness she's fine she's fine yeah right and we're very close probably to bringing her back in and having her train with the barbells again but because of her demographic she can't go out and be I mean she's just sort of homebound right now and she's doing stuff at home the best she can and you know she's walking the stairs as often as she can she's doing those things but you're exactly right is exactly like a 401k you make deposits when you can so when the day comes when you have to make the withdrawals you had already paid your dues and it doesn't throw you in like her bone density numbers are incredible right she doesn't have sarcopenia at 84 she's built muscle from 79 to 84 as a female which on no hormones which most doctors would say is essentially impossible it's not we've watched it happen over and over and over again yeah there's a myth out there that like you can't get stronger once you pass a certain age and it's just not true that's right it's just not true it's just absolutely not true my critique of physical therapy because often physicians will be like oh i'll just send them into physical therapy is they do bands they do like I had this one patient broke my heart they were having them squat twice a day like sets of 10 and and I was like that's just too much so one of the things that I've learned from you is like when you first start out if you're older twice a week is probably where you want to be and if you're younger maybe three times a week but that's about as much as you can put that's right on your body would it be okay with you for a second if I talk through like what those kind of big picture items are for how to get started for the average person okay so let's do it here's the way I look at it from a logical kind of the way my brain works so the first thing we have to think about is if someone goes to the gym and you just especially like a big box type gym there's an infinite number of exercises that they can do right there are hundreds of machines and if they don't know where to start what would you possibly like where do you go you know and so we have an exercise selection criteria that we use and it's because we want to think about you know what's going to get us the biggest bang for our buck so you take this infinite number of exercises and you can apply some criteria to it right and that criteria that we use for exercise selection is we try to find exercises or choose exercises that use the most muscle mass an easier way to say that is we want to find exercises that make the most joints move bend and straighten right because that's what muscles do and so you start thinking about well I could do a one arm dumbbell curl where only my elbow bends and that's not that's not working very much so I gotta do a whole bunch of exercises to work my whole body if I'm doing things that are single joint exercises the body is made to work in a system it's systemic right it's an organism it's not meant to take the bicep out and just do the it's we're made to work together and so we try to pick exercises that are use the most muscle mass we try to pick exercises that we can train over the greatest effective range of motion we want to move through that full range of motion it's healthy it's good for mobility it's good for agility it's good for flexibility people that do strength training correctly the vast majority of them will never have to do things like yoga and I'm not saying yoga is bad yoga is great but your mobility is enough because you are doing full range of motion squats you're doing full range of motion presses you're working those joints through the full safe range of motion right and lastly and it's this is the one that's sort of like duh is if strength training is the goal then we want to choose exercises that will allow us over time to titrate up a little bit at a time and use the most weight because strength training and maybe it's clear or important to say this strength training is literally defined as being able to produce force and the person who can produce the most force is the strongest so what we're trying to do in strength training is learn how to produce more force with me now if you're that person that now walks into that big box gym with hundreds of exercise machines and hundreds of cardio machines you don't know where to start and you apply those basic criteria and we've done this for decades now we literally get down to four or five exercises we get the squat which is literally like sitting down and standing back up it's a sit to stand we get the deadlift which is picking stuff up off the floor we get an overhead press which is exactly what it sounds like you press things overhead and we get the bench press which everybody knows it's the one you lay down on the bench press right you lay down the bench and you press vertically while laying horizontally and that literally works the entire body really the only thing that potentially is left out is some of the muscles of the upper back and to train those we do chin ups or if someone is unable to do chin ups then we can do that machine at the gym that they call the lat pulldown machine and literally those five exercises will train every single muscle in your body and even for those competitive power lifters competitive weight lifters who are at the absolute top of their game 95% of everything they do in their entire career will be those five exercises yes they'll do a few extra things because they're competitive here and there but for the average person who's just trying to get generally strong that's literally all they need and so it's very very simple yeah yep so i started once i figured this out it was i think about three years ago i started squatting you know so for me it was about the barbell which is 45 pounds and a 45 pounds on each side so it's 135 yep three sets of five and by the way for i think most people listen to you know i mean you've got a big frame on you you're like eight foot two and like 430 pounds you're built like the world like a world's strongest man like yeah you if you had decided not to be a psychiatrist you could have been the world's strongest man based on your frame oh i don't know about that you're funny well i'm a big guy i'm exaggerating but you're a big guy so 135 to start with that's far on the right side of the bell curve no i just i think that's important for people to understand we made this point earlier it is perfectly okay to not even be strong enough to start with the empty barbell yep and to work up to an empty barbell right you're a big guy what are you six what well so i'm six five when i started i was about 260 and you know i was a competitive rower in college so i wrote it you know one of the top three programs in the nation for four years which is you know a lot of legs it's not just arms in case you've never seen rowing and a lot of the people who rode with me had already been in the olympics or were eventually in the olympics yeah so this was like an elite level group if i wouldn't have gone to medical school i could have you know gone out to the national team and if i would have slaved away for four years i would have been in the olympics right so that was kind of the level of the training that i was doing well and we still started you with those same four exercises at a pretty conservative weight that was conservative for you and we slowly added a little bit over time and got you stronger and stronger and stronger for you and again it's not about you versus somebody else you're not a competitive lifter you're doing this for the quality of life and health benefits that's why you do this yep so one of the other things i think is really important to think about for the practitioners that listen to this podcast is to again i think it requires a paradigm shift to think about strength training and conditioning as medicine right and so when we think about the medicine criteria that you would use and let me be very clear i am a strength coach i am not a doctor so if i say something here that you'd please jump in but from what i understand and also from what i am we have a lot of doctors that work for us as strength coaches at barbell logic online coaching and one of my favorites his name is dr jonathan sullivan he wrote a book called the barbell prescription he was a emergency room surgeon emergency surgeon for like 30 years and he's a fantastic strength coach and he started to see this problem for years and years everyone that came into the vast majority that came into the emergency room was what he called the sick aging phenotype you know they'd come in for this thing but they were all over weight had blood sugar problems they were hypertensive their cholesterol was high right what we now call metabolic syndrome which wasn't the case back then 90% of the people that came in would have that thing and he was trying to figure out what was going on and so over time he developed this medicine criteria for specifically for exercise and it's the same criteria that you would use for pharmaceuticals and it's this yeah any medicine that we prescribe should be safe as safe as it can be and we've already discussed based on the data that weightlifting that strength training is incredibly safe you don't want to hurt people that would defeat the purpose so it must be safe it needs to have a wide therapeutic window right the range between the minimum effective dose and the minimum toxic dose needs to be really wide drugs that you increase by a little bit and potentially kill people that's a very dangerous drug to take right it's not very safe and strength training allows us to titrate up from literally nothing from literally a pvc pipe to a child's aluminum barbell to a slightly heavier barbell to as much weight as you could possibly eventually you know the world champion weight lifters the kind of things say the thousand pounds 800 pounds which is not what we're telling your listeners to lift right but it has a very wide range of a therapeutic window it's comprehensive right I want something that has a comprehensive effect I want a wide range of effects if all strength training does is make me strong and it doesn't change it doesn't have this effect on depression it doesn't have this effect on sarcopenia it doesn't have this effect on bone density what's amazing about strength training is its effects are so incredibly wide ranging it makes it a wonderful medicine right and the last two are is that it is specific and effective and really there we know that what's really interesting about all those studies that we read at the beginning is they would use these terms resistance training and we often when you look at the resistance training they do it's not even very good but any resistance training seems to work significantly better than no resistance training yeah and what I think we do well and the reason I hope that you've had me on the show is because we think we have found over decades the most effective way to do this and the most specific way to do this and lastly yeah the simplest that should be simple and efficient and so people are busy your patients cannot train three hours a day six days a week they're not professional athletes and what we found is that when you read through these studies literally things like 30 minutes three times a week gets this incredible bang for your buck and that's why strength training is so amazing because it fulfills all of that medicine criteria that the practitioners are already using for pharmaceuticals only we don't have to take anything exogenously we can actually do this on our own and have an incredible impact and that's pretty amazing yep and so just to give people an idea what we're talking about if you add five pounds to the bar three times a week you know you're going up 60 pounds a month that's right which is a lot so for the first four months I was able to continue that until I got around a 300 squat 300 deadlift and I kind of continued in that area for about two years until you became my trainer coach thank you and through your coaching and programming you know my squat went up to about 380 now we've dialed me down quite a bit because I wasn't going deep enough so there's like this kind of balance of technique and strength and I think for me because I'm not a competitive strength trainer I'm doing this for you know longevity and for total brain function for optimizing you know all the good hormones that I want optimized without adding any hormones to myself that's right we're a little bit more on the uh conservative side conservative side you're not chasing numbers you don't have to chase numbers yep I do actually want to start rowing again and maybe compete and I want to talk to you about that eventually but the idea is that you know I was already an athlete right so I trained a guy out of my garage who had never been an athlete never done any sports and he got up squatting around like you know 155 he was deadlifting around to 25 and he has like a body type of someone who if you looked at him when he first started you would be like this guy has never done anything physical in his life you know and so what's amazing to me is how fast people can get strong yes with the proper coaching with the proper model that's right if you're listening to this and you're like uh that's like that's like a lot of weight I don't know if I'd ever want to do that that's fine I mean my wife started doing this she's being coached and she was squatting a bar you know 45 pounds she played tennis in college and now she's doing you know maybe like 105 pounds 120 and she's got good technique which honestly it's taken her four or five months to get the good technique sure to get into a place where it looks good and so what the benefit of that is is that you know her bones are going to be stronger she's going to be more resistant to different medical issues so yeah I just want to throw that out there one even somebody like you or like your wife or most of our clients who don't necessarily come in depressed will train and will after three months notice a marked improvement in social emotional mental well-being and this is not a meta analysis this is Matt Reynolds who has trained thousands of people and they didn't necessarily notice that there was an issue in the first place they just go wow I feel more confident I feel better I feel like my quality of life is better I carry myself a little bit different we're not talking about arrogant sorry bodybuilders we're not talking about people who lift just to look good we're talking about who train to be healthy and then they look back and they go wow what I have found what we've coined the term in our business in our podcast of voluntary hardship when people walk through this fire of voluntary hardship they notice that they are refined by you don't have to lift weights that's not the same thing as going to war that's not the same thing as being pushed into involuntary involuntary hardship is different and it refined some people and it crushes other people right but voluntary hardship when I choose to do hard things on my own I take personal responsibility to do it even for people who don't have depression and aren't wired for those things or even like for me because I can speak about myself like I'm wired for some anxiety training is an incredible medicine for me for that I train and I am less anxious I train and I feel better I train and I carry myself better I train and I'm more confident I'm trained and I feel better about talking on a podcast these are the benefits that I never thought about when I started I just did it because I wanted to get big and strong because I was a college kid and wanted to get big and strong now I do it for health and it's been incredible the confidence it's interesting how launching my own podcast coincided with having about two months of strength training yes because I had been sitting on the gear for about two years and had different ideas and what I would do and you know I do think it improves your confidence because it you know it does affect things like testosterone it does affect you know your stress how you handle stress one of the biggest psychological things that I'm thinking that strength training can do for someone is it creates not only a physical stress but a psychological stress so the stress system in our body physical stress and psychological stress are you know the same hormones cortisol norepinephrine you know like epinephrine like all of this is released every time you have a stress and so what's happened in our culture is a lot of people can go months and months without having a stress and so then the stresses that are small start to become big stresses and so what I see with the sequential program with the voluntary hardship that you have to go under to do it right because honestly it is hard sometimes like sometimes I don't want to you know squat especially when it's like you know getting pretty heavy what it does is it creates a stress and that stress allows my body to learn how to deal with stress better that's right that's right what we found is that when you spend time doing these hard things that nobody else makes you do that you choose to do strength training is a wonderful and we haven't really even talked about the high intensity interval training which is also really really really hard and not very fun and you know your heart gets racing like crazy it's called high intensity because your heart rate gets up you know 90% of its maximum capacity it's pretty intense as well when you do those things it's interesting it's not that it makes these things not painful but when you get laid off from your job when you deal with a year like 2020 where we've had COVID and all sorts of you know upheaval in the United States and people are struggling financially and the economy is crashing you know when someone gets sick when you lose your parent you're a little better prepared to handle those big involuntary stresses when you have forced yourself to go through the voluntary stressors that's what we found and by the way there isn't a study on that there is no metadata on that yet we know out of the years the decades that we've done this that it is the case and we know it personally you know it because you've done it I know it because I've done it I have coached thousands of people I've watched them report that in the testimonials of people they see that as a massive positive impact of strength training yeah well I mean I think that the data showing that it decreases the future incidence of depression is showing that that's probably good point because yeah when you have a multitude of stresses that usually can trigger someone into a depression if they're wired that way and you know for myself I get first migraines that's probably the first thing that hits me when COVID hit and I was doing 100% video calls after about a month I started to get headaches pretty frequently and that's about the time where I reached out and was like hey I want you to be my coach and now I have maybe one every like three weeks so it's pretty infrequent compared to where it was you know and I have a lot of stressors in my life that kind of fluctuate in and out but I do think that there's something about sort of progressing getting stronger that influences the overall way that we metabolize stress and that's a great way of saying it so with every patient that I have every patient's going to have stress so I want all of my patients squatting it's kind of it was a joke for a while because I was literally like getting every patient to squat and I was showing them how to squat you know in the office and some of the residents who don't understand this philosophy was like what is he doing you know they just didn't understand how important it was he's crazy and you know I would try to convince them and talk to them about it and so I'm glad we can do a long form so that I can say hey listen to this podcast because this will explain that's right explain my thought process you know it's I'll put you on the spot here for a second for me strength training is hard right let's be clear this is a hard thing doesn't have to start that way it starts conservative but over time it's going to get hard that's why we call it voluntary hardship it will get hard it has to be hard to make you better to actually get that adaptation and hard for some people some people are just not cut out they just won't do hard okay but for me my experience is that for far greater than 99 percent of my clients who have bought into strength training for at least six weeks none of them would ever come back and say that was a bad move for me I wish I had not done that it just seems like everyone that does it for four to six weeks it'll change your life that's all there is to it is your experience similar I mean I obviously have kept with it a couple years ago I bought all the gear to be able to do it out of my garage and it's helpful too when you have small kids because I don't have to go to the gym that's right I don't have to deal with all of the gym politics or people looking at me funny or you know waiting for someone to get done with the squat rack so I've always done it out of my house and it allows me to you know do it while my kids are sleeping so there's a positive there and I think that although it's hard sometimes it's like I'm progressing I'm still making gains and it's been three years like now we're doing more rowing and high intensity interval training with the rowing and there's something exciting about getting back on that it's not fun all the time honestly it's like it's really hard and it's psychologically hard to get on the rowing device by myself in the garage late at night if you have a road you might know what I'm talking about like it would be easier if I was in a group doing this but unfortunately there are not like I have friends who come over and lift with me that's been really helpful rowing groups yeah we're thinking about where we could possibly do that for your clients and you've now prescribed this exercise medicine for probably certainly scores of not hundreds of clients there are people who do it for a week 10 days and they're just like I just can't do this this is too hard right and I understand but for the people who have done it for your clients just aggregate who've done it for four to six weeks plus how many of them had or what percentage have come back and say I really wish you had never had me do this I feel like this has made my life worse as opposed to the better yeah I mean 100% have said thank you yeah right they get it like honestly the hardest part is to get them started to get them going and so lately if I can connect them with a coach it's interesting because I I'm in this world I know coaches in different states in different cities sure and so in the midst of COVID I've had a number of patients who are not in my area that I do you know some long-distance stuff and I have connected them with someone who came to their house right you know like I have this like eight-year-old lady who now a coach comes to her house and works her out and you know this is someone who I trust who I met at a conference and you know it's been helpful it's literally going to be like it's going to be as big of a piece in my mind as the therapy that I provide once a week absolutely sure the therapy is going to help them you know counter negative narratives that they have you know deal with psychological stress like I 100% believe that's important and the medication this person's also on medication I mean some people are just wired three to four standard deviations in one direction right towards neuroticism like they've always had anxiety and so medications might be important sure right for this type of person but the combination of all of it together really does give the value to a place where that person's life is very changed yeah that's great and so yeah I would say 100% who start do not regret it's interesting as you were talking through that I was thinking through this sort of three-pronged head of strength training therapy and medication and not all people need all three but both therapy and strength training for you and for a good professional as I would hope most people who are listening to this podcast are it's sort of low risk high reward right therapy you are a professional at therapy you can probably have fairly low risk with therapy like you've learned that same process that I apply to strength training of starting probably not too intense and slowly working in I don't know this is not my skill set obviously yeah no no no 100% 100% the point here is that those two are low risk high reward the medication piece is often high reward as well but it's also much higher risk especially when you're dealing with hormones you're not entirely sure right sometimes it takes a while to figure out what the right combination of medicine is for your patients so that they get the reward that you're looking for the effect that you're looking for but the therapy and the strength training strength training is the simplest I think with the lowest risk and a very high reward I won't say the highest reward but everybody benefits right and the vast majority of people are going to benefit from the therapy and then the medication is the one that's a little bit more difficult and it certainly has a great ROI as well once you get it honed in but it's tough probably at times I would imagine to get it honed in yeah medication you know has side effects and so a lot of people come to me already on medication the people who come to me on medication may be on you know sometimes even five or six medications and they don't want to be on five or six medications and they're still miserable and they have sexual side effects of the SSRIs and the SNRIs and you know other things and so you know once they're out of depression it's like okay how can I get them to a place where now they don't need to be on as many medications and one of the things I constantly say to them that's right is getting a good strength training program will change the amount of medication that you need to be on and so if I can get someone in strength training and in therapy they may not even need medications if depending on the severity or what's going on you know and so ideally in my mind I would much rather use less medications just because I know you know for every person I put on for every 10 people I put on an SSRI probably about seven of them are going to have some sexual side effects sure sexual side effects are really do lower the quality of life for a lot of people you know if they're not able to have an orgasm have an ejaculation have a you know full arousal full desire sexual desire you know and that impacts their family unit as well that's right so yeah I think that eventually I almost want a gym attached to my practice yeah I had someone from Australia reach out she's probably listening to this she was like hey would you have any best practices on how to have a gym attached to your practice this point I don't other than the model that you want is probably something close to what you're talking about you know and sure and learning a lot from that book you recommended yep and your buddy barbell prescription it's great yeah I recommend that book that's the one book I will recommend on the Amazon and again and just be clear I don't make a dollar off that book so barbell prescription is a wonderful book I'm also not here to promote my business I will say this we went into the big picture pieces of what lifts to do and some of the big picture basics of the program but for us at barbell logic our content is always and will always be free and so for people who are wondering well he talked about doing things like squats and deadlifts and presses and bench presses and I kind of know what that stuff is but I don't really know and I don't exactly know how to do it right and when they talk about the program like okay it's only three days a week all of that stuff we have online we got a we have a great youtube channel at barbell logic where highly professionally produced videos are very short that are like three minutes four minutes long that teach you how to do the lifts that show you how to do the program it costs nothing yeah it costs nothing you can go and we always want that to be free because we want to expose people to that information so that we can change as many lives as possible yeah and to be clear I don't have any financial relationship with barbell logic that's right I'm not making any gains by pushing you that direction that's where I get my coaching done you were a full paying client your your family pays for coaching at barbell logic so right yeah but I think what I'm interested in is helping the most people possible that's right at the end of the day if you're a therapist if your psychiatrist listening to this consider you're starting your own program first right see what the benefits are see what the process is like because it's going to make a difference it's going to make an impact in how you feel you know and it's another tool in our toolbox we need as many tools as we can to be able to help the most people possible and at the end of the day from the data that I presented from those studies you know we'll link that in the blog we'll show you maybe I'll link some of your youtube videos on like squatting deadlifting just to give people an idea on what that looks like but it does it does work yeah it's hard to get going I've had a lot of patients who when I talk to them about it it takes a couple conversations it might take like four or five sessions of me bringing it up for them to actually follow through sure and I'm hoping that I can give them this resource as well as a way of saying hey check this out listen to this absolutely understand why I think this is important understand some of the basics of what you're doing you're creating a small stress you're taking a day off you're creating another small stress you're taking a day off I started one patient like hey I want you to walk out of your house five minutes in one direction and then walk back yep and then every day I want you to add 10 seconds to that yep that's progression it's the same kind of idea that's a good starting place it's a progression that's right that's exactly right and over weeks she'll get up to 30 minutes and then you know once she's at 30 minutes I'll add in a little high intensity interval training and then eventually I'll have her start you know doing some strength training as well to create that extra benefit right and I think it'll make a huge impact that's right I know it'll make a huge impact yeah here's what I would say and I don't want to put words in your mouth but what I'm hearing you say is is that for you in your practice strength training is as important or as one of these major major pieces of importance along with therapy and medication and for a lot of practitioners they're not using it and if we consider ourselves as practitioners professionals and we take pride in what we do but I think we have a responsibility to learn everything we can about the things that will improve the lives of our patients this is huge and so if I'm listening to your podcast I have earned trust or you have earned the trust of your listeners as I'm sure you have for many and you are talking about this has changed my life and changed the lives of my patients but I think we have a responsibility as practitioners to do everything we can to research that and learn about it for ourselves because it can impact the lives ultimately what are we trying to do as practitioners but improve the lives of our patients and I listen I'm not a doctor I'm not a psychiatrist but I am a practitioner I can't do all three of the things that you can do I can only do one I can do the strength training part I can't give therapy I can't give medication but I give strength training and I'm going to learn everything I can about it and if there are pieces in my world that will teach me over time as technology progresses and knowledge progresses that I can continue to learn so that I can change the lives of my clients for the better certainly the bell curve there yeah I think I have a responsibility to do that and I think it's the same for people in your profession and by the time you graduate medical school you've probably spent about 10,000 hours learning by the time you graduate residency you probably spent another 10,000 hours and yet this is something that probably for some people was completely new you know like maybe they thought you know walking or cardio right but strength training really strength training increasing strength it's something that's new and so I would say you know how many hours have we spent learning about learning about these other things and what if you spent you know 10 hours just even 10 hours learning about the importance of strength training maybe even just one hour just jump on my jump on my blog read the actual like what we've written about this it's going to be kind of a summary of what we've talked about here but it'll also be cite the studies you can look at those studies you can come to your own conclusions on what the best practices are and so we spend 20,000 hours learning about everything but strength training that's right so maybe spend 10 over the next month or so jumping on my podcast I'll try to link some of the key information on where to start I have a couple other episodes on strength training I have written a couple articles on this stuff already looking at the cognitive function looking at depression and you know maybe get a book you know the book I recommend this strength training book by this other doctor guy so I'm excited for you guys to kind of consider this as an option I think it's going really change the way that you feel it's like I'm going to do an episode actually Reynolds on how to retire well I love it financially specifically we've done one retirement psychologically I'm going to talk about like how I invest my money in a way that's very simple it takes four hours a year of work four hours a year and it has a huge impact on because of compounding interest sure you know and there's so much financial information out there that's just complete fluff you know people wanting to make money on you so I'm going to give you sort of what I found from about 20 books of reading and maybe and in the same way I think strength training is like do you want the best physical health when you're seven years old like right have a strength training regimen invest some money in yourself just like you would any other place to just be in a better place and it's not that complicated it's just like your financial piece right so people that try to make money off of others in the financial realm just like in the fitness realm one of the things that becomes very attractive is if I can make it very complicated they have to continue to pay me because they'll never figure it out it's complicated but the reality is is that learning how to live financially free and build wealth is actually not complicated and learning how to live physically free and strong and improve your physical quality of life is also not complicated neither or easy it's hard but it's simple right it requires some effort but it's not very complicated and so I think that's why there's so many charlatans in both of those industries yeah well I mean everyone wants to say that their way is the only way of doing it sure the financial world is a world largely of salesmen that's right and so is the fitness world that's right and so when I did my research which eventually led me to you like I I didn't start with you I I was doing a lot of digging I was reading everything I was you know pursuing this for a while it's been a journey so I'm trying to give the best information that I can find possible put it out there hey start where I you know where all my sort of research has led me Kyle I'm over here I'm thinking what is Kyle thinking as as we're going through this you haven't spoken for a long time is any of this new for you or is this kind of yeah I mean I was like thinking back on my own strength training like early college I was doing like deadlift squat bench and I was doing like six by six you know and I was just so sore when I went home like the next day like you said like just in pain like sitting on the toilet I'm like how much time have I wasted yeah I want to give the you know the slow progression that's right I'm excited to try that you know once the gyms open up after covid yep you can come hang out in my gym I'll get you started six by six is like the person that eats seven ibuprofen that's what it is yeah that's that's a good way to explain you don't have seven ibuprofen one will work usually in the beginning and then when it you know eventually you'll go to two like it's minimum effective dose and sometimes six by six works but the question is if two by five or three by five also work why would you do six by six that sounds terrible I don't want to do that right that's the key yeah you don't want to do that one ibuprofen works why would I eat seven that's that's terrible idea and it can be counterproductive to actually overstress your body absolutely right so just having you know three sets of five I think is sufficient for most people to get to a really good spot where they're pretty strong you know it might get more nuanced eventually but three sets of five is like pretty good way of doing it yeah like we literally we've said it we've kind of danced around this pewter but it's it's this we do three sets of five repetitions on a lift so we take the squat we warm up properly with good technique let's say that day we're gonna squat 65 pounds which isn't very much we're gonna do 65 pounds for five reps we're gonna wait three four minutes we're gonna do 65 pounds for five reps we're gonna wait three or four minutes we're gonna do 65 pounds for five reps now we're done squatting a few days later when we come back guess what we're gonna do the same thing only instead of doing 65 pounds we're gonna do 70 pounds it's literally that simple it's literally that simple that's what you do on the lifts yep one other thing i'll say is uh like after getting more exposure to depressed patients uh you talk to them and like they're not really proud of much in their life but like what dr. pewter was saying like if you add 65 pounds to your squat over a month that's incredibly powerful and i think like i think that could have like a psychological effect too of like you're building yourself you just care about yourself so much like shows yourself value it's the same thing of like starting to get someone who has not cleaned their house to slowly that's right clean their house it's like then when their house is clean their bed is made things are put in an orderly fashion it's like they're proud of that that's like i've created order to the chaos of my life strength training creates order to the chaos of our body that's exactly right it's like we're putting our body through a system that our body doesn't like when it's going through it maybe you know for a couple minutes of the actual lifting time or a couple minutes of the actual high intensity interval time but then our body just responds with like producing all of the good things that we want our body to produce you know so i'd like a patient who was like should i get on testosterone and i was like well honestly i think if you lifted weights and you stopped eating junk food and you started sleeping eight hours a night with that c-pop i think your testosterone would be radically changed and it was that's right it was right he went from like being in the tenth percentile of men to like the fiftieth percentile that's right just by changing lifestyle stuff so it's like that's right okay you're medicating the symptom the symptom is he has low testosterone what's the problem the problem is he sedentary each junk he has sleep apnea right he chokes all night long and as a result his testosterone is low right what do we tend to do treat the testosterone how about we make it lifestyle change that will and almost always not always but certainly there is no downside for the lifestyle change if he makes the lifestyle change and he sleeps better and he eats better any exercises and his testosterone is still low you might have then sent him to to the doctor to go get that but most of the time you're probably finding that when you actually attack the root of the problem and the problem and not the symptom of the problem yeah then you get a bigger bang for your buck yeah man i'm thinking a couple surprises i had of getting coached by you is how positive you are so what reynolds does is he watches a video of me squatting and then he records a video on his computer of him commenting on my squad so every morning i wake up to a little video of reynolds commenting on my squad and what surprises means you're usually very positive when you do it like i didn't expect sure i didn't expect the positivity um wow thanks and that's been a nice surprise it's like wow hey good morning good to see you okay let's see this all right that one looked good okay that one that squat was a little bit too high oh you're doing it again your squat's a little bit too high okay we gotta we gotta figure that out you naturally i think learn the compliment sandwich i don't think about it yeah i mean i never think about things like that anymore i've just done it for so many thousands of hours so you talk to somebody the key is you're trying to encourage them to keep going yeah i know it's hard i've done it i do it yeah it's hard yeah right so people like and even now i have been lifting competitively for 24 years and i still have to work every single day when i squat on my squat form or on my deadlift form it's not just automatic it takes work right and so i know what it's like to work on those things so yeah it's important to be encouraging now i do have some clients that sometimes need a talking to right they need a little bit of butt chewing like they start to do one and they just kind of give up as coaches we are certainly not psychiatrists but there's a little bit of that you've got to read their personality enough to go i need to figure out if this person needs encouragement to do better on the next session or a little bit of come to jesus meeting to do better like hey that really wasn't heavy you just stop trying right sometimes i have to say that to people but you're somebody that i think you're very self-motivated and so encouraging you and walking you through the technique changes that's key and we've said all along for us the things that make the biggest impact in strength training our consistency and form and so if you do this and you don't miss three days a week and you make sure that your form is correct and for you you have a coach then you're 90% of the way there the program matters far less than just consistency and technique yeah that's key okay well gosh i think we could go on we'll have to do a part two or something love it if people have questions if people want to know you know stuff that maybe we didn't cover shoot me a dm and we'll make a list of that for part two but amen it's been good to see you and uh thank you for having me on the show it's been a blast yeah we'll talk soon okay we're gonna come out and on our podcast with the best best of dr. peters series soon seriously are we really because now you've been on the show enough yeah it'll be great right so and we'll put it it'll be kind of like a rewind series and then you can send some of your audience and be like if you want to hear me dive deeper into this strength training you can listen to the best of dr. peters series on the barbell logic podcast nice i'm serious okay once we were talking about the other day once we record that i'll i'll email out my email list and share that with them all right man hey thanks for having me on the show sir i appreciate it yeah thank you all right so yeah if you want to check out the blog that will go with this it will have all of the links to get to know matt more and get to know the studies more and we'll put some links to the youtube videos i would recommend watching on technique to get you started all right have a good one