 Welcome to Barbell Logic, Rewind. It's Barbell Logic time again. I'm Scott Hamburg, and I am with Matt Reynolds. And this one is gonna be about block, which is something that we often use for people who are, in fact, advanced trainees. A little recap, we talked about how an intermediate might use heavy light medium. In Texas method, in my opinion, is a heavy light medium variant. But you might be just strict heavy light medium that as you would see in practical programming. And then as they keep going, as the trainee keeps going, they can't make progress on weekly heavy light medium anymore, so sometimes we'll stretch it out often. We'll stretch that heavy light medium to take them two weeks to get a PR. And they'll get a five rep at PR every other week. And then that gets to be pretty tough. And then I'll have them do over two weeks, they'll get a five rep PR. And then the next week, they'll put a little more weight on the bar and get that for three reps. And then that doesn't work. And then maybe they'll go and we'll get a five rep PR. Two weeks later, you get a three rep PR. They'll two weeks later after that, we get a one rep PR. And then next time, next cycle, they get the, what was their three rep PR for five? Yep. And then that becomes a new five rep. And we just ladder up. And then that doesn't work. So you're making progress weekly, then you're making progress every two weeks, then you're making progress every three weeks. And really it still might be weekly progress, but the idea is we can quantify that the PR is going up quantifiably where we have something to compare it to every three weeks now. And then we're about to go to every month, right? It's four weeks, whatever. And then it's every six weeks. Yep. And then it starts to get a little bit uglier. Then we might want to add another week into there. So you get a three week heavy light medium, maybe. Sure. But by this point, we probably need to deload week. And so I might cut off the heavy and go straight to the light week. So wait a minute, let me rephrase this. So we might cut off the heavy volume there and now we're gonna have a light session, a light week followed by a medium week followed by a heavy week. A low stress week. Right. There's a better way to say it's in the light, right? So at this point, we're moving into something that's about maybe a six to eight week program at this point and it looks like a really simple block. Yep. Then that doesn't work and we can expand that so it takes longer to accrue the stress and we get more time to dissipate the fatigue at the end of the cycle. And then you're in like a standard 10 or a 12 week block as prescribed by Soviets. Yep. Or Matt Reynolds. Yeah. I mean, I just stole it from the Soviets. Right. Gosh, I hope that made sense. You know, there's no visual aids here on the podcast. I hope that made some sense. But hopefully we can elucidate a little bit more about what that looks like. Yeah. No, it's good. We really kind of know that almost everybody gets to a four day split kind of in mid intermediate training. As a matter of fact, as soon as one of my clients says it kind of like to train four days and they're past the basic LP, I'll let them train four days. You bet. Right. Cause I can do four day heavy light medium. I can do four day Texas method. I can, you know, that's not hard to do. And block training is really the most advanced four day split that you can do probably a true four day split. Right. What does advanced mean? Well, it just means like it's a long program. It takes a long time. It needs, you know, 10, 11, 12 weeks of lead time to hit PRs. Certainly the way block was written by the Soviets is a pretty traditional four day split. It was two upper body days to lower body days. Right. We've modified it some over time. We tend to like maybe an extra press or bench press in there. We'll get there in a minute. But the general idea is that you have a block of training that could be anywhere from one to four weeks that starts with an accumulation phase. It's just a phase that you are building or accumulating work capacity. You're just doing a lot of work. They're blue collar days. So they're not hard. They're not super hard. I mean, they can be somewhat stressful, but they're stressful because of the volume, not because of the intensity, just a bunch of work, man. We will talk about how we try to manipulate intensity a little bit when we get in there, because I do think that if we just do, we've talked about this a lot, we think if we just do that volume work without any of the intensity, it's too hard to go to heavy if you haven't done heavy for a long time. So we have some things we do. So that accumulation phase is just a high volume phase. The percentages are mostly in the 70s. So what are we accumulating, do you think? Are we accumulating work capacity? Are we accumulating fatigue? I should think you're accumulating both. Yeah, I do too. So both accumulate. Yeah, you're accumulating both work capacity in over the course of two, three, four weeks accumulating fatigue. Do you think it's a good idea to accumulate fatigue? Yes. Why is that? Because of Han Selye. Right. At some point I want enough because I have to take my body to a fatigue point that it hasn't been at before, that it can still recovering get stronger without the response where it wants to shrivel up and die. Right. We play a semantics game in the strength and conditioning periodization world that I don't necessarily want to get in a semantics game, but in order to help you understand, there is obviously a line between what the strength and conditioning world tends to call overreaching, which is clearly fatigue is accumulating. I cannot recover from session to session and from session to session a week to week, I'm actually having more fatigue present and I'm less and less recovered. At some point I actually cross a line into what, again, most people in strength and conditioning call overtraining, which is now I can't actually make progress. Right. My body will not recover and adapt anymore. It's going to sort of shut down and it's going to take a long time and once I recover from the overtraining, I'm actually, I've actually lost fitness. I haven't gained, right? I've lost strength, not gaining. But you get to the point where during the novice phase, you build up fatigue on Monday, you completely recover from it in the next 36 to 48 hours and you're ready to go again on Wednesday. By the end of the novice phase, you're not able to do that, right? So the fatigue, this is troubling. Okay. Not really, but when I'm programming, you know, I've got goals in mind. Sure. Right. And so is there a difference if the goal in mind is to help the trainee develop more work capacity or if the goal in mind is, you know, I need to pile the work on this person in order to fatigue them. I think you just maybe move a little slower if the goal is to never add fatigue, just to go real slow to make sure that the person can continue to recover. I mean, at some point, I also think that the goal is not just to fatigue them, right? I can go and I could just have them do. You could just drive them into the ground on the first three days, right? Or right on the edge of overtraining. So yeah, you're actually playing a happy medium between the amount of work that must be performed. So the total amount of stress that's being done. So I'm playing man in the street here, right? Yeah, I did it. So I think that we're actually trying to accumulate the work capacity. That's what I think we're doing. And we watch to see how much fatigue they're accumulating in order to measure how we're doing here. I don't wanna push the guy too far, but if he's not fatigued, then he could do more work. That's right. And so we're gonna do a block of this accumulation. And it's gonna be roughly four weeks, right? It could be something like that. Yep, it's gonna be like five sets of five. Again, it depends on the person and how fast they're accumulating fatigue and how well they can handle the work. So it's probably somewhere in the ballpark of five sets of five on most of the main lifts, right? Followed by a supplemental lift. So you've got your main squat day, you're gonna squat like five sets of five somewhere in that ballpark, and then it's gonna follow up with a supplemental deadlift. Right. The other lower body day is the same, only it's now a competition deadlift for five sets of five or four sets of five in a supplemental squat. Same thing for press and bench press. Yeah, if you're programming for an animal, it might mean they squat, then they do supplemental deadlift to some sort of rack pull or whatever. Yeah. And then they squat again. Yeah, we do that some, but not that often. I do that. You've had me do it. But not a block on DUP. No, you've had me do a block, I'm pretty sure. I don't think so. Yeah. I wrote the program. I've done it this year. Have you? Yeah, and I haven't done DUP this year. Certainly did. It smells terrible. The whole room stinks now. It's a little room, there's a little, not much air supply. I just added some air in there, I don't know. It tastes true. Oh no. Ugh. Oh no, curry. Yeah, it tastes like curry. It's terrible. Ugh. So the other piece of this is, if what we're trying to do is, there's two things that kind of change with block training. You have a block of accumulation that's high volume, moderate intensity, intensities in the 70s. Followed by, what are you doing? I'm gonna open this door. So bad, did you fart again? No. That's so bad. Carry on. All right, so you have the accumulation phase where for a few weeks, you've got relatively high volume, moderate intensity, intensities in the 70s range. Followed by a supplemental lift. In the accumulation phase, I want the supplemental lift to be full range of motion or more than full range of motion because I'm accumulating work. Right. So we're talking about deficit deadlifts. We're talking about tempo squats or pause squats. We're talking about close grip bench presses. Big, giant range of motion. Right. Because I want lots of work. Work equals force times distance. You want D to be mighty big. Correct. So for almost all of the supplemental lifts during the accumulation phase, the weight that they're gonna be handling on the supplemental lift will be less than the weight they handle on the main lift. And you do that for about three to four weeks. That's a block, the accumulation block. Then it's almost always followed up by a D-load. The D-load we tend to, because the volume has been high and the intensity has been just moderate. When we D-load after the accumulation phase, we keep the intensity moderate. We don't drop the intensity much or any. We drop the volume significantly. So like three sets of three, two sets of three. So we might actually still get decent work in and we continue the work on the supplemental lift because supplemental lift isn't heavy enough so it doesn't matter. By that time, the volume has been peeled off of that and the supplemental lift is getting decently heavy. But overall, I feel like the stress of a D-load week because the intensity stays moderate on the main lift, moderate to high on the supplemental lift and volume is low across the board, the total stress is relatively low. Makes sense? It does. All right, then we move into the second phase of block training, which is the transmutation phase or the, what's the other word for that? I don't know, sublimation? No, sublimation? No, it's the accumulation, it's realization. It's realization. Yeah, where we start to transmute our work capacity into the ability to exert more force. So how does that work? I'm not really sure. Is it that we just start practicing singles again? Is that what it is? Or is there actually some sort of biological process whereby you can turn five sets of fives into three triples? You know what I mean? Like what the hell is happening? I don't know. I don't know. How can anybody say they know? Hubris? I guess, hubris. I'm not gonna be so arrogant to say that I know what's going on. Something happens between the accumulation phase and the transmutation phase, but here's the primary thing that happens. It's called transmutation. I don't know that that's actually what happens. You're tapering volume and driving the intensity up. Well, you're not really tapering yet. You are, but stay with me. Let's think about it from a stress perspective. For the stress perspective, if you continue this sort of high-low-medium ideal, accumulation is the medium. Right. Transputation is the high, because intensity continues to drive up from moderate to moderate-high, and volume goes from high to high-moderate. So now, both intensity and volume are sort of moderate-high during the transmutation phase, which means stress is really high. Yeah, so instead of doing five sets of five, when you're in transmutation, you're gonna start with four, four, four, four, or maybe like three, fours and a big, heavy single or something like that. That's exactly right. You're gonna get 12, 14, 15 reps at the most. And then in the 80% range, so like week one, here's like 80% for four, 85% for four, 90% by one, and then 82.5 for two sets of four. Yeah, now it. So at these intensity levels that we're talking about when their accumulation starts down in the 70s and then transmutations go up into the 82 and plus, we end up at 87, 89, I don't know, towards that last week of transmutation, which again is a four-week deal, doesn't block, does not work for old people. I've never had an old person do block. Well, I mean, we've had these long, long discussions over the course of years at this point about volume and intensity and all that stuff. What's the youngest person or the oldest person you've ever had run block? How old was that person? I mean, I think a guy like a Frank Sanders could still probably run it. Like you would always find those guys that are like really good athletes who are really strong, who are in there. Former SEAL. Right, former SEALs are in their 50s. You know, guys like that, I think you could see that, but you know, outside of that, I think your standard guys, I think 40s, probably the line, 40, 41, 42, sort of. I mean, it really depends on the individual. I want to be careful of drawing lines. But sure, the point is in general. They will detrain during the accumulation phase. Even if they could stay healthy, you know, not get the flu, not go on vacation and actually stream together 12 weeks, there is a group of people who will detrain in accumulation. So not everybody can do it. Nope, just wanted to say that. Yep, so you do a transportation phase, the intensity goes up, the volume comes down, but just a little bit. In general, it's real stressful. It's hard to recover from. The supplemental lifts become a little more partial. So on presses, you go to like press lockouts, but still kind of big press lockouts. So press lockouts are like from the top of the head or the forehead, not from like three inches of lockout. Bench press is like a paused competition bench press, like a two count pause. So it's still pretty heavy. The other one's probably a floor press, something like that. So floor press, most people when they start a floor press they do a little less than the bench press. And by the time they get done doing floor press for three, four, five weeks, it's a little more than the bench press or somewhere in that ballpark. So you've got some things. If you do a deficit deadlift, then you would reduce the amount of deficit that's on there. You might do a low rack pull. You might do a pause deadlift, something like that. Are you reducing the range of motion in order to put more weight on the bar? Yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, the goal is just to put more weight on the bar. The weight on the bar on the supplemental lifts also go up, as does in the competition lift overs. I mean, that we're working towards a peak, right? So it just makes sense. As a side note, we do on a four day split for almost all four day splits we do, there's a fair amount of accessory work on upper body days specifically. You're gonna do some back work. You're gonna do some tricep work. You're probably gonna do some bicep work, extra slots, hypertrophy, additional stress without really screwing up your joints and your bones. You know. And your bones. You know, try not to break. We wanna not screw up people's bones. Yep, and usually not much in the way of accessory movements on the lower body days. The lower body days are tough enough real heavy squats and real heavy deadlifts on the same day. You're really probably done. You're gonna have, I don't know, six or seven sets for squats and deadlifts and that's gonna be plenty. And then we do realization. We'll do another D-load, right? So there's another D-load and the way I write the D-load is on that D-load you're gonna hit a single, like somewhere between 90 and 92%. So it's pretty damn heavy on D-load week. And then you're gonna do a set of three or a couple sets of three in the like mid 80s, 85, 86. So that's also still pretty heavy, but it's just not very much volume. Not much. Volume's low, single and triple or single and two triples. Your supplemental lift by that time, you know, you're doing enough single at the floor press lockouts or you know, you might end up doing a total of like three or four work reps, total reps, same accessories. And then, yep, then we go into realization, right? Oh, the other word for transmutation is the intensification phase. That is unacceptable. Transification is also known as intensification and that's probably a better word. Why don't we just call it heavyfication? Heavyfication? Yeah, I don't like that. That sounds like my honeymoon. There's a lot of heavyfication going on, huh? I didn't have a honeymoon. It's because you're working. That's true. So the question is what's happening during transportation slash intensification phase? Well, the stress goes up and the stress goes up enough that what typically happens is in week one of transportation, you're like, this is awesome. Right. And then we do, you're like, this is not awesome. I don't know. And in week three, you're like, oh my God. Yeah. This sucks. And remember, you have four workouts. So you realize it sucks on workout one of the third week of transportation. You're like, oh my God. And I still got three workouts left. Oftentimes people will get a five rep and three rep PRs in transmutation phase. On the first week. Yep. And then they do okay on the second week and then they damn near die on the third. They don't damn near die. You guys take me so seriously on top. Oh my God. But you get it, right? So you clearly have built up fatigue, tremendous fatigue at the end of that transportation phase. You're like, I need a D-load. I need a D-load. This is not gonna go well. I'm a month out from my meet, 30 days out. What have you done to me? This is bad. I remember Michael Burgos telling me that Michael Burgos is like, mm-mm, this is not good. This is not good, right? And then you D-load. Yeah. And the D-load is still pretty damn heavy. And the D-load goes okay. And you feel a lot better on the D-load. And you get excited. And you go to that first week of realization or peaking. It's awful. So you're gonna do ascending singles. And you do 91% for a single and like 94 and 97. And you got two more weeks. You're like, sometimes you miss it, the 97. Yeah, it's... Or the 96 or, you know, whatever that is. And so by the time somebody gets here, their squats are damned heavy. They're heavy. And they're not fully recovered yet. And they're not fully recovered. They're peaked. And you have to remind people, like, it's okay. And they do 97% and a 97% is like an RPE10. So heavy. For a lot of guys, it's, you know, it's way, way, way, way north of 400, 500, you know. It's heavy, heavy weights. So 97%, yeah, it's brutal. And then they'll have back-offs too. And then the volume starts coming down. And the weight just goes up from there. Well, and remember too, though, and the weight on the supplemental list become really heavy. So now press lockouts are like three inch press lockouts. Yeah, at over your PR. Over your PR. And your bench press is like a slingshot bench press. And the deadlift is like a higher rack pull, not an above-the-knee rack pull, because the heels are worthless, but still a below-the-knee rack pull, but like just below-the-knee rack pull. And it's real heavy. The first week, that rack pull's the same weight as your deadlift, or even a little bit less. But by the second and third week of that rack pull, your rack pull is 50 pounds more than your deadlift. 105%, 107, ouch. That's right, that's right. Where we'll do stuff too, like those big heavy walkouts, we'll do those press starts, you know, things like that work really, really well. Speaking of walkouts, I want to go back to the heavy vacation phase. We need to really- The transportation phase? Yes, we're not going to get the answer on this, but let's just spitball and talk about what might actually be happening there. Okay. So if somebody, well, I'll just talk about me. If I'm just doing a bunch of survives, you know, heavy, you know, even triples or singles are shocking to me, you know, and as people get stronger, particularly for men, the spread between their five, their three and the one opens up. Yep. And, you know, so a big component of what's going on in the transportation phase is we're just starting to practice doing heavies again. There's just a practice element. What else do you think is going on? Do you think that biologically, I mean, we don't have any research here. Biologically, can we actually convert the work capacity into force production somehow? I don't know. Probably not. It doesn't seem like it. But it's not work capacity, it's work, right? We know that we've trained with high volume to drive the stress during the accumulation phase. And what is actually transitioning during transportation is that you're going from a volume stressor in accumulation to an intensity stressor in peaking. And during the transportation, you're really moving from one to the other as the primary stressor. So maybe they're not even named properly. Yeah, I don't think it's named properly. That name is stolen from the Soviets. That's a translation of the Soviet work. So maybe then what's happening is transition phase. We use volume as a stressor for as long as we can. Like if we did it for nine weeks, you'd overreach maybe, right? Sure. Then we stop that. And now we use intensity as a stressor. Yep. And of course, you can't do that forever either. Nope. And then you deload. Yeah, so I've actually done it back-to-back accumulation phases where they do an accumulation block followed by a deload, followed by another accumulation block. Yeah. I've also done accumulation block followed by a deload to a transportation block to a deload back-to-an accumulation to a deload back-to-transitation and then a peak, right? I've done both those. I've done that because somebody missed. I've just done that sometimes when I've got like a really high-end lifter, like back when I did that with Jillian Ward back when I trained with her because we were laying out her training 24 weeks in advance. And you could see that she could do it. Yeah, 24 weeks, what am I gonna do? You want me to actually peak her 12 weeks out from Worlds? Like that's done. No, let's just get a bunch of good work in. Let's keep driving up the stress. Let's get her pretty damn heavy at the end of transportation one. And transmute one, transmute two, transmute three. And then we deload and then we go to accumulation two and then transportation two and then we peak the thing, right? And so it works fine. I think people are looking at it wrong when they actually think can volume actually transmute to intensity. I don't know. I don't think so, I don't know. I don't know. I don't think so. My hunch, and it's only a hunch is that we can use volume as a stressor that will disrupt homeostasis. We have our adaptation and it carries over to some degree to create strength adaptation. Sure, we know you can get strong from volume and you can get strong from intensity but you can't do either very long to keep driving the strength, right? So at some point, again, there's lots of arguments on the internet about exactly what order you do this in still continue to come back to if you just train consistently and focus on a really good form probably really doesn't matter if you drive volume first and intensity second or intensity first and volume second or more volume and then intensity or more intensity and then does it really actually matter? Well, at some point we have to have a podcast about it and we're talking about the things for sure, let's talk about it. But here's the deal. What we know is you can't go, no one that argues for volume would tell you to squat five sets of five on the squats the week before the meet. Right. Why? Well, you're not getting the practice you're not getting the practice like there has to be some amount of heavy lifting to get good at heavy lifting. Yeah, heavy lifting is a skill in and of itself. That's right. And it's enough stressor to drive an adaptation. That's maybe another place that there's some disagreement on the internet is that is heavy alone enough of a stressor to drive an adaptation? The answer is clearly from my experience is yes. For certain populations. Hundreds and hundreds of people, of course will it work forever? No. No. Literally the exact same argument for volume. Right. Does volume make you strong? Yes. For how long? Not forever. Yeah. I don't know, man. So what block does is it takes you through both. You start with volume. You get all this work in. You kind of lay the foundation. You lay the bricks down and put the mortar on the brick and put it down and you just do the thing and you're just punching. Almost every workout in accumulation is a blue collar day. Not because you feel bad and you don't want to do it. It's just a lot of work. And there's nothing really that heavy. It's heavy enough. You're going in and you're like, Tams, like man, I can remember doing accumulation phases. I had like seven sets of five on deadlift. I don't typically write that for my clients, but this is stuff that was written to me by Jeremy Frey, who learned it from Sharon and Bondarchuk and the elite FTS guys back in the day and all that kind of stuff. And so, and we would do lots of sets of five on deadlifts with like 575. Ugh. Ugh. It was no fun. No. But it was doable. It wasn't like, it was just like brutal. We were all like well over 700 pound deadlifters at the time. So in that we deal. So we transmute, weight continues to go up, volume peels off slowly, intensity goes up a little quicker, deload, come back to that realization phase. Now it's time to peak. Now what are we trying to do with realization? Well now, we're actually trying to drive the weight on the bar up while getting rid of fatigue. We built up fatigue and transmutation phase. We know we have an excess of fatigue present in the body. The one week deload alone doesn't get rid of it all. And I have to be able to get better at just really heavy weight on my back and in my hands now. And so I stripped tons of that volume off. I drive the intensity up as fast as I can. I also continue to play the intensity game in the supplemental list by making the supplemental list really heavy. And so I go real heavy. You know, slingshot, bench press, rack pulls, high press lockouts, things like that. Pin squat, which is probably the one type of squat. So you can really do much heavier than a normal. It could be a chain squat. So you do like something like that where it's, you do a chain squat with almost as much weight as you can actually squat. But I like a pin squat there. And drive up and you go, you know, that first week in realization, you hit like 96, 97%. And the next week you hit like 98, 99%. And then you go for PRs, which may be a test week or you may go for hitting 100%, 102 if the thing's going really well and then take another deload week and do the meat. Right. Or you may not do this one or two week at all. You may finish with a 90. Yep, deload and then go to the meat. Like any of those are fine. The general idea is that in that realization phase, you just peel off the volume, drive up the intensity, recover as much as you can and get real good at handling real heavy weights. And then time to roll. Yeah. What else could you do? Well, for programming. Yeah, I mean, well, there's other things, but I mean, I do think this is the next like, well, we've always talked about block training as being this like super advanced program. I think it just needs to be this continuation of the minimum effective dose of complexity, which is what you laid out at the beginning of the show and what you've laid out in previous programming shows. Like, man, it's just, I don't know how you end up not getting here if you're a good enough athlete and your body can handle getting here. Like if you train with consistency and you're 33 years old. Right. You're gonna end up doing this. Yeah. Everybody's gonna start at LP and everybody's gonna get to some sort of heavy light medium combination of Texas method type style to a four day split Texas method style to a four day split, two week progress to a 40 split, three week progress and do that rotation, five, threes and ones. To the next thing, you know, man, I'm on a six week, eight week block. This doesn't have to be 12 weeks. No. Right? Yep. And in your Jillian example, it was, hmm, 24 weeks. Yeah, it was 22. Yeah, it was 24 weeks. It all works. So the idea is like, we lay the ground work with accumulation. We build the stress that must truly be recovered from. We try to get into an overreaching sort of stage in the transutation phase. And then we peak it all out to the final phase. And that doesn't take very long. The final phase, two weeks is often enough, two, three weeks max. I think five week peak is too damn long. So God, I dread this so much. But listen, it's actually terrifying. I've had this happen to me before running too long of a peak. Somebody peaks on week two and the meat's not till week four. Right. We hit real big PRs like 14 days out. Uh-oh. Yeah. Uh-oh. I screwed it up. Yep. And I've done that before and you go, damn it. And then they go to the meat and they don't perform as well as they did two Fridays before. Right. Well, that's on me probably. Right. Now, which really all means if I do it again with the same person. Right. Because at some point, like the first time you do the thing, you just don't know. Yeah. So if somebody is able to get a PR two weeks out, this means that they could have taken a little bit more stress. Yeah. So I don't know if they get a PR it's wrong, right? So I've had, especially females on this program, just the very potential of PRs two weeks out doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong. But if you hit two weeks out and you're hitting big PRs and you're a really advanced lifter and the PRs are really big and really hard. A big giant guy. Yeah. It's like a 585 squad or 605 squad. That's pretty rare that you'll see. Yeah. If you see somebody squat 600 for the first time two weeks out from meat, they've never squatted 600 and they squat, they're probably not squatting 600 at the meat. Yeah. It's a little better to kind of hold that back. So the way it's written, the way we do it, the way the kind of template is written and the program that we use here, and of course we tweak all these to modify them for each individual lifter is that we actually have sort of a peaking week and we let somebody peek. If there's a meat in there, I peel off that last week and I throw the kind of meat prep those last two weeks and kind of D-load going into the meat and let them get PRs on the meat day. Right, rather than across the week. So that's block, right? Yeah. Block of volume, block of transition from volume to intensity where you're doing both. Final block is intensity only. So rather than maybe using the Russian words of accumulation, transmutation, realization, we can just say, look, the first block is volume. The middle block is both volume and intensity and that's why the stress is so high. And the last one is intensity and we lose the stress and hit the peak. Yeah. That's the way it works. And the term block really is really kind of misleading. It's an eight to 12 week program cut up with one or two D-loads. You just start with high volume and you just end up tapering down over the course of 12 weeks. That's all it is. But it makes sense to think about it like it's cut into segments by those D-load weeks. That's why it feels that way. You actually have pre-planned D-load weeks which maybe block might be the first time you've ever done that. Yeah. I probably had D-load weeks with my clients by this point but it's usually been because it was needed. Oops, time for D-load week. Yeah. And we do that but it's rarely pre-planned and here it is. I've had to add D-load work in the block for guys that are in their 40s. Sometimes they can't do the three weeks. Yeah. Two on D-load week. Yeah. I think that's fine. Nothing wrong with that. I've done the same thing with young kids and they could go four or five weeks before they had to D-load punks. Yeah, but that's fine. The other thing is it's just like every other program we've talked about except for LP. It's just a framework. It's a way of thinking about it and then you can do jazz on the thing. Yep. And you have to. You have to depending on who your lifter is. You know, if you've got a fairly heavy guy who's in his late 40s and he's got a meat coming up, you've got to watch him. You may have to taper it more quickly and add more D-load in there. You just don't know and you got to watch. Yep. And that's why it's really great when you have somebody else watching you instead of doing it yourself. Yep. Because it feels like week two of transportation. You just don't think you're going to live. Right. You think you're going to need like a leg transplant. Yeah, it's pretty, it's tough. And we get real cheesy with the supplemental lifts on this too. No reason to review this. You can go back and listen to the supplemental lift episode. But in blog training, we're trying to pick supplemental lifts that specifically attack weaknesses of the lifter. Right. So if they struggle with the start of a deadlift versus the end of a deadlift, whatever those things are, if they struggle to keep the bar over the middle of their foot on a squat, then I'm going to pick supplemental lifts that try to correct those things or if they're fired out of the hole just fine and then they struggle halfway up. So I start to think about like where the weakness is a lifter. What am I trying to build up first thing? I generally try to stick with big full range of motion movements for the supplemental lifts during the accumulation phase and go to more of the partial real heavy things by the end. That's it. Pretty easy. Yeah, I love it. There you have it. Yeah. If you've got any questions about this, gosh, we probably can't answer them for you in an email. You probably just need to go, which it's probably time, you know? That's true. But follow us on YouTube like we always say that is a show. Even on some barbell logic at barbell logic podcast at gmail.com and let us know how we can help you out. Thanks.