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Why don't we talk about why I don't see Justin ever using more than 15-pound dumbbells? Hey, man. Can we talk about that? I'm still getting them gains that you're jealous of. I think that's why we should talk about this is because you obviously look fantastic and you don't lift any more than 15 pounds. Something's working. No, you know what? All joking aside, that's actually a good topic because there's definitely not just the time and a place for lifting light, but it's superior in some cases to lift with lightweight where a heavy weight would actually impede your progress or your results. So I do think this is a really good topic to talk about. You know what's funny? I brought up a statistic on another podcast and I want to bring it up again here. There was this study that was done on weight lifting injuries. This is the one I told you guys about. Oh, about men or women? Oh, it's hilarious. For people who don't know, they followed men and women who worked out for a year with weights and the injury rate difference between men and women was comical. 0.6% of women had a weight lifting injury, 4.5% of men. So it was like a 4-5% difference. Massive discrepancy there. Did you guys prefer training men or women? Did you have a preference? I know you were an advanced age guy. You talk about that all the time that you liked older clients, but did you prefer sex? I think there was advantages to either. I enjoyed training women just because they're a little bit more receptive towards the educational part of it and slowing down. Then I didn't run into a lot of problems about form, technique, and the application, the exercise versus with a guy. It was like all the time I just was having to check them on. I know you can do more, but we need to perfect this movement. We need to get the technique of it down. I hated training guys. Really? Yeah, I didn't like training guys. In fact, there was a while back in Mind Pump, just a couple years ago, and I was telling Katrina, I was in save mode and trying to hustle a couple other things that I could do to make some extra money on the side. I was like, you know what, maybe I'll train a client or two in the morning time before Mind Pump and we work and stuff. And we have a guy friend, a mutual friend of Katrina and I, who's got money and can afford my hourly rate and would come at the time I would want. It would be flexible and ideal. And Katrina's like, oh, I'll set him up. And I'm like, no, I don't want to train him. She's like, what do you mean? Why wouldn't you want to train him? You guys are friends, you like him? I said, no, I hate training guys. It has to be a girl. And right away, she thinks, why does it have to be a girl? It's like, no, women are just way better to train. Because to your point, you're making, Justin, it's like, men are so fucking stubborn half the time they lie. They don't tell them, you tell them, go do this, go do that. They're not going to tell you they're in pain. Yeah, they're not going to tell you they're in pain. They're going to push heavy weight when they shouldn't push heavy weight. They're going to say they're doing all these things. They're not like, women, just if I tell a female client, do this. I swear they're just better at following things to a T, which makes my job so much easier to measure and calibrate. Okay, are we heading down the right track versus when I get guys, you know, he would come in and by the way, I have trained him on the side for fun here and there come in and be like, Hey, so did we do X, Y, and Z? Oh, you know, yeah. But last night, you know, buddies and I, we went out, we got fucked up, you know, it was a crazy night. It's just like, bro, how do you expect me to calibrate your programming and diet if you interrupt it every fifth day with 12 beers? Like I can't, you're killing me here. Well, I think, I think generally speaking, right? I would see that with men, it was harder for them or harder to get them to do certain things like train lighter and watch form a technique. I guess generally speaking with women, sometimes I'd have to convince them to go heavy or to increase their calories. That's generally speaking, but on an individual basis, I mean, that could be very different. I had really good experiences with and bad experiences with both men and women. But yeah, generally speaking, guys, you'll get that ego, right? Yeah, that's a politically correct way to say that. No, it's true. It's also true. Well, look, one of my, one of my best clients of all time was Doug. He's a guy. Yeah. And he was, he was a great client. Well, I mean, I stand by that there's always an exception to the rule, you know, there's definitely, I've had male clients that I loved and were amazing. One of my first best clients I've ever had, Alfredo, engineer guy, and he was an engineer. So you guys have trained engineers before. They're more like that. They're detail oriented. They want to know everything we're doing, why we're doing it. They want to document it themselves. So that, that does really well. You can convince them to do crazy stuff. That was my f**k. That was like my favorite part. Yeah, that was the squat curl present. But to the weight point, and that's kind of what made me think about this was I love that I could tell a female client of mine like, this is the weight I want you at. And she would perform it. And even if she knew she could do a little bit more, if that's what I was telling her to do, she would stick to the program where it was always hard for me with a guy if he thinks he can do more weight, he always wants to do more weight. And there's, there's times when just because you can do more weight, I don't want you to do more weight. There's air, there's points in the training program where I'm, I'm doing that not because I think you can't lift any more weight, because I have a specific adaptation that I'm trying to get to with you. And if I need you to be in a lighter weight in order to accomplish that and us stretching beyond that, we're trying to hone in on the right dose. And that's like our job as a trainer is to find that balance where you are going to still progress forward. And you, you know, sometimes that means, you know, lightening the load a bit. So that way, you know, it allows your body to fully recover. And that way we can adapt further to then build strength and kind of, you know, move in a direction going, going on. Yeah, load is just one of the components of your programming. And it's appropriate to go heavy and effective in some cases and other cases, it just isn't, it's just not, and it just won't, not only will it not get you better results, but it'll actually reduce the effectiveness of what you're training for. So there are cases and we're going to go through seven of them when training light isn't just, oh, it's not just, you know, an alternative way of training or a way to change up the signal, but rather for more often than not, in the seven cases we're going to give, it's the, it's where you should probably go. It's the most appropriate way to go. I mean, the first one we listed was correctional and rehab. Absolutely. And that's the perfect example of what I'm talking about is, you know, here I'm trying to get one of my male clients to back off the way and like really pay attention to the detail of the movement because we're trying to target a very specific area because I'm trying to fix something versus like just prove to me that you could lift more away. That was, this is one of the challenges. Never had a problem with a female client. If I tell one of my female clients, this is what we're trying to accomplish. Stay light, stay controlled. This is what we're trying to do where my guys would always come back and be like, oh, yeah, you know, I did that, but I went up to... Well, it's especially important when you're addressing some recruitment pattern that is obviously off. Like they are, they are recruiting muscles just by the way that they've done it over the years and they've hardwired this movement pattern that is just not ideal. And it's created problems. It's created unnecessary stress and instability and aggravated the joints. And so now to go, you know, deep dive into that and show them, like there's another operating system we need to apply here. We have to, you know, bring the load back substantially so we could actually even perform it correctly. Yeah, but see, I think the confusion is people here, you got to go light with correctional or rehab exercises and they think you have to go light because it hurts to go heavy or you have to go light because it's not safe to go heavy. Now that, there's truth to that. Yes, but there's something that's even deeper, which is when I'm doing correctional exercise, you don't even have to be injured. I just noticed that there's a movement pattern issue. And a movement pattern issue means that your movement pattern that is not optimal is your default movement pattern. That means it's the one that you're best at. So if I increase the load, your movement pattern is going to automatically switch to the one that you're best at. Now, it might not be the ideal one, it's just the one that you're best at. And so you're going to go there as soon as I go heavy. Like, you know, if you're really, really good at walking in high heels, and that's all you'll do all day long. Oh, and I am. Yeah, you probably can walk faster in high heels and you can't flat, even though walking with your foot flat is more of an ideal movement pattern, you have to kind of relearn how to do it. Because as soon as you speed up, you default to this pattern that you've already learned. So if I'm teaching someone, for example, how to row without their shoulders shrugging, and that's how they've always rowed, and they've gotten strong that way, the second I go heavy, the second the load is high, they're going to go to the movement pattern that allows them to move the most weight. So correctional exercise always has to be light with the load, hard with the connection. And in that case, in particular, heavy weight is almost never. Well, and sometimes it's not just the actual correctional movement, I'll give you an example. So they're very, very common one. So my teachers that ride on whiteboards, my drivers, truck drivers, taxi drivers, like painters, painter, anybody who uses one one arm that's forward, hairstylist, you know, if they and they what they would have is this on that side, their dominant side that they use this just slightly rolled forward shoulder, more on that side than let's say the left side. And then not only do I need to go light and do correctional work to help them engage and retract and depressed and get that shoulder in optimal position, but I also I'm going to lighten the load on things like a bench press because what I would see is this is I get that client under and we start off with, you know, minimal load and they start pressing and then yeah, first five reps that I've taught on the mechanics, they got great form, but then they get to like six or seven and as soon as it starts to get a little challenging, that right side, they still can get the all the way to 12 reps, you're moving the way, but what ends up happening is the those last five reps that that shoulder rolls out of position again and then the body cheats the weight up because it that's how it knows it's the dominant way for it to move. And the worst part is you end up strengthening the bad movement pattern, right? You end up making it even stronger, making it harder to correct in the first place. Correctional exercise should almost always be light because the new form, the new technique, the new recruitment pattern that you're training is one that's new to you and you can't train in the new pattern with hard heavy load. Like this is why so many people injure themselves running. It's not because humans aren't, you know, we didn't evolve to run. We actually run exceptionally well. It's just that we don't have the skill of it anymore. We stop running when we're 10. So people go outside to run and they don't practice running. They go run until they're tired. Well, you know, if you if I'm trying to practice perfect running and I don't have the skill, the second I get tired, my form is out the window. A lot of people lift weights this way too. A lot of people lift weights for the sweat and the burn, thinking that that that translates into a good workout when this is what's happening. The minute that your body starts to fatigue, it goes to its default pattern. And since most of us have these poor default patterns, then you just keep reinforcing that by adding load. So here's an area where light weight is necessary and superior than heavy weight. Maybe not from a calorie burn or total amount of muscle being built, but for total optimal performance and longevity and gaining muscle over a long period of time for the purpose of correction. Yeah, we're trying to correct the movement pattern. So to put it differently, right? If you have a chain and there's one link that's weak on it, the most that that chain can support is what the weak link can support. So if I have a movement pattern issue, I am training heavy according to that movement pattern issue. It's as heavy as that movement pattern can allow. Not as hard or as heavy as my old movement pattern can allow. That's what we mean by light. So it's still challenging, challenging with perfect form. You go heavy, now it's out the window. Yes, you can move the weight, but now you're moving. And so what does that look like? Take it back to the example I was giving with the chest press. So this same person who I was talking about at rep seven, they start to roll forward. They could technically add 10 more pounds and still get and still keep get the reps out. But that's how I decide how much weight they can do is how much weight can you do and keep the shoulder in that position for all 10 reps right the entire time. The minute I load the bar heavy enough that the form slightly starts to deviate at all, we got to go back the other direction and that and it's not where do I foot the muscle fatigue and I no longer can push the weight anymore. It's where does my form breakdown and that's how you gauge how heavy I should I should you know where you see something like this is a good example. You might see this with someone who's like a really, really good deadlifter maybe doesn't have good ankle mobility and they're squatting heavy. And then they start to do the hips come up first and the back extension up at the top. Because as they start to get heavy were they're really good at that hip extension aspect, not so much at the squatting aspect. And so their body defaults to that one and then if you keep going that way again, what you don't want to do is strengthen a bad movement pattern because you're just you're adding cement to it you're adding concrete to it and you're just making it much worse. So correctional exercise should almost always be light because the limiting factor is your movement pattern and that movement pattern gets challenged very easily with lightweight and heavy weight it just overcomes it and then you go back to your old movement pattern. The next one is when you're training for the pump. Now this isn't to say that heavy training doesn't give you a pump because the heavy training can definitely give you a pump. But if you're training specifically for what's known as sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, sarcoplasm is the all of the non-muscle fiber structures in muscle, which actually incidentally makes up most of the size of your muscle also contributes to energy production of course size and hydration and blood flow. So it's very important not just it's not it's also important just like muscle fibers are if you're training for that you want to be able to focus on the muscle maintain tension on the muscles and really squeeze it and keep that tension there and that is easier when you're going light it's harder when you have your positioning and your posture with that too because I know even the little slight nuances of angles and all these things are a consideration when you're training with this type of a style and to be able to maintain you know the mechanics of it and stay in that stabilized position you know this is where lighter weight does play a bit of an advantage you know with this style of training. Well this is where you see those exercises that I think we kind of harp on is like the glute kickbacks or something like that this is where I see tremendous value right I have a client she says to me Adam I squat I deadlift I do all these movements I cannot feel it in my butt at all so that she's she has a poor mind muscle connection the glutes because she's doing the exercises that are supposed to be for glutes but she doesn't feel it okay so what I'm going to go do is do something like a floor bridge or hip thrust or I'm going to do like the dog peas or kickbacks all these little movements but I'm going to go extremely light and have her think about the glutes why she does that and get a nice pump in them so that she then goes over to do the squats and her butt is already pumped and she's already worked on that connection so she gets more out of the squat for her glutes than she would had she not done that well this is where bodybuilders really shine you know I've heard bodybuilders say rather than adding weight to the bar make the weight feel heavier with your technique in your form and focus on the squeeze in the pump and you can definitely do this I mean I can make 200 pounds feel like 300 pounds on a squat by squeezing and maintaining tension and slowing my forend down and squeezing at the top and pausing at the bottom I can do all that with lighter weight doesn't have to just be certain exercises you could do this one compound lifts I've done this with dead lifts dead lifts which a lot of people like this doesn't isolate anything it's super compound or whatever and you know I get some of that but I've done it with dead lifts where I squeeze my lats and I go light and I'm coming up to the top and I'm squeezing hard and I'm maintaining tension all the way down and I'll get a lat pump from doing a dead lift that way if I want to get a lat pump from a dead lift I don't go heavy I go light and focus on the squeeze and that's where you know that going light really shines yeah and I think too I mean obviously we're focusing a little bit more on like single joints so we're trying to isolate certain muscles involved but the thing about it is man I totally forgot I was gonna say that a really long time but no I was gonna say it was like so the contraction part so you have the concentric you have the isometric you have the eccentric so you know a lot of these like compound lifts like it in terms of strength training you're focused primarily on that concentric portion and so it's like really ripping the weight and then coming down pretty quickly and so you know with this style of training we're also focusing on those other muscle contractions which now builds up that overall muscle tension which makes it a lot more challenging difficult you can make it really challenging by those three components with lightweight no that's a great example like you want to get a massive pump is you know choose a way you can you that's really light and you can move really slow and do a four to six second eccentric portion of the exercise and watch how much blood gets pumped into there and watch how easy it is for you to direct where you're trying to focus on because it's so light it's very easy for you to focus on a specific area you're not just worried about moving the weight yeah and because it's so light you can slow it down for four or five maybe even six seconds on the eccentric portion of the exercise where if it's at all mildly heavy or heavy at all you're not going to be able to slow the rep down like that and so there's tremendous benefit to the the pump and being able to focus on the eccentric portion that was one of my favorite things and i actually wasn't trying to highlight so much the pump when i do that used to be me just trying to get someone to go four seconds on a negative i've talked about this on the show all the time for muscle building yeah it's incredible for muscle building in fact it's one of the most important portions of the exercise for muscle building yet very few people follow the ideal protocol for hypertrophy which is a four second negative and you go in the gym and you don't see anybody doing that and that's because everybody's always pushing the limits on weight you're always trying everybody wants to look yeah they care about looking strong more than they care about getting the most out of their workout because what they're have to do on that bench press if they want to get a four second negative like you're talking about you might have to drop 50 pounds on the bar and it's you know it doesn't look cool if you're a dude and you want to be saying you're doing 225 you're gonna drop down to one plate by the way going light for the pump it's not like just coming down five or ten pounds like literally take your weight in half and then see if you can make it feel as heavy as the weight was before by slowing down your reps and maybe doing some higher reps and squeezing at the top literally cut it in half watch what happens to the pump I had so I just did this right so we did an episode what maybe a month or go good when we do the the german volume training one oh yeah a month right but a month yeah so anytime we have an episode where we talk about something like I haven't done a long time it always inspires me to go about it's been a while since I've done like this and so I did 10 by 10 with chest I had to drop down to 35 so on the side and it was just you know because that just blew my mind because I could rep to I can get 225 for 10 reps but with the rest periods and for 10 sets and if I was really focused and then what I wanted to do is like you know what if I'm gonna do this I'm gonna go lie I'm gonna really focus on the negative portion slow it down get a nice pump I don't need to train really heavy right now and if I think it was like the four set I realized really quick that by the 10th I'm not gonna be able to finish this with good form especially if I'm going slow so I had to drop down to 35 plates on each side how was your pump incredible yeah and it was an incredible workout I was more than enough sore from it afterwards felt amazing but I also know too this is you know 40 year old older wiser Adam that boy if I was the 20 year old me in the gym working out as a trainer and my buddies never it would take a lot you know my ego would get in the way of what's best for my body at the time and I would want to pile on the weight when I know better in higher reps too they tend to give you a better pump and of course you got to go light when you're going higher reps so it's very appropriate when you're training specifically for the pump now the next one we kind of talked about a little bit which is when you want to isolate now this doesn't necessarily mean single joint exercises although those are the ones that are best known for isolating you can isolate specific muscles with compound lifts if you go light and focus on what you're supposed to feel like I can definitely do a heavy overhead press and I can also do a light overhead press but really feel it in my delts and it feels like a different exercise and the weight difference is tremendous literally if I'm going light on an overhead press and I'm really just trying to focus on the delts and get a pump in the delts and isolate the delts I'm like a hundred pounds on the bar if I'm going heavy it's closer to a hundred and seventy pounds on the bar so it's a big difference so it's not just isolation exercises you can do this with compound lifts as well by going light and and focusing on the action of the muscle you're looking for for example if I'm doing a squat and I want my glutes to really squeeze I'm focusing on my hips the extension that's happening with my hips if I want to focus on my quads I'm focusing on knee extension and squeezing my quads at the top so two different focuses mentally two different feels if I'm going heavy I can't do that because when I'm going heavy it's not about gotta feel my quads gotta feel my glutes it's like move the weight much harder to maintain that mind muscle connection yeah you can do that you can highlight certain muscles and squeeze and have control like that you can do produce that intrinsically and I think it's best obviously to do that with with lighter weight because then you can focus still and it's not you're not defaulting back to your old patterns where I just need to move the weight out one of my favorite examples of that you guys know I rear delts are like one of my favorite things to train and of course when I was focused on that during competing days I was always looking for creative ways to target or hit it different and seated row seated row if you would ask somebody what is that primarily for are going to tell you your your rhomboids your traps your lats those are all your main muscles I would use it for rear delts by simply lightening the load flaring my elbows a tiny bit out letting myself roll and protract the shoulders forward and keep them in that forward position crazy redone now I have an unbelievable mostly rear delt exercise very little lat traps and rhomboid movement and to the average untrained eye they would walk by and be like oh he's doing a back exercise it's like no I was doing that for my shoulders and you can do that when you understand mechanics and you lighten the load and you focus on a specific area you can take a movement that is primarily used for something completely different and change it to target an area that you really want to focus on right now the next point I think is a very important one and I communicate this one personally a lot to general population when I'm talking to the average person not a fitness fanatic somebody who's starting resistance training who wants to reap some of the benefits but really has no interest in going super crazy with it maybe wants to do two or three days a week I love to tell them to practice lifts rather than treat lifts as a workout so rather than going to the gym to hammer your chest or your quads or your shoulders you're going to go to the gym again to practice squatting until you get really good at it and you're going to practice pressing you're going to practice rowing when you're practicing a lift you're treating it like a skill right so I'm in here I'm squatting and what I'm trying to do is just get better at the skill of squatting my positioning my upper back my core stability where my knees how are my ankles and my feet active how are my hips where's my hand position and I'm practicing the technique if I go heavy the first thing to go out the window is the the the form the first thing to go out the window is my technique and then I'm training the wrong skill so if you're trying to practice lifts you got to go light and this is like what we said with the correctional exercise you got to go light because your default pattern is is wrong it's just funny that I haven't I didn't put this together right away like it was something that was very obvious to me in terms of how I trained for sports and how I made sure that I maintain certain skills and movements that would apply when I'm in a game situation versus like when I'm in the gym and I'm going through these lifts you know it used to just be about how much you could put up yeah and and like how hard I could go in that short amount of time versus treating it just like I would at getting good at something yeah and just to get good at something you have to repeatedly do it not just every now and then you have to do it repeatedly and so to be able to maintain and pull that off I mean you see the best strength athletes in the world do this and like we should learn something from that obviously they figured it out it's they're just just drilling this and practicing constantly with low to moderate intensity really just it just forms and fashions this the skill set that you can then you know get really good at it I'm so glad you said that because strength is a skill I'm so glad you said the best strength athletes because I went to begin a route I went the general population route but this is also very applicable to the person who just wants to really take it to the next level Olympic lifters right more science is applied to Olympic weightlifting resistance training than any other form of resistance training it's been the most funded it's been around for the longest it's an olympic sport countries around the world spend time and energy and money on maximizing performance and how do olympic lifters lift submaximal loads most of time they're most of time they're going light and just practicing practicing practicing when do they go heavy when it's time to compete and then their form and skill so good the weights that they lift based off their body weight you won't find a sport that has a greater discrepancy between body weight and weight lifted it's insane and it comes from the fact that they have such perfect skill and technique and strength definitely is a skill definitely well I think I don't remember what study it was I don't know if you remember Sal that you shared on here that I think just highlights that so well and was talking about the amount that a olympic lifter the the capacity that they could get out of the lift like and I think it was like in the 90 percentile or something the amount the like you all have a max capacity but your cns only allows you to you know generate so much because it's fear of injury but when you practice over and over again you're able to train your body to maximize its output right we lifters are yeah everybody's had this example right where you did something like we've told stories about being dads and hearing the kids screaming and you leap up the stairs like the thing that's crazy about that is that I bet you if it was a normal day and I stood you by stairs and I asked you to move up the stairs at the same speed and rate you couldn't do it but because you hijacked that because of the fear that you were able to do that so the point of me sharing that is that your body has this amazing capacity and a capability to move a lot more weight than what you do and the average person who lit weight trains is probably only working at like 50 percent of what they're capable of the only per example that we really have of people that move at their highest capacity are Olympic lifters and what do they do they spend 90 percent of their time moving light weight lots of times really good really good form controlled and practicing the skill of lifting so that when they do decide to get after it and go heavy they get the most out of that low a little while ago there was a squat every day program that got kind of viral online and people like oh my god my squat went up 50 pounds and but what they what people didn't realize is if you looked at it it was heavy lifting once a week maybe the rest of it was essentially what we're talking about you know when I really realized that strength was a skill going to work with my dad as a kid with all of these blue collar workers who you know I'm a I'm 16 years old I've been lifting weights for two years I'm full of testosterone and energy and if you took my muscles off my body and and looked at them under a microscope in a lab and tested them and compared them to the 50 and 60 year old men who were you know nailing wood and you know hauling two by fours on stuff my muscles would have looked stronger healthier superior but we're out there mixing cement carrying buckets doing that they practice all the time and I'm exhausted my hands are fatigued everything's cramping up and these guys are whistling while they're doing this kind of work because inefficient with your energy yes they've practiced so much that they became very good at it so there's tremendous benefit in practicing with your skill of working out or lifting but the best the only way to do this really because practice what's the key of practice is to do it often right you can't do it often if you go heavy you have to do it light in order to practice often and reap those benefits and that's when going light is you know is really appropriate with that the next one is kind of similar and this is when you just want to add more frequency to your training this was the key to the trigger sessions that I put in maps anabolic triggers because with maps anabolic if you go with the more advanced version of it because there's two versions when you buy the program one gives you two heavy what are called foundational workouts a week the other option gives you three heavy foundational workouts a week and you're working the full body all three of those days so the whole body is getting hit three days a week but I threw in trigger sessions so that you could hit the whole body five six seven days a week right but how's that possible the only way it's possible is if the weight is really light and the intensity is really low does lightweight and low intensity send a muscle building signal it does a small one but it still does and the best part is it doesn't impede your recovery in fact this is the best part speeds it up lightweight speeds up your recovery if you don't believe me next time you get really sore on a body part I don't care what body part it is go to the gym and do like four sets of super lightweight of an exercise that targets that body part just stretch and squeeze keep the intensity will go light and tell me how you feel afterwards this was a hard lesson for me to learn and I think that I would I bet that more than half the audience struggles with this whether they admit it or not and that's you know we we've if you've listened to mine pump long enough you've heard us refer to the studies that talk about frequency and the benefits of training a muscle two to three times a week and that seems to be superior to most all programming right is to be able to hit a muscle two to three times a week that's what most of the research says now the problem with that and the way that I think I read that as a as a young 20 year old trainer was oh more more of I was training it once a week now I do it two or three times a week the same way though with the same intensity you know and trying to push and go to failure and train as hard as I could because thinking that more is better and the study and the research says do it more often and it's better and so I'm going to apply the same way I trained on Monday on Wednesday and Friday now and wham I should get more right well no it doesn't work that way and I think that's the hard part about teaching somebody about frequency is that yes hitting a muscle group two to three times a week is superior than to training at one if and only if you know how to adjust for intensity and one of the ways of obviously adjusting the easiest way to adjust for intensity would be to back off the load but it's a mind fuck because you know if I was bench pressing on Monday and I was working with 225 and now it's Wednesday and I'm bench pressing again and I'm only working 135 I feel like oh I'm not really doing much I'm not wasting my time yeah why am I wasting my time I did so much more on that and you have this desire to want to push to those weights again but your body will not respond the same way and so this is another example of you know where lighter weight is going to be superior yeah where I was challenged most with this was I thought that why waste my time going light all I'm going to do is impede my recovery all I'm going to do is slow my recovery down what I didn't realize was that movement makes recovery happen faster literally the blood flow you know it moves oxygen it helps to you know give the type of like building blocks and nutrients and things of the cells for them to fully recover and then regenerate and you know it's a it's a it's a vital process of I mean between that and sleep I mean those two things are like some of the biggest components for recovery and recovery is really what moves you forward it's great to have the the insult in terms of like going in and lifting weights and and getting that kind of stimulus but now we want to reap the reward of it and the reward comes from the recovery yes and in recovery typically happens simultaneously with adaptation so adaptation would be the building right recovery is the healing but just because you're recovering doesn't mean you're actually building it just might mean that you're healing no adaptations can occur so to give an example you could hit a muscle really hard on Monday it like let's say you work at your legs really hard on Monday and then your bed ridden from from then till the next Monday so I hammer my legs on Monday now I'm a lay in bed I'm not going to move people are going to be watering me water and food and I'm just going to lay in bed till next Monday and now I'm fully recovered I'm going to be weaker I'm going to have less muscle on Monday I might have healed but I didn't adapt in fact my body adapted in the opposite direction this is why this is one of the kind of reasons why active recovery is so incredible it encourages adaptation and it helps with recovery this I can't stress this enough literally if you have a sore muscle that you over train one of the best things you could do is stretch it and work it very lightly and I mean very lightly like low intensity just move it through full range of motion you will speed up the recovery process and induce even better adaptations on top of that in terms of what you know you sort of found out with the rubber bands being one of the sort of tools you can use it that applies the least amount of damage yes in terms of getting you that kind of contraction out of the muscle and blood flow but you know it's less damaging in that you know the recovery of it doesn't quite entail as much yes now the next one is for when you're doing a D load now D loads I'm happy to say now our is become a relatively known concept now in the fitness space wasn't before but now people are understanding that it's a good idea to throw in a week or two after a training block where I'm going light and I'm going easy and the challenge with it with it in the past was well I'm doing a D load that means I'm not progressing right I'm not going to progress over this next week or two you know it's funny how many times did you D load then come back and actually get stronger studies actually support it now yeah studies will actually show now that some of the best strength gains and muscle gains come during that D load period now it's not because you're doing nothing you're still doing something similar to what we just talked about you're still moving but you're actually allowing the body to adapt and build this is a very important part of training I remember experiencing this as a kid so fanatical ball training couldn't miss a workout everything was super intense I thought that was the best thing to do then I'd go on a on a camping trip with my family for five days right and I got nothing I'm out in the woods and so what am I going to do I'm doing these light exercises I don't have weight so I'm doing push-ups and maybe a couple pull-ups not much because I don't have equipment and I'm dread oh man I'm going to go back to the backyard and lift weights and I'm gonna be so weak this is gonna suck uh and then I go back and be like oh my god I just hit a PR like what's going on and I never put that together that it was the D load aspect that you know it's it's always uh I know that I think I brought this up when we were making the notes for this and it's I'm I'm always really careful how I talk about D load weeks because it really depends on my audience yeah someone who's always in a deal yet to be to be honest like I use D low weeks very rarely for my average clientele and that's because the one of the biggest hurdles overreaching well yeah the one of the biggest hurdles for the average you know general population person that would hire a personal trainer is consistency is just can I keep this person actually training three times a week for three months I mean and believe it or not a very small percentage actually most people will miss yeah most people at least exactly most people naturally you know miss and D load without scheduling it but occasionally you get that client and most certainly in the fitness space you see this and probably more mind pump listeners than average because most these people are seeking to learn more about fitness most of people listening to show are probably working out that person who knows how to stretch how to push how to be consistent this is where there's tremendous value so if you just if you've just been hammering it for the last three months consistently and you haven't missed a workout that's an amazing accomplishment but a lot of times if you're if you're experiencing a plateau you may be in that place where you just need a D load week you need to back off and go and again it doesn't mean you don't go to the gym and not work out it just means hey I'm going to work at 50% of the load on all of my exercises next week and really back off and many times what you'll see and this is how you always know there's a great test for everybody to try this is everyone should just do that for a week right so if you even think that you might be this person who needs you're not going to lose anything but yeah just do it for a week and when you know that that was what your body needed was you come back stronger if you don't come back stronger maybe you come back weaker you don't notice a big difference maybe it wasn't a big deal for you but certainly if you take a week of deloading and dropping your weight by 50% and then you go or doing like all suspension or all body weight type of exercises and then go back to your routine and you come back stronger that is your sign that that is exactly what your body you know my sign was was my nagging aches and pains disappeared that's another I had like I had like this kind of hip like issue it wasn't major it was just kind of there and this elbow pain and remember remember I'd complain about I don't know what the hell is wrong I was like weird I'm getting older and I'm blaming it on everything but you know correct training and oh man I don't know what the hell is going on and then I'm like you know what I'm going to do unilateral training for a few weeks and I'm going to go light and my goal with the unilateral training wasn't necessarily the aches and pains it was for symmetry and balance in my body and I did it and then I remember coming in you're going hey you guys will never believe this aches and pains are gone of course that's obvious but you know when you're a trainer you obviously your things are so much more obvious for other people than for yourself but yeah deloading one of the hallmarks of an effective deload is to literally go light now the last point is this is that some exercises are just meant to go light they just lend themselves well to go light and when you go heavy on them and you can go heavy on them you can go heavy on any exercise you want but there definitely are some exercises where if you go heavy they tend to suck they tend to lose their value I'll give you one example and we can go through some that we all think of but here's one example laterals yeah I'm working my shoulders I'm trying to do laterals can you go heavy with laterals hell yeah I can go out there right now and do some sloppy ass you know partially clean looking laterals with 50 to 60 pound dumbbells and I can make it look crazy and get a good sweat and whatever and everybody's gonna be like wow that's that's awesome it'd be cool for videos yeah how much weight do I typically use on laterals I almost never go above 20 25 pounds never because that exercise is so much more effective when I slow it down and really work the side delt of the shoulder when my when I go heavy it becomes a trap upper back exercise I get this external rotation in the show I've seen so many people do like laterals like momentum starts to play a factor hip hinging makes its way in there's just a lot of things in the kinetic chain you may not be aware of unless you're really focused and to pull the focus out of some of these types of exercises you know sort of defeats the purpose you know what analogy I think of right away and this will suck for people that don't play sports so or like golf or anything is uh I mean here I like how you you set the table with this which is it's not I'm not saying you can't go heavy on these exercises or that they don't have value to go heavy it's just some exercises lend themselves yes to not going heavy well this is how a golf swing is if you've ever ever tried I know this because yeah although I beat you guys it yeah like we have a recorded listen I know I know the harder I though if I went hard anomaly shit went out the window yeah right you would barely hit it or go off to the left or you'd miss it or what that he's using a driver for like you know a 50-yard yeah you take a little you take a little half swing I still want you take a little half swing and you focus on this this short range perfect control and just barely barely swing and the ball sails right where you want it to go and then you get in there and you try and muscle it and yeah you might hit it but it don't go anywhere you want to I think the same way when you're training a specific area when I'm trying to target the rear delt and it's really easy for my traps and rhomboids and other parts of my body to help me well yeah I could get something and just rip it up there but then what ends up happening all those other bigger muscles take over the movement and now the area that I'm trying to focus on doesn't even get worked that much I end up developing another part and it don't I don't get the same benefit rear delt flies is a great exercise I don't think I've ever seen anyone go heavy on a rear delt fly and it look effective now I got to a place I'm glad you said that because I actually did get to a place where I could rear delt fly pretty good way like I got up to 4550 pound dumbbells as a pro physique competitor okay how much would you row at that way yeah and by the way I wouldn't do that now you know I was doing rear flies of the day with 15 so there's a major difference where I'm at today and where I was out there but that's also the tiger woods also gets into the golf ball right you know say he's he's practiced that that movement so much that he can just think about how he wants that and his body is going to respond to it and I think that's when you're ready to do maybe some of these types of movements I think that lend themselves better for lightweight it's not to say like you said there's not value in doing some exercises heavy but man you better have the ability to just to just be able to isolate that by thinking about it really well before you think about loading it on some of these curls is another one I remember a while ago we I don't remember where we went we went to go do a speaking engagement this is of course before you know everything got shut down or whatever and there was a picture of me working out and I've got my pump going on or whatever and I'm curling and you know one person comments oh that's all he's only curls 30 pound dumbbells or whatever obviously it's some dude trying to you know mess with me or whatever troll yeah but you know here's a deal like I've been working out for a very long time I mean I can curl if I want I can go curl with 60 pound dumbbells and I can kind of look like I'm okay I don't get the same results curling 60 pound dumbbells that I would get with 35s I just don't with 35s I can really get full extension I could focus on the bicep and it's just a better way of doing that exercise I can go heavy but it doesn't work as well when I go heavy it's a better exercise when it's done light just like some exercises tend to be better when they're heavy versus when they're light like dead lifts like can you do dead lifts light you can if you're perfecting your form and doing a lot of stuff and you're trying to focus on a particular muscle but generally speaking dead lifts are a lower rep heavier type of exercise silly yeah it's it is it is right it's not nearly as effective another one will be tricep press downs how many times have you guys seen a dude put the whole stack for tricep press downs and it looks like a dip like he's not doing a tricep more shoulders and touching and hunching it forward yeah it looks like he's doing like a like a decline chest press right and he's so proud that he's using the whole stack but you can get so much more benefit from doing it with lighter weight I mean I think this is pretty true I'm trying to think right now an example of a single joint exercises that this doesn't apply to I would say that most probably most single joint movements lend themselves better with with lighter weight again there's there's always exceptions to the rule if you've been training for a very long time can you get just like your curl analogy I agree does that mean that you can't get some good value from going really heavy on curls sure you can if you have really good mechanics if you know that when you go really heavy you're not gonna allow allow the shoulder to roll forward and the anterior delt to take over 30 percent of the load and then because that's the part that you just gotta understand like okay you might be doing 30 more of the weight but if now 30 percent of the load is being carried by the muscle that you weren't trying to work out increase the risk of the exercise yeah you know I'm saying and you're now you're developing an area that you weren't focusing on so that's that's the reason why I think there's certain exercises that lend themselves well for lighter weight yeah I think overall understanding when it's appropriate to go heavy when it's appropriate to go light is one of the most important things you can learn about how to train your body when you can really understand this then you can maximize your exercises in your workout and minimize your risk injury and just get the best results and just like we said in this particular episode those are the seven reasons when going light is definitely the best option look if you like our information you'll love our guides we have a bunch of free guides that we wrote and created for you guys and girls out there to want to learn more about your bodies you want to build more muscle or burn more body fat or improve your mobility you can find them all at mindpumpfree.com you can also find all of us on instagram so justin can be found at mind pump justin i'm at mind pump sal and adam is at mind pump adam