 Strength, it is a foundational physical pursuit. It's the one physical pursuit that contributes to all other physical pursuits. In other words, if you got a little stronger, you'll get a little better at everything else. So in today's episode we're going to talk about strength. We're going to break it down into some components because how you train your strength matters. All right, fun. Let's do it. There ain't nothing wrong with getting a little strong. Wow. Am I right? That's good, dude. For sure he was thinking about that all morning. The first time I heard. I was like practicing. Justin's been saving that forever. He has been. I remember the first time I heard somebody communicate the value of strength this way was Mark Ripitow. He actually said this and he said that. He's the first person I heard say that. And then he goes on to explain and it's, I mean, it's 100% true. If you want more, if you want to improve your functional flexibility, getting stronger will do that. If you want more endurance, getting stronger will contribute to that. If you want better balance, if you want pretty much any physical pursuit. If you get a little stronger, you'll notice improvements, all the others. Now this isn't true with all the other physical pursuits. If you improve your endurance, you don't necessarily get stronger or get more functional flexibility. If you get more functional flexibility, you don't necessarily get some of the other ones. So strength is this kind of like, if you look at physical pursuits as a triangle, the base, it's at the base. So it's very important for everybody to kind of train. Also for your athletic endeavors too. 100%. What point do you think that tips over? When you start to take away focus from other things, when it's so specialized that you lose sight of other, I would guess. I'm asking that because I'm picturing like a high school athlete, who hasn't been introduced really to strength training, or is about to get introduced to strength training. And just them doing the major compound lifts is going to contribute to whatever sport they play. I don't care if it's football, wrestling, basketball, whatever. Just by doing that, they're going to get better at their sport. But at some point, the weight training becomes, and when the weight training becomes such a focus, or you get beyond that base of strength, I guess, and it becomes like almost weightlifting, it becomes almost specialized, and then it starts to even take away. So how would you tell a young athlete to approach that is where I'm kidding? Yeah, no, so first off, strength will always contribute to all the other physical pursuits if it were simply snapping my fingers and making you stronger. The reason why you start to see a reduction in potential benefit is because it takes time to train for strength. And when you're training as an athlete, especially as you become more and more advanced, if you're dedicating this much time to strength, to building strength, it means you're taking away time from being able to train for other things and you're limited by recovery. So it becomes much more complex. Yeah. And then the strength gains you get need to be a little bit more specific because, like for example, quarter squats, you know, you get a new athlete, like, you don't want to do quarter squats. We want to get you good at being able to do full squats. But if you're a high-level basketball player, you're going to get tons of carryover from quarter squats, and you're not going to get as much damage, and you're not going to need to train as much time on working on the control mobility of a full squat. It's not going to have as much carryover, that kind of stuff. So it just gets much more specific. But overall, if we could just snap your fingers, I mean, take any athlete, if you could just make him 10% stronger with a magic wand, would they not see improvements in everything else? Absolutely. Yeah. And I think too, like you can get to a point where you get really strong in like certain directions to the point where your body then has to kind of compensate when you introduce other variables, other directions, other factors. Like, so if I have to like change directions and now my body's in a certain position, I'm not quite as strong in sports and athletics. It's going to expose a lot more of, I guess, like multi-directional strength in terms of like your ability to be able to react, respond, have strength outside of just this sort of linear focus. But what's great about building up that base is you do build up that strength overall. You have to just consider the fact that that's not the end goal with it. You have to then extend to that and build in, yes, your skill for your very specific sport, but also too, you have to get strong in other directions. Yeah, I guess I was looking for a simpler answer and you guys both gave me complicated answers. I'm picturing myself as like a parent of a high school student. I don't know very much about strength training. My son doesn't. I listen to the show. I trust your guys' advice. I want to advise my son on his pursuit in the weight room, even though football is his passion or basketball is his passion. You know, how much should he be focusing on getting stronger versus going out and playing a sport more? Because you kind of started to allude to it. At what point does the strength training start to take away from the athletic training? That's obviously... Generally speaking, yeah. Oh, I mean, it's going to be just a sliver of your training. Obviously, the skill has got to be the most of your focus. And the cool thing about strength training is you don't need a lot of it to gain benefit from it. So even if you took a high school athlete and you had him lift once a week, he would get a lot of benefit from that and minimal time taken away from... Yeah, I think it depends on how strong they are to begin with and what they're capable of because if it needs attention, and that's one of their biggest setbacks in terms of their performance in their sport, that needs to be a focused effort to really build that base completely. So if you have a good base, then you can taper off, I think. Okay, that's a good point, Justin. That gets me closer to where I'm searching. So if you were told, let's say by your coach, like, hey, you need to put some size on your skinny or you're a lot lighter than the average athlete, like you need some more strength. And that's why you're lacking, right? And that's going to be a huge difference. Versus maybe you're a more built muscular kid already and you're already in the middle to the upper pack of strength and size naturally, that kid is more likely to overdo the strength training, weight room time. He'd probably benefit more from movement and being able to skill, yeah. Okay, so now we're getting closer to it. I feel like a good kind of general advice for a parent who's trying to advise their kid on pursuing strength for their sport is understanding that if it's hindering them, right, because they could be better at basketball or football if they were stronger because most of the kids are stronger than they are, they would greatly benefit from the weight room. Versus if you are a kid who is middle of the pack or even the top of the pack as far as strength-wise, you're going to benefit more from your athletic endeavors than you would be spending even more time in the weight room. Yeah, now, and you're also talking about a small slice of the population. For the sake of this episode, you know, we're talking, let's talk to the average person. Right, right. The average person who's trying to become more fit, more healthy, look better, have a faster metabolism, better hormone profile, just generally feel better, be more stable, and just have improved health. And so that's kind of what we'll communicate to you, because once we get to athletes, it starts to get... It can get real... It can get complex. Really complex and specific. But for the average person, getting stronger, you'll notice an improvement in the quality of your life across the board. But then it gets a little bit more specific in the sense that there are different types of strength that you can and should train for, because it's going to give you better overall strength. So I'll tell a story that kind of illustrates what I'm talking about. I mean, I started lifting weights as a kid. I was 14 years old when I first started working out and never stopped since. And I remember at 16, this was two years after lifting. I'm a teenage boy, so full of testosterone. I remember going to work with my dad, and he would... My dad was a towel setter. And I remember he was putting mud up on the wall. So this is like a real sticky type of glue that you put up on the wall, and you spread it out and put tile and stuff like that. And he had this... He was holding this flat... It was like a flat square that he would hold with this handle, and there would be a big pile of mud on it, and then he'd have his trowel in the other hand, and he'd scoop it off that hand and throw it up on the wall, scoop it off the hand and throw it on the wall. And he was doing this all day. Now, my job was to mix the cement, bring it to him, and pour some of it on this thing that he was holding his hand. And so as he's doing this, and I'm watching him and waiting to see if I need to put more on or whatever, like I said, that was what I was doing, I made a comment, something like, man, that looks like fun. That looks real fun, right? And he goes, you think you can do this? And I said, I mean, I could tell it takes some skill, but I could try. My arm, not only did I not have the technique, but my arm got so fatigued. Just holding it. Yeah, and it was probably like 25 pounds, which doesn't sound like a lot, but all day he's holding this arm. That's a ton. Now, I curled all kinds, way more weight than that. I mean, I was 16 years old. I was really strong. I was already dead lifting almost 400 pounds and all this other stuff. And here he is holding this mud, and I remember doing it for maybe three minutes trying to do it while he's laughing at me. And my arm was just on fire. And I realized that there are different types of strength, because had him and I gone to deadlift or do curls, I could probably lift more than him, but I couldn't have this isometric kind of like contracted, stable position doing this particular thing. And that was the first time I kind of realized that, oh, there's different kinds of strength. And when you work out in the gym, you can train all of them or different ones. And doing so will give you more of a complete package. Number one, you're gonna have a better physique as a result. There'll be no holes. You have less injury and you'll just feel better because all of these types of strength are expressed in the real world. So you'll notice in the real world, if you only train one and not the others that you'll try doing other things like moving a couch and you'll wonder why you get so fatigued when you work out all the time. Today's program giveaway is Maps Power Lift. Here's how you can win it. Leave a comment below this video in the first 24 hours that we drop it. Subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications. If you win, we'll let you know in the comments section. We're also running a sale right now. Maps Anabolic Advanced, half off. If you're interested, just click on the link at the top of the description below. All right, here comes the show. How long have we been aware of this? Like when you think, I know you guys are more into looking back in like old, you know, old people used to, or older guys like as far as old timing type stuff, how they used to train. How long have we been aware of the different types of strength and were there specific exercises, specific people that like specialized in different types of feats? They were aware right away. Yeah. Well, even back in the Roman days, right? The inception of the Olympics, like they would do these strength feats and that were, you know, produced these types of like granite looking bodies and you just saw like, you know, people used to marvel at these feats that they used to do and then that kind of translated into a lot of the things we saw with like the bronze era guys that would, you know, just lift benches full of people and do like these bent presses and they're very much of a different strength focus, I think back then because of the hard labor. I think hard labor was a big part of that. If anything, we forgot. Not that we just became, we became aware. They were aware of this way early. Yeah. Because early strength training was all about, first off, they would have to display it to an audience. If you were a strength athlete in the bronze era and you wanted to somehow make a living doing it, you would do it by doing demonstrations. The demonstrations to the average person, if you did a deadlift with a barbell, the average person back then would look at it and be like, I don't know, is it a lot of weight? I mean, I guess you could have people come try it. Yeah. But they'd look at it and but you'd have to, so what they would do is they would lift objects that people could recognize like, Yeah. Like a heavy iron wagon wheel or. It was like a side show. Almost like a vaudeville, like they'd travel and they'd do these like performances for people. Or they would bend a horseshoe, right? Or hold a young woman up in the air for a long time, right? Or do stuff like that. Roll a frying pan or something. Yeah, exactly. Crush things. Yeah. So they were very, people were very aware and then they would challenge each other. So yeah. Oh, great. You could lift a really heavy rock that I can't but can you hold this bucket of water at arm's length for five minutes, right? So then I challenge you and then you couldn't do that. And then you'd say, okay, but can you take this nail and with one hit, hit it through a plank of wood or whatever. So they were very aware of the different types of strength. And so they used to train them. Yeah. They would train all of them. So you didn't see these strength athletes only training a particular way. They were trained in many different ways so that they could do these competitions and these performances and demonstrate their feats. The result of which being these really incredibly fit athletic, mobile, strong, healthy, natural bodies way before anabolic steroids and performance enhancing drugs. This is before supplements. They just ate food and worked. They all had jobs. Very few of them actually able to support themselves fully doing this. So they worked full-time and then they trained their bodies and then they would do these displays. I remember when you guys first started showing me some of these athletes in the bronze era or weight lifters, whatever you want to call them. I don't recall ever seeing pictures. I don't feel like it was celebrated or highlighted today. I assume that they didn't have physiques. Whenever I saw an old poster or a clipping that was black and white, if someone did that, they actually never really showed a physique that looked really good. So I just assumed that it didn't happen until a way later. But I've now seen all kinds of physiques back then that looked amazing. Is there a reason why maybe they didn't care about that as much? Is that why? They did, but what was more impressive to the audience back then was what you could do. Because you'll still hear this today, by the way. This is an instinct that especially guys will have. What do you see? This is annoying, by the way, but you'll see like a buff dude walking down the street and then some insecure dudes are looking at him. What do you bitch? Or they'll say something like, yeah, but I bet he can't fight or whatever, right? So instinctively it's like, but what can you do? That's always what comes out. Well, back then it was all about what you could do. So if you looked pretty and you looked nice and you were not doing anything, like you were really quick, everybody would discount you. Oh, that guy, oh yeah, he looks good, but what did he do? He can't do anything. Well, it wasn't like one of the first crossovers, Sandow, because he had like that really impressive physique. He turned it into bodybuilding. Because bodybuilding, I feel like it just started along his era, right? No, it happened later. So the original competition. Like modeled after him. Yeah, so they were challenges. So way before that it was like circuses and stuff like that. And then these strong men, strong women, by the way, there were women too back then. Oh yeah, dude, some of these women were crazy strong. Oh yeah, oh, like I don't remember what her name was. What was her name? Pudgy Stockton, I think? Carried a 600 pound cannon. What? She carried the 600 pound cannon. This is a chick. And this was, by the way, women who are, you know, they had like to promote like empowerment and stuff like that. Like this was back in the day when if you were outside of the house or outside of the kitchen, like people would like say something to you. And here was this woman who was, who would go on a stage. She would do these lifts and challenge men. And she would put them to shame. So yeah, this is pretty cool. But anyway, they would have challenges. That's how it started. And then they started creating shows. And the shows were, first there were challenges. Then they, somebody was really smart and included a physique round. So they would come out, they would do some kind of a challenge, maybe a competition with each other, who could do most handstand pushups or who could lift the, you know, the most with the bent press or something like that. And then there was a physique round. Don't you think that would be cool if they brought that back today? Of course. I think it would be so cool. It would change the physique. Especially since, I mean, we've gotten to a level now where like, you go to like a Mr. Olympia and everybody looks fucking insane. Like everybody looks amazing. How many egos you think will get crushed if there was an actual, because now you have to do something with that body. That's why it would be cool. And I think it would be a much better way to separate them because they're now at a point where, man, it's so subjective. Like it's so, like everybody looks so good. The guy who comes in last place, like most people that don't know how to, how the bodies even get judged would be like, I don't get it. I don't understand what, so it would be cool to add an element into the show where it's like, now you have to do like this bent press or do some, or you get to choose, right? You have a couple of different feats. You definitely get something like me more interested. Otherwise, I'm out. You know, I could care less. Yeah, for you, it's just a pageant, you know? It is, yeah. I mean, although like to give the guys credit, you know, most of them can do something pretty fucking strong and impressive. Yeah, a lot of the bodybuilders are strong. Yeah, yeah, you know, it's like you, if you got that massive, that big, you're not, you're not weak. Yeah, I'm not discounting that, but yeah. I know. So all right, let's talk about one of the types of strengths that you can display that you should also train and practice on. And that's max strength. This is what most people would, this is what most people think about if you were to mention strength, is they would think of this type of strength. And it's basically your ability to generate maximal force. It's your ability to lift something heavy one time. So it's like, you know, like how much can you deadlift? How much can you bench press? How much can you squat? Can you lift that really heavy thing off the ground or press that really heavy thing in the air? This is an important type of strength to train. It is specific, meaning you train for this to get this. There is carryover to other types of strength, but it's important for everybody to develop the ability to generate maximal force through a range of motion. Okay. Through a range of motion, meaning not just force, but force and movement. So like a squat would be an example. And this is again, everybody should train this at some point, this becomes less important when you start to get really strong. But within the first at least three years of training, this is a very important type of strength to train for. You know, it's interesting about this portion is the rituals involved with being able to get in that mindset and be able to recruit as much muscle fibers and force as possible. Like everybody has kind of their own thing. And it's like, you know, whether it's like crazy, crazy hype music or it's breathing, like certain erratic breathing or it's like, you know, slapping somebody. It's just, I'm always very fascinating to see how people can get into that headspace to lift like the most maximal amount of weight possible. I wish this was actually communicated better to me because even as a trainer, like I told you guys, like I'd never, I never maxed out. I thought, I thought it was silly. I thought it was too high of risk for the reward. I cared about how I looked. I didn't care about proving how much I could dead lift or squat was relatively strong. So I didn't care. But the irony of that was when I started to train more like a strong man or learn how to lift like a power lifter, the benefits and carryover that I got from aesthetics, I wish I understood that earlier. I think I would have got to my destination much faster as far as the physique that I was trying to build as a young man, but I avoided it because again, I fell into that category of people who look at the way people train as like a camp. Like, oh, one rep max, like I'm not a power lifter. I don't train that. Yeah. Why train that way? Why would I ever train that way? And it's only risky to. That's a good question. Why train? Why train to develop max strength? Number one, it's training your central nervous system to fire with incredible force to get your muscles to organize for one concentrated effort. And it also builds and strengthens the tendons and ligaments like nothing else. So that's why it's very important. This I did not because I knew it was a great way to build a physique, but because there was always an infatuation I had with strength athletes. And so I liked to try doing that when I started applying this to clients because I never trained clients in low reps until the back half of my career. It wasn't until the back half of my career when I started reading books that were written at the turn of the century by people from the Bronze Era when I started to say, God, you know, with good form and technique and all that stuff and appropriate, I used to start putting clients through cycles of training for max strength. It became my secret weapon. Why? Because no trainers were training average people. Nobody was touching it. I mean, especially women. Yes. And there's so many, I mean, there's prerequisites involved obviously before we get to that level where it's like, let's go ahead and get after it and go for like our max output just because of safety. And so I think that there was a bit of a hesitation there amongst coaches and trainers. But really, like you said, same thing in my career, like later on, because that was such a high concern, was like, I don't want to injure anybody, I don't want to hurt anybody. But really like to be able to build that capacity to really show them what they're capable of, it really just bled into everything else after that in terms of their ability to get strong in these other strength pursuits. Oh, it was my secret weapon, because people who'd been with trainers before and all that stuff, and I'd look at their workouts and I'd know they'd never trained this way and I'd start them out that way. And within two months, they would get blown away by the results. Speaking of safety, now everything has to be done properly. Let's just understand that context. But heavy deadlifting, heavy squatting, heavy overhead pressing, like just heavy training like this appropriately is what actually made my clients the most bulletproof against injuries. That's the irony. Well, it's also, it's relative to the individual, right? So if you have somebody, right, we all have had this client who is never lifted really heavy or one rep max or ever below five or six reps, but they train eight, 10, 12, 15 reps all day long. And they have a weight that they choose every single time with that. It's simply taking that same person and going, hey, let's add 25 pounds to the bar, which you've never done before. And if you only get four or five, it's okay. Or let's add 50 pounds of bar and if you only get two or three, it's okay. So it's all relative to where they're currently at, how much you loaded. It's not like you take somebody who's like- Oh, it's gotta be appropriate. Yeah, somebody who's never lifted before like, let's just slap on 200 pounds and on their back right away. Yeah. Max deadlift with some of my clients was the bar. You know, this was like my older clients. They lift the bar for the first time and that would be their, you know, us training low reps. Doug is a good example. Doug was my client, came to me because of back pain he could not fix. Chronic low back pain. Do you know how we fixed it? Heavy deadlifts. Yeah. A back exercise literally got him to pull 400 pounds and the way his back used to bother him and hurt and all that stuff disappeared and it was from training in this particular fashion. So it's got tremendous value. Now, when you train this, there's a couple of things you want to consider. One is you're obviously training a low reps. Okay. Two, you're not maxing out all the time. So I know we're talking about max strength but to train for best max strength you've got to train with sub maximal weight, meaning let's say I do sets of two reps in a lift. So I'm doing a set with just two. I'm not picking a weight where I can only do two. I'm picking a weight where I could do four. But now what I do is I do five sets of two reps. That's how you build maximal strength. When you're ready to test yourself is when you go for the max. That's not how you work out in this low rep. But few exercises, lots of sets, compound lifts, low reps. That's the general recipe for building max strength. And you can apply it to any exercise, but compound lifts are going to give you the most bang for your buck. Training single joint exercises like this. There's not a ton of value in comparison. All right. The next one is strength stamina. This is a type of strength as well. Now we're not talking about lung capacity or VO2 max, although that plays a role. We're talking about the ability for your muscles to generate strength repeatedly. Your example you gave with your dad. Well, that would be more of the isometric, which we'll get to. But it would be more like a set of 25 reps in the barbell squat. You would consider his flicking up the... Oh, I was talking about the arm that was holding. Oh, I thought you were explaining it. Well, yeah, the reps involved with that continued. Flicking his feet. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, and the arm flicking up the... Yeah, that for sure. Oh, I'm glad you made that clear, because when I was picturing you trying to do that, I was thinking even more so the... It was the hand holding the metal, the flat plate with the mud that I couldn't believe how tired it got. You didn't hold that kind of weight for that long of a time, and that makes a huge difference. But I mean, it's great still of sample, right? So there's an example of there's two different types of... Yeah, my right hand is the repeated stamina. Yeah, yeah. And the left hand was holding the mud for that time. But yeah, strength stamina is reps. Can you repeatedly generate strength? So here's a great example. Let's compare what we just talked about. Max strength to strength stamina. You could be somebody who can squat 500 pounds, and all you do is train max strength. Then somebody puts 200 pounds, less than half on the bar, and they tell you to squat it for 30 reps, and you can't. Yeah. That's a common example, by the way, is that somebody for 30 reps wouldn't be able to do that. Who could squat 500 pounds? So just to give you an example of how specific strength can be and why you want to train both. Yeah, you see fatigue setting in and how that affects the body and how it literally shuts parts of your system down. You just start shutting down if you don't have that kind of long-term strength. It's the worst. And it's one of those that's very exposing, especially if you are that kind of person that you just like to lift heavy weights and then somebody takes you through something around 15 to 20 reps and you just... Buries you. It's embarrassing. And it just highlights that there's different, completely different types of strength and this is also a necessary part that's very functional in real-world situations. Yeah, I think of ranchers, cowboys. That's what comes to mind. Being able to stack 70 bales of hay in a day. You know what I'm saying? Or hauling fence posts and nailing down a whole, you know, acre worth of fence posts in a day. Just like that ability to just hammer something out like that for hours all day long and an average person would do four or five. They're almost as strong at the end of the day as they were at the beginning. Right, right. Bodybuilders actually have our good examples of strength stamina. Bodybuilders because of the high volume. Lots of super sets and tries. Yeah, just like, okay, today's chest day. You take a powerlifter and a bodybuilder, go to workout. So what the workout would look like. The powerlifter would be stronger than the bodybuilder in the beginning. But about halfway through the workout, set number 15, the powerlifter just, his muscles don't work anymore. This is how I always got Justin. Yeah, that's right. This is where I was good. You know what I'm saying? I never trained the one rat. You bury me all day long. I'm hard out of the gates. And then I was just dogging. I was single double triples. Maybe 45 minutes in, bro. I got this guy. Yeah, now this is also a type of, by the way, all the ones that we're going to talk about today contribute to muscle growth. All of them are the most effective thing you could do for muscle growth when it's novel. Meaning if you always train in one, then training in one of the other ones will give you some like really fast initial gains. That's why one of the reasons why it's so good to cycle through these is because the body gets, the body comes really adapted to one and then switching to a new one. It's a new stimulus and the body just responds along with, of course, developing a better, more well-rounded physique. This kind of training also produces really good pumps. So for those of you who really enjoy that feeling in the gym, where the muscles get really full and tight and you like to see what you look like if you were a little bit more developed, like stamina strength type training, high volume, higher rep type training is a surefire way to do it. Like the guaranteed way to do it. And it does increase blood flow. It does burn a lot of calories. And it does contribute to traditional endurance much more than max strength. Yeah, I think this one has more cardiovascular benefits for sure because of all the blood and oxygen pumping through your body. I was gonna ask you, what are the things that you think really that contribute to this more so than like the single rep? So you're gonna get the cardiovascular. You're gonna get the stave off fatigue, like a muscle stamina, right? That you're gonna get from it. You get the pumps and probably benefits of high hypertrophy from in there. What else would you say? Well, I think it's, this tends to be easier on the joints so long as your form and technique are good. So if you have good, now if you have bad technique, stamina strength training can be terrible. I've seen so many examples of loose, crazy form. But if it's really good, it can be easier on the joints. So let's say you're older. You've been working out for a long time. You're already pretty strong. You'll probably spend more time here than you will or you probably should. Less risky here in terms of on your joints. There you go. And yeah, like the stress, you're gonna get in the ligaments and things. So I think it does have a bit more, it weighs higher in the longevity spectrum. Yeah, and then lots of health benefits. I mean, they all have health benefits, but this one you can throw in some of the benefits of cardio in with this type of training. I'm gonna go do a barbell squat set with 30 reps and tell me you're not getting some cardio, benefits from that. You're going to for sure. So now people in the strength and muscle building world will tell you that this produces round looking muscles, whereas max strength type training will give you that kind of like hard granite look. Anecdotally, I think there's some truth to that. There's zero science and studies to support any of what I just said with that, but in my experience training myself and training other people, and it's a small effect, it's not like it's like this dramatic difference, but it does. There's a different look to my body when I train one versus the other. I mean, it was dramatic for me. I felt like it was. I think it was dramatic for you because you were so long. I was an extreme example of it, right? And you had so much muscle. You're a pro. I was an extreme example of somebody who trained like hypertrophy, high rep, super set, very much so in the, you know, stamina, strength department, not the max strength department at all for years, a decade of training that way, and then switched over to training. And there was a very obvious physical change to my body. And it wasn't just that I added more muscle. It was like the way the muscle looked on my body. It was very clear to me that I'd always had this like ability to air up, right? And the training in the strength stamina where I get these bubbly looking muscles and I would look full and then after an hour or two I'd have this kind of deflated look. I wouldn't feel like I looked as muscular where when I started training max strength, my body didn't get as big and round during the workout, but then the muscle that I built on my body felt like it stayed on there even when I wasn't aired up, if that makes sense. That's the best way I can describe what that was like for me to go through that transition, but I felt like it was dramatic. Yeah, I feel like when I train like this, I feel if I do it well, sometimes I can over train with this because this adds a lot of volume, okay? But I feel good. I feel healthy. I feel like I could, you know, my muscles are working really well. When I train with a lot of max strength, I feel solid in my body. I just feel really solid and tight. So it's a different feel as well on the inside. All right, the next one, this one we can label as grit because I can't necessarily think of a better description that the average person would understand. Isometric strength would be what we would use, the trainer jargon, but grit is your ability to maintain and control tension. This, I also have a great story to tell where I experienced this myself and this is when as an adult, as a young adult, after years and years and years of lifting weights, I was 200 and I was a big boy at this point, I was like 220. I went and signed up for Brazilian jiu-jitsu and these were with the gi and I remember in the class as I'm learning, as I'm taking the classes, I'm a strong dude. I'm stronger than anybody in the class. I'm the strongest guy in there for sure. But halfway through, my hands will just stop functioning. I couldn't hold on to people's gi anymore because so much of jiu-jitsu is grip and grip training and then holding people in a position if you're on top or on the bottom, maintaining guard, maintaining grips. And I remember like, even though I'm the strongest guy, I've got the biggest muscles in there. That was it. It was done. I couldn't isometrically hold anymore and then I was like, you could just take me apart. That's a different type of strength is the ability to maintain steady tension. Here's another example. New dads will understand this. So if you're listening right now, you work out, you became a new dad, you probably were embarrassed about how tired your arm got holding your kid. You know, you got a baby, literally a 20-pound baby and you're holding them and you're like, man, my arm is tired. I go do curls with 50-pound tubbells and I'm holding my baby right now, trying to do stuff with the other hand and my biceps on fire. Like what the hell's going on? The coolest part about this one is this is probably the safest one to train. 100%. Yeah. And what's really cool is if you have somebody, if you're a coach or trainer and you have somebody of advanced age and you're hearing us talk about these different benefits of building, you know, max strength or strength, this is a great place to start a lot of your clients who you're not certain yet if they can handle the other types of strength training because it has tremendous benefits and it's really easy to start anybody at any level. It's why I love using this. It also causes the least amount of damage. You could train it the most frequently and there's this weird myth out there that isometric training or training for that kind of stability or hold, the ability to maintain that kind of tension is not a muscle building former training. That is so wrong, it's not even funny. In fact, it is the best muscle building method in the initial short term. That's what studies will show. Now, eventually it falls off very quickly if that's all you do and then the other forms of training are superior. But if I only had to train somebody for three weeks and I wanted to show maximal muscle and strength gain and you gave me beginner more strength than muscle in the first three weeks than anything else, that's what the studies show. Now, for everybody else if you work out and you're fit and you're consistent, if you just inject this kind of training into your routine every two or three months for a couple weeks or you inject this kind of training into your normal routine here and there, you'll get tremendous benefits. There's so many interesting factors to isometric training to get strong 15 degrees on both sides of whatever it is that you're contracting whatever angle you're contracting it's going to carry over 15 degrees on both sides of that strength curve which sounds kind of interesting but you start to understand how that now translates to feeling stronger in different positions that you're holding which a lot of times when you're doing regular lifts like say you're doing it in the max lifting portion there's a little bit of a weak spot somewhere which this will inevitably fill and it will send that signal everything is accounted for stable and strong so you can apply even more or a consistent amount of force to be able to lift more weight and then on top of that too it has an analgesic effect where say there's an instability your body kind of has this natural governing system in it to be able to tighten up and restrict movement and keep you kind of from injuring anything further where if you start like holding a position and trying to increase that range of motion very gradually and you squeeze and you tense you're sending a signal now that it's stable again and so now the pain signal kind of dampers down a lot of people don't know that the pain signal oftentimes isn't necessarily because there's an injury but rather because your body's trying to prevent you from doing a particular a weakness type of movement and this kind of training tells the body it's strong I mean to original comparison or example of construction I just remember for me having to be in really uncomfortable positions unnaturally would I would never be in underneath the house and I'm having to fix something but propping myself with one arm and just holding this position to try and make sure that I can like stop a leak or something in the house and it's like it's just it's a very strange like way of thinking about strength but to be able to hold myself and maintain that position for a good amount of time like required it was exhausting it fully like floored me sometimes there's a viral clip right now going around of a ex-bodybuilder who claims to only do isometric and negative training now no in the clip it's a very short clip but he's talking again like social media it's like extreme right all this other things of waste it lost me on the everything else of waste but obviously like many things that go viral there's some truth to it and he's basically making the case that the eccentric portion the exercise in the isometric portion are the most valuable portions of any exercise and so why waste any time doing all that damage on the other one that has the least amount of return by working on the concentric and so I mean again some truth yeah some truth to that but it just shows you too though how valuable it is you could have somebody who that's all they train and actually build a legit physique from it you're talking about construction did you ever you guys ever do this where you're like with your dad or your uncle or someone as a kid and he's like hey hold this up for me while I you know oh yeah something overhead yeah oh my god they're doing all the work everything's collapsing yeah that's that's that's this type of strength that we're talking about do you find something there Doug? I didn't find it no oh never mind he had a look it's like he was going to say something I mean there is a guy named Richard Monaston but I don't know if he's the one I have no idea but yeah so this kind of training builds muscle it builds tremendous solid stability it is very safe literally pushing against an immovable object means you're not moving so you're not your risk of injury you can back off at any time applies much or as little you know tension as you want and there's different ways to do this it could be as easy as holding a heavy weight above your head for time out at arm's length for time or holding something like a suitcase or a farmer's walk and just holding it for time it could also be pushing against something that won't move as hard as you can or just holding your body in a position for as long as you can or for extended periods that's how you would train this kind of training and if you've never done it before try it and you'll be surprised at how strong you are at other stuff how weak you are at something like this and that just goes to show you the potential benefit that could possibly be there lots of value here yeah that's another thing I want to mention all the ones that we're talking about if you go to the gym tomorrow after listening to this and you test one of them because you're like you know I never trained that way and you find that you're terrible at it that is a huge opportunity huge potential for your body to progress when you find something in the gym if you're advanced and you find something in the gym that you're not good at you just found a way that you could get your body to really progress and grow whether it's an exercise or a rep range or a style of training I actually later on started to figure out to look for these types of things that I sucked at this is what's made me infatuated with moving in and out of different types of modalities because I figured that out and I've been doing this as long as any of us have been doing it it's tough to continue to see these gains that you are chasing through training the same way that you've kind of trained always so finding unique exercises or unique ways to train always creates that novel stimulus and that's where the most amount of especially when you're advanced you're going to get I mean sure it has all kinds of benefits like we said earlier about a beginner there's everybody listening right now could apply one of these three and I guarantee they suck at at least one of them if not two of them for sure I've yet to meet anybody who I think has got all three of these like nailed down that you're really really strong and we tend to neglect one or two of them so I have three examples of bronze era athletes who demonstrated each of these in their strength performances and feats or how they train that are great examples of their max strength maybe Doug you could look up George Hackenschmitt and look up his one arm bent press now he was the one to break Eugene Soundow's record so he was widely known as the strongest at max type of strength this was a by the way if you see a picture of this guy I mean you if you didn't know that they didn't take that steroids didn't exist back then yeah I mean he was also a wrestler and while Doug's pulling up his one arm max bent press you should be able to see a number there something like 270 pounds or something like that let's see now Soundow got up to 271 wow that's crazy I know Hackenschmitt beat that yeah I'm not seeing that offhand I see his overhead press it's a snatch 196 pounds with one arm then Stamina you mentioned Eugene Soundow a lot of people know this Eugene Soundow would often train in the 50 to 60 rep range with dumbbells so he would grab light dumbbells and do sets of 50 to 60 reps and so he would demonstrate this kind of kind of strength stamina in some of his training grit I got someone for you the mighty Adam maybe Doug you could look him up and show maybe look up some of his stuff he was this little like muscular strongman dude kind of crazy kind of fruity hair yeah kind of crazy crazy guy but he would do things like bend like prison bars and like that and demonstrations and horseshoes and he was this little like granite looking kind of dude that just had this crazy hand strength in particular for somehow tall and how much he weighed you I don't know if Doug pulled him up already but his name was Joe Greenstein yeah but they called him mighty Adam the mighty Adam performance like 18.0m yeah so he would pull a train with his teeth stop a plane from taking off with his hair bending iron bars with his bare hands yeah that one I remember which I always love to see that because it's it's one of those you can put context to it and be like oh yeah I've actually tried like you know try to do that take a lot of force that he did he was 5'4 and 140 pounds yeah so the story with him was he weighed 4 pounds at birth this was in 1893 and he had health issues and doctors are like he's not gonna live longer than a couple hours so of course he did survive and then he became this guy that would just do these feats of strength yeah he would break like chain a chain with his teeth oh my god awesome of course he has like a story like that yeah it's really really cool stuff but yeah if everybody by the way there's other attributes of strength we didn't cover like speed strength power that's also important the reason we're not talking about it here is because it requires a lot more skill and right now again we're communicating to the average person yeah these I think these are like the three most basic that no matter what your pursuit is you should find a way to rotate through exactly that's what you talk about right now is what the phasing looks like for something like this and I know there's a lot of different ways that we could program this because you could easily be in a phase or like say I could train strength stamina for a year straight rotating exercises and all these other things and still get the benefits of it but how would you suggest to somebody that's listening that was writing their own program or following their own workout how to incorporate this to get the max two main ways to do this one is to is to incorporate some of each and every workout the other is to focus on one for a few weeks to maybe a couple months and then move to another one I tend to favor focusing on one moving to the next one because each one of these requires such a different mental space completely different focus feel and focus and attitude plus combining them although there's nothing wrong with that at all it's a great way to train as well requires a lot more careful programming and planning I would say people tend to because when you're mixing stamina with max strength with grit you really got to understand workout programming the same workout to know where to place what and how to place the focus but that would be pretty much it and if you spend a little time in each of these you'll get a better body over time then you will if you don't and that's the lesson of today's episode look if you like Mind Pump head over to mindpumpfree.com and check out some of our fitness guides we have guides that can help you with almost any health or fitness goal and they're all free they're free 100% free you can also find all of us on social media Justin is on Instagram at Mind Pump Stefano and Adam is on Instagram at Mind Pump