 Welcome to the School of Calisthenics podcast with your hosts, Tim and Jacko. Another week, another podcast and today you are in the illustrious company of Tim and Jacko from the School of Calisthenics podcast because there is no guest, we don't need a guest. We are talking about getting insane gains and I know somebody that's got some insane information to drop for you today in this podcast and that is our good friend aka Tim Bo, but before we just jump into that, something else that's insane or people are a bit unsure about is are we in lockdown, aren't we in lockdown and all that confusion but there's something not to be confused about is the fact that we are still keeping our 50% offer off your first month's membership for the virtual classroom open this whole entire time until there is some clarity on when lockdown has actually finished. I'm just a little bit confused as to how you've snuck insane gains into the intro for the podcast this week, but we're not going to go into too much detail with this one. It's all talked about in the session, we go to quite a little bit of a practical take away on this one is how you can start to stretch your training to get a little bit more fun and get a bit more variety and particularly around some hypertrophy. So if you're looking to build some muscle mass so you can do some more cool stuff this is the podcast episode for you. And it's direct from some of the things that we are currently doing ourselves in our own training. Absolutely. And if you also, we have to say a big thank you to the guys at Red Light Rising for sponsoring the School of Calisthenics podcast, they're absolute legends. You can find out a load of information about the benefits of red light therapy at redlightrising.co.uk. And now, Jaco, shall I tell you a little bit about my red light therapy benefits? Tell them about what you've been feeling consistently using it morning and night. So the biggest thing, and this is not, it doesn't cause a surprise, but you know, sometimes when you try something new, you don't really know how it's going to work or how you're going to feel. So if I, in terms of sleep, if I get my bedtime routine right and I'm not sort of on my phone or working late and then I'm using the red light before bed, there has been a consistent increase in my quality of sleep as a result. Not every night, because sometimes I don't get my bedtime routine right. But noticeably, in some occasions, having deeper and better quality sleep than I have been doing previously. And that's me, N of one, but useful to share these little cases, I reckon. Well, N of two, I can say the exact same thing. The science and all the research that you can find out about on the red light rising website backs up why that is the case. It doesn't affect our circadian rhythm, like the blue light does coming from your phone and computer, that's why it shouldn't be you on your phone and your computer before you go to bed timbo. And yeah, there's a whole host of other benefits in terms of recovery and all sorts. So if you are interested in joining us in getting involved with some red light therapy, they've got a 5% offer off any of their red light rising products on their website. So that is using code SOC5 code SOC5 to get 5% off at redlightrising.co.uk. The link is in the show notes for this episode. I can also confirm that red lights are extremely popular with three year olds. Jack loves the red light. This is a party. Mrs. Jackal even likes it. Cracky. I've never found anything before actually, like, exactly. It must be good. Right, let's get into some talk, some chat about volume and some exciting things about programming variables. Roll the jingle. All right, Jackal, are you sitting comfortably? I'm actually, I've got a standing desk, Tim, but yeah, I'm comfy. I am also standing comfortably. Let's begin talking about volume in a training program. Yes, please. Can we talk a bit? Do you want to talk? Can we set the scene a little bit of round what we've been doing or what you've been doing and what that looks like in terms of training at home? Please do. Recently, yeah. Well, OK, I'll just from... You go first. We, I think just naturally the way lockdown has been and what training at home has looked at, I don't know what you're... I haven't really asked you specifically, you're taking it, but I definitely took a case of, well, I had a shoulder problem. A potentially long, I had a little, an ultrasound for me and Horsley on it. And he was like rummaging around in the shoulder that it was, you know, the male classic rugby shoulder that I dislocated and broke the shoulder blade and what not. And he was like, oh, yeah, I can see there's a few tears in here. And there was like labrum and then there was like, but he reckoned that there was it found something in sub-scap and like a little small tear. So I knew I needed to like chill out a little bit. And when I got back into sort of lockdown seemed to happen a couple of weeks after that. And I'd just been like resting up a bit, not doing too much. And then just starting back with some like easy volume stuff and just trying to do a little bit more of that. And then we had Andrew Tracy on the podcast. And whenever we have someone on the podcast that sort of like inspires me and gets me excited, I like to try out what they what they were doing. It was like when we had Ross Edgley on the podcast way back when he made me feel like just by talking to him, he made me feel like I could be a superhuman like him and just do like insane training. And I tried for like two days in a row and then I was like dead. But with Andrew Tracy, his idea of like something he said, something is better than nothing. And I had these like five minute, 10 minute, 20 minute workouts that you could just do what he was doing. He'd just do them anywhere in a in a car park or whatever. But thinking, yeah, I could do that home. And and you mentioned it when you said sort of at the end of a day, when you don't feel like training, but if you say to yourself, I'll just do 15 minutes, just do like or just do 10 sets of minute on and and you just you just go, yeah, you know, I could do that, actually. And then you just keep pick a couple of simple exercises. Just so all I started doing was just super setting a couple of different exercises, like on the minutes, some some sort of E-mom style ones like that. And actually just really, really, really enjoyed them recently and helping with conditioning, but also just enjoyment of training. Not to think too much about your training. And then when I've gone back recently to just like a couple of sessions of like trying some harder stuff, I've just laid a bit of a better foundation, I think, of that sort of strength and bodies feeling good for it. Nice. My kind of story around getting into a bit more of this is this is my first scientific term that I'm going to drop today, Jaco, is all around mojo. So I've had my mojo it is. Yeah, you can look it up. My mojo, which can be defined as one's desire to want to train has been fairly low during lockdown because of just a number of things which life is busy and there's a lot going on and getting to the end of the day and just being pretty shattered. So I kind of started just reviewing what I wanted to be training, how I was going to get my mojo back. And I was coming into a session, not really feeling like I wanted to do stuff which was difficult and like sort of task focused in terms of a specific outcome. And I just wanted to train and I wanted to play around with something a little bit different. And the other thing is like lockdown and training at home actually lends it quite self quite well when you want to just get some work done and put some reps in the bank of like focusing on what we would normally term capacity strength because you can use quite simple movements. You can use you can keep it. You don't need lots of kit to be able to do it and you can get really significant gains and just from a sort of a. Did you say games? Yeah, but I'm not insane games. OK, it comes down to a bit of like some high purge of the adaptations. So it's starting for me is starting to do a little bit more work, which is going to build some muscle mass because bigger muscles produce more force. And obviously in kind of sense, we talk about this a lot that we don't necessarily want to increase a huge amount of body mass in terms of weight. But there's going to be a trade off in terms of being able to produce more force as a result of having more contractile elements in a muscle and therefore be able to do more cool stuff. So I started playing around with some some different reps and set variables I use in training programs over the years, mixing it up and just challenging myself in a different way around volume, like German volume training, 10 sets of 10 on pipe push-ups, feet and hands elevators. Like I haven't gotten into that. I haven't got into that. Sorry for 30 for years and then starting to just explore for my own sort of like accountability around rest periods and tempo, particularly of those acute variables of reps, sets, intensity, tempo and rest. Because I've kind of had a niggle for a while that I don't think I am disciplined enough when I train. I don't think a lot of people are disciplined enough when they train around tempo specifically. And it's such a big driver in adaptation, particularly in hypertrophy. And I wanted to kind of put myself through the middle a little bit and see if I could be a little bit stricter with myself and what it feels like to do that kind of volume with that kind of discipline. Yeah. You know, sorry, I was going to ask you. You were going to say, Nick, how was your shoulder bent? Good. It's had some ups and downs in terms of like niggles back. It was like Christmas, it was like January, wasn't it? Yeah, it probably wasn't good until the start of lockdown and then I didn't train again very consistently. So it got some additional rest. But off the back of that, being a little bit more conscious, I did a lot of rehab type work on it. And then I haven't actually, if I'm being perfectly honest, done a lot of rehab on it since lockdown started, but I've been putting a ridiculous amount of volume through it compared to what I've done previously and it's holding up really well. But like good volume, not just like thrashing it down. And I guess I'm asking like live now on the podcast with the genuine question because you haven't mentioned it. Like I haven't heard you mention it for, yeah, like it's a big in a lot of ways. So maybe seven weeks or more. So when someone's not talking about something hurting, you tend to think that it's obviously doing all right. Yeah, it's doing well. And I think the other thing is that some of the stuff I talked about on Instagram with it is that manipulating the reps and sets, rest periods, tempos and whatever intensity to make sure that I continue to move well. So if I'm much more conscious now and I've identified a couple of key positions where I was not helping my shoulder. And this is partly because I've got a little bit too much range and positions. And I'm doing like overhead pressing work, for example, like a pipe push-up. Have a tendency to slam it into that end position. And it doesn't like, you know, someone likes to give an example so people can visualize it. If people do a snatch, lots of people will just throw a bar overhead and their shoulder just stops at that end range of movement. They just like a bit, it just like a hip to bumper and they just go, boom, caught my snatch. For me with my shoulders, what happens is my hand goes too far over the back of my head and the bar then passes my crown of my head and therefore I'm kind of like over flexed and then the bar of the weight behind me. So that's why I kind of stopped snatching a number of years ago. If I do the same thing in a pipe push-up position, for example, I've got too much range so I can actually slam into end range further than where I need to go. And I think that's just kind of compressing some tissues. My scap was like scapulae, human rhythm wasn't great. So now I've identified what the problem was. I've reintegrated it, did some corrective work and now I've put it back into movement patterns but I'm much more conscious about moving well and I'm manipulating the intensity of my session to make sure I can prioritize that rather than just absolutely spanking myself, falling apart, getting sweaty and having done a ton of work but move like toilet. A lot of the session. There'll be a lot of people listening now and it's not now is not to go into it for the podcast. So we go, hold on, hold on, I'm backtracking him, backtracking him. What did you do? What was the corrective strategy and how have you integrated it back in? But that's another podcast and that's a whole other rehabilitation program. People like shut up and tell me how to get massive. Well, but I think all the people that are currently injured right now are also going, well, hold on a minute, what was the intervention? What was the corrective strategy? Yeah, I had a little bit of help. I've got to give Gemma a shout out and give you some stuff to do. But you know, feeling pretty good. It still niggles a little bit and I need to do a little bit more mobility on it but I can generally get through some pretty disgusting volume in a session and hold up without giving me any pain at all. So that's a massive win. Not hurting, it's not getting worse. That's kind of the approach I'm taking to it. Right, but let's talk about this volume then. What's kick us off? Right, so my adaptation and maybe a little bit different to yours and I specifically was interested in playing around with a high perch of the adaptation. So my objective is to increase the amount of lean muscle mass or contractile muscle mass that I've got which let's move away from a bodybuilding terminology. I'm not necessarily trying to get bigger but I just want to have a little bit more capacity at my disposal to be able to produce some force. So generally what happens around that, if you look at the research in science there's three sort of proposed, maybe a fourth one these days based on where current people's ideas and thoughts are. Method or mechanisms as to how we can improve muscle mass or how we can elicit hypertrophy. So I don't really want to get bogged down in the detail of those today but just so that people are on the same page, they are mechanical tension, metabolic stress and exercise-induced muscle damage. Those are kind of three mechanisms. One thing that's kind of, we just need to bear in mind above all of that and this is where some of the reps and set variations that we've been using are fitting together is that volume is a number one driver. We need to be able to do more work which is going to be the key thing which is going to help us to get an increase in muscle mass. So you get bogged down in the reps and sets, people are like, I could do three sets of 10 for hypertrophy or four sets of eight. Well, the research actually is sort of steering away from that a little bit because it's sort of, it's suggesting and the current thinking is you can get hypertrophy using weights that are 50% of your one repetition max which puts you into a category of around 15 to 20 repetitions. Whereas people would normally go, are you not going to build muscle mass with 20 reps? Well, the research is now suggesting that you can. Yeah. I'll have to pause there, Jack. In case you have any comment on that, that shmuel. No, I saw something actually the other day where there was, it was, and it ties in with your, you know, that you've quoted before that like one set of intensity, you can maintain strength for X number of weeks, whatever it is. But it was research saying that like one set of intensity can actually, I think it was like one set of intensity two, three times a week with illicit like strength gains. It was just, it's not to do with hypertrophy, it was just to do with like research showing that actually like the more people are doing like research projects into these things that they're actually finding out stuff that's a little bit potentially counter cultural to the old school ways of bodybuilding. Yeah. And I think that's what's interesting is we don't necessarily know what the underlying mechanism is. Exactly. We've got some good ideas from- Lots of things work, don't they? Like because not being funny, like whatever Arnold Schwarzenegger did, that worked, didn't it? And that's, I saw one paper, or one sort of commentary on a paper where they were suggesting that they can take a bit more of a shotgun approach to more type of hypertrophy because we're not 100% sure. Like those three mechanisms are three that have been proposed recently. Another group of researchers are suggesting that it's more about motor unit recruitment or activation. So we need to train to momentarily failure or muscle failure so that we can kind of create full activation of all the motor unit recruitment in a muscle and that would lend itself more towards lifting heavier loads where we're going to obviously recruit more of the muscle in terms of it's contractile elements or it's the motor units. So the way that I look at that is going, well, okay, there's a number of different mechanisms and each one of those you could apply a specific type of training to. We could do things which are focused on mechanical attention or we could do some stuff which is going to be more around exercise-induced muscle damage but the reality is if across a course of a week as I said before, the number one variable is volume and I want to dive into some stats on that in a second but ultimately like as you said there's a number of different things working so let's kind of build them all in. There's enough time in a week to get lots of different kind of stimuluses going to which are all going to contribute towards hypertrophy and the one thing which we've talked about quite a bit before is you still don't get away from the fact that if you want to get strong you need to lift heavier weights. So we might be able to get some hypertrophy of using 15 to 20 reps but that's probably going to be more like endurance type muscle fibers like your type one fibers. Those are useful for endurance but they're not going to really help you massively in terms of or play a hugely significant role in producing peak forces. So if you want to go and do a muscle up having loads of type one fibers is not going to be as good as having more type two fibers. Yeah, yeah. And just before you dive into then the detail of those like talking about the mechanisms a little bit more on those volumes. Just to emphasise a point because it ties in nicely from what you said before about your shoulder and moving better that whatever someone, when we're listening to this now and however you're going to sort of digest this you cannot get away from the fact of the simple fact that as you said volume is one of the key parameters and therefore what you can manage in a week what you find interesting and what you are consistent with that is going to be massively more important whether you've worked out whether you're doing what percentage of your work is going to be metabolic stress or whether it's going to be tension or whatever it may be. And the other thing would be the quality of the movement that you do is going to be reflected upon the your movement preparation beforehand and how you move when you're pushing yourself that's going to play a massive factor on how well you're going to progress and you're going to develop through like don't listen to this and sort of don't forget to do the simple things, the basics getting those right, getting good volume and being consistent with your training and making sure that you're prepping well for those sessions and moving with good high quality because if you're not doing those things but getting like the fancy science bit right you've got it the wrong way around is that fair to say Tim? Yeah, 100% and I think like we can get into we'll give you some reps and we'll talk through some of the ranges and variables that we've been working towards as we get through the podcast but I think let's lay the scene out so you know you've got some context as to what kind of things they might sort of fall into and we'll try and map all this together so you've got some real takeaways from this conversation but the other reason that I think is useful for me and I think you and I differ quite a little bit on this one and you might differ or you might beg to differ when I've done hypertrophy training in the past I've stuck to quite rigid variables so I've kind of gone down the route of going eight reps, four sets and I might do three or 10 reps, three sets and I'm going to run those for a period of weeks I might repeat them and stick within these kind of what originally were fairly well-defined variables maybe like six reps, five sets and a three to sort of three sets attempt like and you can range and play around in those and I would have kind of previously described myself as a let's say a non-responder or a low responder in terms of hypertrophy I find it difficult to get big and partly because I've got a lot I've got a light frame, I'm not a big guy my bone mass is not huge and there's some research which suggests around the amount of muscle building potential that you've got is directly proportional to the amount of bone mass that you've got because there's a small frame having a ton of muscle on it, it doesn't make any sense because the bones aren't designed to handle that kind of force production so I've kind of hit my upper limits before and I found some research which was suggesting that volume is a real, couldn't be a breakthrough component for people who historically have been non-responders to a training stimulus and they found it originally in endurance protocols where just by doing more they found they got a better or ramping volume for the non-responders but they meant they got a better outcome and they started to suggest that might be something in hypertrophy as well so me doing three, bang my mic, sorry three sets of 10 versus me doing 10 sets of 10 that's a massive change in volume and it could kind of break me out of this non-responder or low responder type adaptation what are your thoughts on that Jackie? I think you're probably a better responder to resistance training than me in terms of strength and size Well, I don't know, I as a kid was like the skinniest guy in the world I mean I weighed 10 and a half stone when I played my first game professional rugby which is nothing, did a backwards rollie-pollie trying to tackle somebody and then in terms of my experience of hypertrophy I've not really done hypertrophy training to that degree we didn't ever do that when I was playing rugby it was all sort of strength and power stuff and then I probably don't find it as exciting post like since doing calisthenics there's a certain level of like hypertrophy just because of some of the rep ranges work but I've never really committed to a proper block of like right I'm gonna do that, I don't think I mean I had once where I broke my foot and put on about 15 kilos of eating a lot that was a big thing for hypertrophy and just did upper body weights for rugby but we were doing a lot of like you say high tension stuff and high volume it was a lot of like drop sets and eccentrics and I got massively strong and also massive people were like, you look like you've eaten do you want to say where's Jack, have you eaten him? but then I lost all that weight and that was a good project and came back lighter sorry it's a bit off to us So the research is suggesting that there's a dose response relationship which means that effectively open to the point and we don't really know whether upper kind of threshold of that is yet but the more we do from a set sort of volume perspective the more hypertrophy or muscle development that we can expect and that's obviously not gonna be infinite so don't go and start just doing 100 sets and thinking that it's a linear progression it's gonna flatten out but just I've got some different so a number of different research papers so these are not all from the same paper but just some stats to throw out so an increase in hypertrophy from five sets compared to three sets compared to one so if we take the biceps and often they'll do things on isolated muscle isolated muscle action so if you do one set they got a 1.6% increase in hypertrophy or muscle mass three sets was 4.7% and five sets was 6.9% so significantly greater which makes a lot of sense to which you go right okay that sounds kind of fairly logical in terms of what we know the gains in the bicep were not as big as what we saw in the quadriceps for example so respectively again it was 5% improvement at one set, 7.9% at three sets and then 13.7% at five sets so the more sets we're doing the more muscle we're building right so volume is obviously a direct relationship with that now the interesting one is when you start to get more than 10 sets and the 10 sets is taken across per muscle group over the course of a week so it's not saying we've got to do 10 sets of an exercise every time we train they're sort of suggesting that there might be 10 to 20 sets is a good place to start across the course of a week and focused on per muscle group now we're always going to be in calisthenics we're using compound movements which is basically a multi joint pattern which is going to incorporate a lot of different muscle we're not really interested in bicep curls as an individual muscle because it's not going to help us a huge amount in terms of doing some of the stuff we want to do if you've got an ascetic goal it's a different conversation but let's keep it within the realms of trying to do some new stuff and moving in different ways when we get a comparison of doing 10 sets per week they showed a 9.8% improvement in hypertrophy that was compared to doing five to nine sets per week which gave us 6.6% improvement in hypertrophy so evidently an improvement over having that increased dose and from just a bigger comparison 10 plus sets versus five sets was a 9.8% improvement at that 10 plus and a 5.4% at that five plus so if you go back to your old kind of like bodybuilding training session where you go right I'm going to do Monday is chest day I'm not going to do chest again until next Monday which obviously never happens I'm not going to do chest again on Wednesday because chest we can actually by training more volume through a week potentially double the amount of muscle hypertrophy that we can get as a result of hitting sets those muscle groups on a more regular basis Yeah I remember you talking we were talking about that with Fran on I don't remember the podcast off the top of my head but I manage using bodybuilding and calisthenics and actually hitting those muscle groups again that's why he was a big advocate of like full body full body training as a bodybuilder rather than the traditional sort of split as you were talking about And I think it's interesting because like if we look at a very practical example like everyone looks at crossfit and goes no crossfit is it jacked? They're like why? Well they do a lot of work and within their training week they're going to have a certain amount of these three different areas of the mechanisms of hypertrophy so they're going to have some mechanical tension they're going to be lifting heavy loads that's going to be one thing which is going to start to increase muscle hypertrophy the metabolic stress because they do a lot at threshold in those condition type workouts and they are strength based so that's going to do something the exercise induced muscle damage is predominantly where we're going to bring in eccentric contractions they don't do a huge amount of that but they're kind of hitting quite a lot of those different mechanisms and they're also training a huge amount of volume so as you said right at the beginning Jack there's multiple things happening at the same time so it's not to try and move one of those out and go that's what I want to do we actually probably need to create an environment where we're hitting all of them and how that applies into calisthenics is obviously different to crossfit but you can kind of see cases in point as to where people are starting to build bigger mass or bigger muscle mass It's a good example actually because you go in they're not the crossfit they're trying to the same thing as in calisthen they're trying to achieve something they'll have like a they're trying to do a muscle up or they're trying to do a handstand walk or they're trying to lift a certain weight so many times or whatever it may be and they're hitting all those things as a result of having some sort of training goal effectively rather than going right today's session I'm going to do muscle tension even though you might have an idea you might talk about like using it like prolonged eccentrics on some of your volume stuff to make that happen but that for me is a I personally just can get motivated and excited about a session when it's based on like an outcome rather than a I almost let the science happen by having an outcome to your training if that makes sense Yeah, yeah and there's so many different ways you can mix this up and that's where there's nothing wrong like you can do three sets of 10 but you probably want to do those three sets of 10 more than once a week so you have to hit those 10 to 20 sets on that muscle group say you're doing bench press for example in a more kind of traditional training sense or a bodybuilding type sense we probably want to be hitting bench maybe three or four times a week to get that attention we might be doing flies and inclines and that sort of stuff and obviously that variety is important and we've been doing the same thing from a kind of science perspective of what positions I'm doing my push-ups in am I doing like a flat kind of normal standard push-up if I've got my hands on parallettes if I've got my feet elevated is it more like a pike push-up we're starting to hit these different angles but we're just applying the variables within that which means that we can start to create these adaptations yeah give us some, have you got, have you got some jump into some examples reps and sets yeah so some of the stuff bring it to life bring it to life so with all that said like I've probably been mixing this up without too much kind of structure but more times on what time have I got available what do I fancy doing and that's the beauty isn't it with some of these so the how fast you can get some of those sessions done with, I'm sure you're going to share some of those examples but they're not a lot they don't have to be long sessions that's the beauty of it yeah and definitely like you can get away with doing like yesterday I did one which was just a pull-up ladder and it took me half an hour because of that you choose the rest periods and stuff and I can chat a bit about rest because there is a bit of some research around that which suggests how we can maximise it but again it's kind of down to personal preference on what you want to do but let's try and start if we start talking around we talk about clusters quite a bit recently using clusters because they're a really effective way to get volume in but you can also get intensity in and what's important about this is to understand that volume and intensity have got an inverse relationship you can't have high volume lots of reps and high intensity at the same time and it's important that we understand what we mean by intensity that's not like metabolic conditioning and tired intensity that was a real like for the lung buster we're talking about intensity in relation to percentage of repetition max so let's take out your one repetition max is the most amount of weight you can lift for one repetition so for example in calisthenics that could be if you can do one pull-up your body weight is your one RM if you can do one pull-up with 10 kilos around your weight say take my weight of around 75 kilos if I can do that one rep with 10 kilos my one RM is 85 kilos and then we scale that based on the number of repetitions we want to do so if you're going to do 10 repetitions and you can go and look if you search around repetition max charts you'll find how they kind of stretch these out and it's again based on some good and established literature and science that roughly around 10 repetitions if you perform most of pretty much failure or you can, let's move away from that you can complete the 10 repetitions but 11 was going to be a push it's going to be pretty much your 70% repetition max if you want to go and do 8 repetitions that's pretty much going to be your 80% repetition max and we can get quite prescriptive with trading loads but we don't necessarily need to worry about that at this instance with what we're talking about with the volume because it kind of takes care of itself apart from one of the examples which was a cluster approach where you're actually going to try and choose a repetition max variable so we're going to try and go say I want to do 8 reps I want to try and do 9 reps at my 8 rep max and that sounds a bit like confusing because I just said you've got to do 8 reps and no more but what we do with the cluster is we're just building into set rest periods so I'm going to go take my 9 reps and I'm going to try and I'm going to use a weight which I can do 8 repetitions of sorry I'm going to go back and pedal on this one so my first thing to do is I'm going to test let's take dips how much weight can I put around my waist and do 8 dips so let's say that's 20 kilos and then I'm going to go and take 20 kilos and I'm going to go and do 5 reps I'm going to take a 10 second rest and then I'm going to do 2 more reps and take a 10 second rest so I've got 7 now another 10 second rest 2 more that gives me 9 so all of a sudden I've taken an extra rep on that I wouldn't have normally been able to do if I did 8 reps in 1 sitting and I've managed to maintain a decent level of intensity so it's almost like I've bagged myself an extra 3 rep at a good level of intensity which is going to start to elicit that hypertrophy adaptation does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, and it's Yeah, yeah, and it's it makes me just think of that that progressive overload that Pete, but we've had what's the, I'm going to forget his name now P2 coach Phil Lerner, yeah he really hammered that home in a really beautiful way of going out applying that to every aspect of life effectively but they're in training going and this resonates with me because it's something that I've tried to probably do poorly in the past is like try and take like 2 bigger jumps rather than going like do you know what I've just got this attitude of like I was able to do 1 more rep it's like well let's try and do 2 more rather than no no like in a week's time or a couple of weeks time add that additional one but that's one of the things I like about this plus is you're just nudging just 1 rep and it's like it's a good level of of progressive overload just in that small little set effectively let alone what's going to happen week by week and within that if we go back to our hypertrophy adaptations and let's talk broadly about those 3 mechanisms that we talked about before we're going to get some mechanical attention there and if we build in the eccentric as well we're going to get some of that exercise induced muscle damage as well so I've been really strict with going I'm going to do these on a 4 second eccentric and it's like this tempo breaks you like it is that I refer to it as a silent assassin of the variables because no one pays enough attention to it and it will be the one thing which buries you if you think you're good at lifting or training you don't focus on trying to do tempos properly down to a 2 second eccentric or a 4 second eccentric I promise you you can feel like you're a complete beginner again by just doing that one thing so if people at home are locked down and go I can't train properly I've got no weights I can't overload just do tempo and it will bury you mate we used to have like our old coach you know we had Joe Brun on the on the podcast a while ago pre-season was always the same like starting point of like bedding that foundation in and particularly when like new player signed and no one was used to doing it he made you do you only had to do sets of 4 reps but it was a 5 second eccentric and a 5 second concentric so it was just a constant moving rep so you worked for 40 seconds without stopping and it was flipping brutal and what those 4 reps equated effectively to what you could do for 10 if you were allowed to go at your own pace like it just you know not only was that I did that had the concentration as well but it was it's a like you say it's an app it just it buries you one thing that is one thing I like about a slow controlled eccentric this is not hypertrophy sort of gains but is the fact that allows you to be super mindful and like conscious of your movement and making sure that it's is really high quality and you are keeping your shoulders in good positions and that type of stuff it does lend itself to that well Tim and Ferris wrote a book about using that tactic which was a 4 hour body which was basically that 5 second up 5 second down because some of the science around hypertrophy was that you needed to get 40 seconds of time and attention for a muscle to grow and again that's been something kind of like challenges it 30 seconds or 60 percent seconds it doesn't really matter there isn't a magic bullet in that one what we know is that by increasing the time on attention is going to create at a high enough intensity or an appropriate intensity is going to create some form of hypertrophy so we need to have those eccentric contractions in there and it will lend itself towards the increased the muscle damage type mechanism of extending that eccentric but I've really actually statistically quite enjoyed it because it's so well yeah it's just it's very satisfying it's the best satisfying bump it's not even the pump it's almost just like I find the satisfaction in that I am training properly yeah it feels like with this sort of stuff for the first time maybe in my life I have played around with it before but for a long time where I feel a particularly round capacity strength that I'm not just allowing gravity to do the work just sort of aimlessly busting reps out the other thing is people a lot of you know handstand push-ups or the frog to handstand obviously a very popular movement that people want to get I always say that you need to be able to move slowly have strength moving slowly because you can't move quick enough and handstand push-up in the frog to handstand because you lose your balance so actually having this as part of as an element to your your training or one of the one of the bits of your your sort of training diet is it's going to be helpful for that because it's it's it's different when you have to move slowly the strength requirement with that strength-based cluster like I'm probably looking just for people's reference to answer all the questions you've obviously defined your intensity by establishing what your repetition max is before you begin the first set you've got your reps and sets and again if we're going to try and pack some volume in for the amount of work we're going to try and do like I'm kind of doing on these on those kind of sets at the moment I'm doing like five five sets of those but you could get away with less if you're going to just repeat them number of times during the week and then this comes down to as Jack had made the point before of how you can recover is really important and before we get carried away and you guys switch off and run out and start doing a ton of volume we are going to talk about periodization before we close this podcast out and how we're going to deload because you cannot get away with just absolutely spanking this week to week out but five is a five is a good average is a good middle ground number for people like one less would obviously be four you're way be like you wouldn't probably go much more than like would you go much more than six I think you've probably had enough you probably find that you're going to lose quality I think it's as well like I would often I am often allowing the intensity to govern how much work I think I can do so if I get to my fourth set and I've rather than got a decision to make is that enough for that muscle or movement pattern for that day or am I going to make a change because I can't continue to move well which could be dropping the weight down to be honest I'm probably going to come back at it and do another day potentially and I'd probably go about at least two and a half minutes between sets on those two minutes, two and a half minutes the rest period research is suggesting that with the upper body you can get away with a bit less lower body needs more but so sure to rest periods on the upper body but again I'm sort of thinking that I need at least 60 seconds and again depends on which literature you look at up to around two minutes and if I'm really kind of like if you're going hard if intensity is high say you're trying to do this technique with like a six RM and you've got a real that means you're using like a real high intensity load or much higher than you might want to go for a slightly longer rest up to about three minutes but there is again no magic bullet and I've been kind of manipulating rest periods to allow me to continue to maintain tempo and intensity because if my rest is short one of those is going to have to compromise as a result you can't have it all all the time yeah so that rest is almost related to that intensity that you're talking about of one RM that if you're lower down towards you sort of five six reps to more more towards your max strength then you need to have sort of more max strength rest periods and if you go in higher then you can afford to have more like you sort of 60 90 seconds rest because there's no point being dead like rigid on your rest and then rocking up and not being able to finish a set of intensity like you just you cut your nose off to spite your face and so that's one of the only one I've been I enjoy which is kind of works is quite a nice finish you're actually this one works quite well with quite simple movements and so I use a lot on horizontal push and pull so push ups and rows four reps 10 sets with a 10 second rest in between so you're basically just going to go four reps again with these ones I've been building in the eccentric of about four seconds as well which makes the challenge a whole lot more difficult and then you'd say you literally sit on the ground I'll put your knees down and do a 10 second rest and then you're going to go again and you're just going to repeat that 10 times so you do 40 reps in what is probably going to take you about four four and a half minutes depending on what your tempo is are you going to use and you just that's one of the points made before Jack was like if you do that you've put 10 sets in if you've done it a decent intensity from and you've controlled your tempo that'll take you four and a half minutes and you've just done a great little bit of stimulus for whatever pattern you're working on it doesn't need to be a 90 minute session say you do that on a push and then a pull you've done a 10 minute session because you had a minute rest in between those two things and you're like boom, shanker, you're away yeah, yeah exactly half an hour in warm up do both of those like kind of have a drink and whatever and it doesn't need to be that long and that probably lends itself more towards like yes we're going to get some exercise induced muscle damage because we're going to control the eccentric but you're going to be doing more around metabolic stress in that because the intensity is going to be less because the rest period is lower and therefore you are just going to be starting to build up these like the metabolic with the waste products and we're doing some there's some occlusion happening and basically getting some cell swelling within that we don't want to get into mechanisms that today but effectively we are creating an adaptation which can lead to an anabolic effect on the muscle as a result of having this kind of like this hydrogen ion build up and etc which is just going to yeah that's what feels a bit grotty and it's what that tends to make people feel like that that metabolic stress is what often people would refer to as the pump and you finish those sessions you just feel flipping muscles are swollen and because that's the kind of adaptation we've got as opposed to doing a more strength based workout where you might come away from it not feeling as pumped up but you haven't you've been doing more kind of like mechanical attention to work yeah I think the nice thing I think of those types of sessions are like they're a great tool to have in your toolbox to go I'm not feeling like I'm not feeling that great today I'm choosing I could just have a rest day but I'm choosing to do because I want to do something for whatever reason but actually that's going to be a quite simple one for me to like just cram in a decent amount of work with intensity but a short amount of time and feeling feeling good about it because I've achieved something at the end of it and or it could be I know for me I like to try and do like at the beginning of the week my sort of harder stuff and then by the end of the week I need some easier type of sessions and actually you know you're going to talk about periodization but a little bit of like angulation like during the week of like a session like that is is good for me when it when I want to you know I want to I want to do a bit of a push pull session but I don't want to actually hammer myself because what I'm planning on in three days time is like a really good handstand or muscle obsession or something so on some work but I don't want to like go hard out because I'm actually planning on doing quite a a harder sort of higher intensity in terms of like more of a max strength power type sessions say with handstand push-ups or muscle ups and I don't want to jeopardize that for later in the or the following week or that do you know what I mean towards towards the end of the week I want a little bit of an easier session so I think it fits in well there yeah and we can kind of contrast that like large giant set if you want to call that in terms of the number of sets that we're going to do we've talked about 10 sets with that example with what German volume training would traditionally be would be the same thing 10 reps, 10 sets again for the sadists in there we try and put in a four second eccentric if we can but honestly depending on how conditioned you are for that kind of volume with the intensities that we're aiming at that that eccentric is brutal and we would probably within that we'd be then falling within or reverting more to the traditional volumes of reps that we've been using historically from a literature perspective of six to ten potentially and we might choose one of those and we might go right I'm going to do eight reps ten sets and that's what I did the other week if anyone's seen it on Instagram which was around elevated hands and feet pipe push-ups four second eccentric eight reps ten sets that's and it was like I didn't I didn't think I was going to be able to do it I'd done eight the week before I'd done eight reps for eight and I'm going to go ten for ten so it's 20 more reps I need to do and and got them out and that's where you go right my shoulder didn't hurt through any of that I'm like okay so now we actually doing something I couldn't lift my arms up afterwards that good advice felt epic remember when I was like when we first started going to the gym when I was like 16 we were made from school and it was like it was a great session when you like really were struggling to hold onto the steering wheel to drive home because you were that arms like bombs you couldn't lift them up we used to do one way if you've been doing biceps you couldn't go home and so you literally couldn't like flex your elbow and then touch your own shoulder you know that feeling where your bicep is so swollen that you can't actually bend your elbow and touch shoulders that was the home time so that's like a bit of a mindset session as well getting in amongst that is a bit of an interesting one and again like these are I want to do German volume training so I've got to do ten sets you haven't just like as we talked about today the volume is the key driver so if you want to start playing around with someone who's six sets then that's cool just try and get that in twice a week and you're going to start to hit those volumes that we're talking about of more than ten sets per muscle group per week and also throw it all again in the mix as well as if you go and do something on pull-ups and then you're also doing a horizontal pull session during the week on body weight rows well that's a working both of those just slightly differently but it's not like it's they're different muscle groups they're both of both the trapezius and the lats are going to be working within both those patterns so they are both getting stimulated just in different variations and then that's helping because it's going to build hypertrophy across the muscle through a different range of movement which is going to build up to something again a little bit more substantial from the adaptation we're looking for so you can kind of mix it up and don't get pigeonholed or like rigid on one thing bring the variety play around with some of this stuff and I made a point and I know you'll have something to say about this one, Jaco, around tracking training like this sort of volume when you're doing it it's so important because you're doing so much it's so easy to forget what you've done Yeah, no I think that's something I was thinking about this in Michelle this morning when I knew we were going to be doing this podcast it's something that I've been slack at in the past and got no excuse because I've got a number of different schoolcasts and it's diet training diaries on the go that keep various different notes in but I've got one that is there well, I started tracking stuff better because I was initially actually tracking things not to do with training I was tracking what I was eating and what my digestive system was working out I was tracking heart-waking heart rate and a few of the things purely based on like I was trying to make some health changes for the sort of crude lockdown situation and actually that has then led into then while I started to record in my training a bit more specifically and like you said when you're doing some stuff like this for me one of the biggest things is I did a session the other day and I was buzzing off the back of it because I'd done I'd done sort of like a bit of a giant set on a bit of a pyramid on pull-ups but I'd done like a significant or I'd done a great amount like more than I'd done the week before and I just felt great because I'd done more than I'd done the week before and I was reflecting afterwards and only because I'd written if I'd have not written it down and like when I sat down and wrote down like this is what I did this session and looked at it compared to the last like I knew in black and white there in front of me and it gave me that extra feeling of like I knew I'd already I knew I knew without looking at the numbers that I'd done better but it just had a different effect on me and when I was reflecting back I thought if I'd have never written this down what I'd have done in the past was I'd have been like yeah that session was alright yeah but and like because I wouldn't actually like have that greater gauge of like exactly what I'd done in compared to a previous week or a previous month and my thing that I would do is I'd probably downplay the session and be like yeah it's probably didn't actually do that much I probably could have done more than try and do more or whatever just do something else the next day rather than going like no no you like you did a great session there and actually the week before you hadn't touched on those on those bar muscle ups for a whole week and like that's why it was so good because you did a great session and then you didn't mess about with it again you let yourself recover you did your other bits and pieces and then you came back to it fresh so tracking things for me is I sound like an idiot probably saying it because like it's one of those it's like of course but you know we all fall into sort of bad habits and I mentally for a long time really really didn't want to track stuff I just wasn't in the headspace for it and so and so I didn't but I'm now now there and definitely reaping the benefits of it as you say it's that key to that progressive overload if I know what I did last week I know what I've got to do this week and last week I did eight so this week I've got to do ten and then that shows that I'm getting stronger and ramping that stimulus the whole time and the last one that I'll just go through that I've been playing around with and this one's probably like a little bit less scientific but it's quite fun it's just a big old period and it's a where you go 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and then if you want to you can then go 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 back up if you do that whole ladder up and down you get 99 reps in but what I like about it is it's interesting the volume changes you get a little bit more rest as you go through so it's not like doing ten sets of ten on a pull-ups which is going to give you 100 reps if I do the ladder I might still get 99 reps of a pull-up but because I go 10 and it's a bit easier to get 9 and then 8 and then I'll just put them down my sort of 3, 2, 1 region I'm kind of getting a little bit more recovery time which is going to help me to come back up the ladder now the flip side to that because it's never always black and white is if you really wanted to you could actually change your intensity as you got closer down to those ones so you could go let's say for example you go body weight 10 pull-ups by the time you're hitting reps 3 or 2 or 1 you might be putting 5 kilos around your waist or a little bit of additional load to try and get some more stimulus of those strength-based adaptations but that's why I'm enjoying playing around with some of this stuff is because you've always got variables which you can manipulate you can change your rest periods a little bit I can add some load on I'm going to choose to do hot or like all the way down the ladder but not go back up I'm feeling good I'm going to go back up like yes there was an example of that I'd done the live in the morning and I went, I'd trained quite consistently and I thought I felt pretty good when I started but I started doing my pull-ups and I was going to try and do the full ladder up and down and I got down to like rep 6 or set 6 and I was like I've not got it today so I just finished off at 1 because I knew that I was never going to get back up the other way because of too much fatigue in the system so just another little thing to try play around with him and hopefully that's just going to give you a little bit of food for thought for just bringing some volume in getting specific adaptation we're talking kind of large around her hypertrophy but for most people like don't be afraid of thinking that if I start doing this work I'm going to get massive like look at me it's not that easy to get huge like it's just capacity strength at the end of the day and most of us will benefit from having a little bit more lean tissue which is going to help us to move and produce force in the bigger calisthenics patterns that we're working towards Yeah, definitely and that's and I think that's where probably start contrast to anyone when anyone sees the term hypertrophy or thinks we're talking about hypertrophy it gets the tendency to think that it's based on aesthetics where it's actually you know as school rule number I don't know if it's school rule number no school rule number one is don't don't get hurt isn't it that's school two don't get arrested school three is it's more important like it's more important what you can do with your body than how it looks so this is you're doing this as a your rationale for doing this is bigger muscles create more force I'm trying to do something that I need more force capacity or ability to be able to produce more force and therefore that's why I'm trying to generate some some larger muscle that's why I'm trying to elicit a hypertrophy response rather than I just I want to get big and I want to look because I'm insecure about how I look Yeah, the other thing about that though is like we've talked to a lot of science and rationale today but the other thing that's easy for me is it's mindless like I know what I've got to do I can just get into it it's not and I'm typically doing two exercises per session and I might take me an hour because of what I'm doing with tempos and rest periods and prep and whatever but I might just go horizontal push and pull and once I know what the variables I'm going to use, I just crack on with it I haven't got a sort of like it's not technical work and for where I'm at the moment that is just being an absolute lifesaver and helping me to get through training sessions and I'm properly enjoying it but that, yeah and there's no that's like such a place such a vital role in all of this if you you can get all these things right and some of those touched on some of those things right at the beginning going like you know, if you aren't actually being consistent and you're not doing you know, you're not doing the simple things right and getting that volume right the the nitty gritty of the stuff that we've been talking about since then you know, all goes out the window really if you're not if you aren't able to get yourself in the right headspace and if this is allowing you to get in a good headspace with your training and therefore be more consistent then that's going to play a huge role in you getting more results and more more gains or insane gains maybe do you know what I mean? It's true though, right? It is true, yeah, 100% like more training means that we're going to get more adaptation and that probably brings us quite nicely onto the point around loading and or more to the point of deloading and I think the important takeaway message from this is that we've got to be strict or disciplined around how we are going to schedule deload weeks or have periods of time where volume is lower you cannot spank 10, 20 sets of every muscle group doing some of this stuff week in, week out for the next six months and not expect something to blow up because you're doing high tension movements high intensity and a lot of volume through the system so it has to I would only kind of recommend that people start playing around with some of this training and committing to it for a period of months which is what it takes to really kind of get meaningful adaptation not talking about doing it for two weeks if you have already got to the point where you are comfortable taking a deload week Yeah, no you know that you are the guy that finds it difficult to do the deload week Well, you enjoy training but it's like you've got to offset that and understand that you are not going to lose everything that you've done in the space of seven days and you've got to find a way to be able to actually maintain some level of sanity if you struggle with it of what can you do during an off week? Finding some other stuff there must, yeah there's like a ton of stuff and it might be to do with training like it might be more you want to work on some more mobility stuff or some stretch or whatever it may be but it also might be like something you've wanted to like what else have you wanted to do in life and you go I've got this book I bought ages ago that I want to read or I want to do this or I want to do that well like just get prioritized with some of those other things that week Yeah and you can do some maintenance work we've shared with that into our virtual classroom program is every fourth week is a D-load and what we're doing there is just dropping some of the volume out there so we might still use some of the exercises like a pull-up but rather than doing ten sets or doing six sets or five sets or whatever we might just go and do one and what you're doing there is reminding the brain that the intensity or we still need that strength so don't do anything with it just leave it there because I'm still I'm reminding that it's still relevant in my need to move and survive so there is a stretch around those D-load weeks where you don't have to stop training but you've got to drop the volume down to let the net benefit be recovery rather than fatigue Yeah Definitely and just my last point on this one was like as I said a good place to start if you want to start messing around with some of this stuff is aim for sort of ten to twenty sets per week per muscle group but we'll probably take that in calisthenics of being per movement pattern and you're broadly going to put those into horizontal push and pull vertical push and pull and lower body and how you're going to mix those things in together is kind of how you want to stretch your training program throughout the week how long your sessions are going to be how often you want to train all that sort of stuff but with all the ways we kind of say do something, monitor it see how you get on adapt it as you go learn from the process and have some fun with it and just challenge yourself and see like yeah just play around with those reps and those rest periods and tempos and stuff and you're going to find a whole world of training for most people that you've probably not explored before Yeah it's giving yourself options isn't it and as you say try some of these things out see what and ultimately because Tim's suggesting that you find out what works for you but then when you do find out something that works for you it's not that isn't like I'm going to train like this then for the rest of my life then we need to go through these you know a little bit of periods of like changing our training stimulus so that we actually give ourselves sometimes of like higher intensity work sometimes of like you're doing now going like actually some building some muscles so going through a periodization but sort of building some muscle mass that's going to let give me a little bit more force that I'm going to then apply that into some like I'm assuming you're going to then go into some some more max strength stuff to work on some of the things that you want to do in Calisthenics that requires more maximal strength as an output so it's part of a journey rather than this is just alright this is me for the rest of my life because all that happens is the body gets used to the stimulus you're placing upon it and so we need to we need to ultimately like mix things mix things up as I remember guys played all these mix it up keep the body guessing but and it was like a bit of a joke but at the same time there's there is actually some some real lessons to that yeah it depends how big I get because if I get really big then I probably just keep doing this so after all that it is about getting big I don't know you teed that one up it was too easy but now there's definitely going to be some stuff going forwards with this I mean like we'll see where it goes I haven't sort of decided what that looks like in the future but it's I'm having fun with it and I just wanted to share some of that with everybody else and see if they want to get some of this in their programme as well another thing my last point and I will shut up to that I feel like I've talked a lot today sorry is one thing which is making a massive difference for me in terms of accountability on this is having I've got a watch a Garmin tracking watch but it's got a strength-based setting on it which you can get on any stopwatch but it's basically a lap function so I'll put my reps in and as soon as I finish the set click the button to get my lap and then I'm then going to go and use that as my rest period counter and if I set myself a target of a 90 second rest like I'm going at 90 and that has been an absolute game changer for me and again it's like what you said before Jack about right so I've done it so obvious but I've let that slip whereas is that about a minute I don't know actually do you know what it is it's not exactly about five minutes you've just been stood around not doing anything and it just means you get through a lot of work especially when you've got more work more volume to get into a session you've got to be a little bit more efficient yeah no definitely I've done I went to I'll just tee it up for a potential of the one like some of the stuff I've been doing has been a little bit more conditioning based and therefore like timing stuff is like doing stuff on the minute and that type of work or every two minutes or whatever it may be but as you say those times have been go fast by and we'll talk we can talk about that in another this is a part two in another yeah it's we'll call it like conditioning rather than just sort of there's going to be some eliciting some high for trade response but it's a little bit more yeah conditioning based as I said at the beginning more a little bit like what Andrew Tracy was talking about and yeah and we'll talk we can talk about that on on another podcast another episode but similar type similar type of things but just going for a little bit more conditioning work yeah yeah yeah defalitation and that's just again it's understanding how to manipulate your variables so you can get your adaptation that you want it's the key to it all perfect right I'm all out Jaco I've exhausted myself today it's good has anyone made it to the end with this hopefully I don't know I felt like that if I felt like I spoke a bit quick today that was rattling through so I hope you're taking notes well I don't think that's the that's the that's one of the important things that we are yeah taking notes I think one thing I was just going to say before we start off was going you might be in a really good block of work that you're doing right now and we're going oh yes you need to try this and change this and you're like write it down like you have this in your locker of like when you've come to the end of the block of work that you're doing that's working really well for you the moment you're ready for then a change or then then maybe sort of use I'm not I don't want people to get carried away and go like right tomorrow I've got to do a cluster set because Tim that's what Tim was doing and it might be yeah have a good it tomorrow but it might be that you're in a block of work and you're looking for something different or it might be that you're in a block of work you're doing a real great job and this needs to be something you yeah you make a note of it obviously the podcast is up there on the on the on the website you can visit it and re-listen to it anytime you want but if you make a few notes there's key points and then and then use some of those next time that you're looking for some sort of variation to just change that stimulus perfect well said let's do it to wrap it up that's the end yeah right until next time well I just want to make sure everyone gives us a nice review at the end of the end of the year I just realized I said that I was like there's more isn't there if why don't I just yeah I get you if we're going to hold a show let's look at some of those five star reviews a lot of you have been listening we're getting so many people saying they're listening and sharing and we love it like thank you for for listening and you and sharing those on stories those that do that and tagging us in and we love seeing that and glad that everyone is enjoying and getting a lot of value out of the podcast and the guests that we've had on as well and even when we don't have guests like this but not everyone's been and give us a review because if we'd have like thousands of reviews if people would also don't review so get on and give us a little review please shall I do it now Jaco yeah until next time class dismissed so thank you so much again for listening we don't take it lightly that you give up probably an hour of your time to listen to these podcasts so we really do appreciate that we hope you got a lot of value out of it guys and we would if you did we would love you to do a couple of things for us one of them is tell other people and share it if you thought that we were adding some value and also if you want to pop over to iTunes or wherever you listen to this and give us a five-star review we like five stars four stars not as good keep it five are the best five of the best stars please and if you would like to find out more about the School of Calisthenics and see the best of everything that we've got head over to our virtual classroom you can access it from the website at schoolofcalisthenics.com and that is where we've got literally possibly the best Calisthenics resource available anywhere in the world definitely the best one we've done and on that note until next week Class dismissed