 Little Mikey Burke! Man, it's kind of cold outside. The road to a big deadlift. My erectors have been erecting for four days straight. I've been so sore, and I've been eating too much food, and it's cold, and I need a haircut, and now the negativity's out. Sometimes you just got to let it out, drop kick it, and now onto the positive. We're getting stronger, although not where I want to be. I'm tightening up my diet. We're going to be in the middle shreds life, so then we can go shreds life in January. De-loading was the start of a new block, so Joe does coach kind of similar to me, where it's not just like a straight up cut everything in half, which is kind of an old school de-load. What we're going to do is start a new wave, and when you start a new wave, you just kind of start a little bit lighter. So we got comp squat threes, two sets of three, and two sets of five, I think. So nothing crazy, but like four fifty-ish, I think, for a triple, then a little drop down, then another drop down instead of five, then just leg accessories. So then we've got Bulgarians, belt squat, and I might catch up for body pump. I was feeling my own boobies the other day. They're feeling a little soft, a little Pillsbury. I think that's it. Then we've got meetings all afternoon. It's time to jam, man. Big things happening, February four and five here, Sacramento, California, Dirstry Barbell, Classic, 210 lifters is going to be an absolute party, so we're going to start organizing some of that. More and more and more clothing launches. Now that the boys and the teams rocking and rolling here at the gym, it allows me to free up, to get a little bit more creative and give you guys a lot more apparel, tell the story a little bit better, continue to drive the culture and the community. That's the number one goal, man. Continue to drive and be driven by culture and community. So let's get the squat workout on. People think that they got to do nothing to rest up for stuff. Sometimes some light movement helps. So old school powerlifting, they would take their heaviest lifts like two weeks out and then do nothing but body build leading up to it, which won your motor pattern for the movement. You can actually detrain in that time. You're not going to get weaker, but you can detrain. In training, obviously, we want a base level of fatigue while we still raise the intensities and allow ourselves to handle more weight. And we'll take away that fatigue and then hopefully that's like the supercompensation of the taper. Take away the fatigue, you're handling heavier weights, so you can handle the heaviest weights out of me. If you're in training or a meet, I would do everything the same. You know, eat the same, sleep the same. Hopefully, if you're taking yourself seriously, you're tracking your food to some extent, your protein and your calories are consistent, your sleep's consistent, your warm-ups consistent. The same thing I would do today, which is like a light day, I would warm up, move around, think, eat, sleep, act the exact same way as if I had a PR today. Now, it's kind of the key to all this is repetition and handling lighter weights the same way you're going to handle heavy weights. I think if you program like perfectly, there's obviously going to be waves. I've said this in the past, I think like the term deload and all that's a little bit overrated because everyone thinks they get a little bit tired or the performance doesn't like skyrocket. They're like, I need a deload. I can't handle this much volume. And then they go and do 10 sets of 10. And then the next week, they're wondering why they're not progressing. We're like, just like progress is kind of irregular, I kind of program that way with like these, I think about it as like a paintbrush. If you all want to get a little nerdy, you guys ever do some water painting and you paint one, it's kind of see-through. So then I'll paint like a little bit more in another wave and it gets a little darker and you just like fade it into itself until we kind of taper into what we're doing. And Joe hasn't given me the master plan, but he gives me an idea what's going on. And I think that's kind of how he works too. So yeah, like today was last week, this very day was a 470 pot squat for three, which is quite heavy. Today it's more just triples comp squat. And then the, you know, so it is like different, but it's not crazy different. I was at 470. Now I'm going to be like 430, 440, right? So it's not like we just cut it in half and cut the volume in half. The volume is around the same. And it's just a different exercise. Yeah, all out singles probably comp style. I think, I think the top pause is off the top of my head, but I think the pause, the heavy day deadlift, it's a pause single and then regular downsets. And the other deadlift days, like six by two at like 480 or something kind of heavy. So, you know, it's just slowly that kind of ramp up, up down, up down, up down. I don't know if that made sense, but yeah, I mean, most coaches know how to manipulate fatigue and that's all we're doing. We're manipulating how we handle fatigue, when to rest, when you need to train under fatigue, and then when you need to be ready to perform your best. Because that's the sport of powerlifting. How do you represent your strength perfectly in nine attempts on a singular day? That's the sport. I know that makes it sound less cool and sexy than, no, I just want to get strong and lift heavy weight. But that's literally the sport representing your best strength in nine attempts on a singular day. And so when you program, you're trying to set it up for that. A little bit backwards, you know, even people's thinkings a little bit backwards where people typically think that a top single fatigues you more, but it actually doesn't. Both CNS and, as long as you're not grinding your tits off, more reps towards failure will get you there. So three, three by ten RPE nine will tire you out way more than a one by three or a three by one at nine. But in terms of accessories, I mean, that's the big difference is we're slowly trying to build muscle here without negatively affecting our performance. So we'll do, you know, a lot of times RPE sevens and eights on our stuff, where if I'm bodybuilding, the load doesn't matter. So you can go RPE eight, nine, ten on this, because you're literally just trying to get stronger slowly over time. But it doesn't matter as much. You just want the stimulus to build the muscle. If this, if I do this, and for some reason next week, I can only do two plates, but I go to a true RPE nine both times, you can still build muscle, right? In powerlifting, you're worried more about the systemic stress, what's happening in the systemic fatigue or your whole body, where here you're looking, bodybuilding, you're looking more in like centralized fatigue or like per muscle group fatigue. I know I promise Twitch streams, they are coming. Twitch.tv slash Salamang with two Ks. Be sure to follow, come hang out, do videos every Monday, Thursday. Appreciate you guys so, so much. The channel's alive and kicking. We're getting to 160,000 subscribers, which I think is an all-time PR. I think before CBS come on, my height was 159, and we're creeping to that. So road to 160K, fuck it, road to 200K. Never been that close. Let's hit it, tell your friends, share this video out. Enjoy the journey with us, man. Culture and community, wheel for me, be a part of something bigger yourself, something like a mountain.