 Our first caller is Phoebe from France. Hi, Phoebe. How can we help you? Hello. Hello. First of all, thank you so much for answering my question. So for all the years I've been lifting, every session has revolved around compound exercises as my main muscle and strength builders. Unfortunately, I got a diagnosis a few weeks ago, which will mean I need to modify aspects of my training for the foreseeable future. I now need to utilize more isolation exercises, as I now have a kind of balance between risk and reward with compound exercises being more biased towards risk with higher loads and the lower reps. So how does someone like me program the use of more isolation exercises and still gain the same amount of strength and muscle? Okay, so very good question. I would like to get a little bit more information if that's okay. Yeah, why? So is it the load that's the problem or is it the intensity? It's a load. It's a load at the moment. What I have is quite rare, so there isn't a lot of there isn't a lot of information around it, but it seems to be, I can still go to a point of failure, but the higher the load and the lower the reps, things seem to be a bit more difficult. Got it. Okay. Oh, well, so there's lots of different ways to increase intensity and tension. One of them is with load. Obviously, that's being taken off the table for you. You could slow your reps down. You could do isometric training, which is very, very valuable. You could do higher reps. Studies actually show higher reps performed at high intensity can be almost as effective as low reps. So just do those things and I think you'll be okay. As far as isolation versus compound, you'll probably have to do a little bit more volume, but feel it out and then here's something that might make you feel better. What you do to build muscle, oftentimes you can maintain it with much less work, load and intensity. So in other words, if you built 10 pounds of muscle doing heavy deadlifts and squats and presses and whatever, and you've kept that 10 pounds for a while, maintaining it, it's a lot easier to maintain it. You don't have to do quite as much volume, intensity and load to maintain than you did when you were building. I would definitely tempo is where I would go here. So I would just slow down the tempo and I mean, I'm watching Doug right now training and he's following. We have a new program that we're working on and he's following some of the protocol and the tempo is a 4-2-2 in there and I think your experience right now with it's been, never experienced this, right? No, I have had to reduce my weight dramatically. Yeah, so which in this case, this is a perfect example of like, because you can't do heavy load and there's nothing that said, even though the research points to like the 4-2-2 right, so 4 seconds on the negative 2 on the isometric and then 2 seconds on the concentric, doesn't mean you can't do 6-2-2, doesn't mean you can't do 8 with a pause for 4 seconds. I mean you can really manipulate and play with tempo a lot and it will make it feel like it is heavy as shit and it doesn't have to be that heavy. Yeah, and just increasing your tension while going through that lift too, just intrinsically, like just squeezing harder as you're doing these reps as well, even makes a difference. There's just a multitude of ways to add progressive overload. Yeah, you know, Phoebe, there was a one time I was, I had, only had access to a gym where the dumbbells went up to 30 pounds. And so for me, for a lot of exercises, that's too light. So what I did was exactly what we're telling you is I went really slow. I focused hard on the squeeze. I did lots of pauses, lots of isometrics, lots of slow repetitions. And to my surprise, I actually, my body improved, actually got good results from it so much so that it became something that I injected into my regular routine. Okay. It's great. What about the strength side of it? Because if that's muscle building and stuff like that, does strength have to be in the lower range? Can you still use the same? You're gonna build strength doing that also. Yeah, you'll build strength doing that also. But you know, here's the thing you have to understand is that strength is also a skill. So if you're not practicing something specific often, will you lose quote unquote strength in that particular thing? Probably. So in other words, if you are really strong at, you know, two reps with a squat, and then you go and perform, you know, 30 reps with a squat, like general strength, you'll probably be okay. But yeah, you're going to lose some strength in the thing that you're not practicing very often. And that's a lot of that has to do with the skill of the lift. But as far as how you look, how you feel, if anything, you're probably going to notice some benefit from this change. What I really like with isometrics is the way that you can actually apply a lot of max intensity. So you can do that in a safe manner where, you know, you can also structure so you don't do quite as many reps. So you can sort of emulate what you would be doing with compound lifts, but now you're, you know, you're squeezing your entire body and, you know, ramping it up as high as you can go, intensity wise, but then you can also back off at any time. Okay, that's great. That's great. Awesome. All right. Thanks, Phoebe. Cheers. Thank you. Oh, it's cool. Someone calling from France. That's really awesome. Yeah. Yeah, I like that all the way over there. But yeah, you know, we tend to get caught up. I was really curious to why or what? She didn't sound like I don't want to pry. I know I felt the same way. I was hoping you would, but you didn't. So I really wanted to know what it was because sometimes too, you know, sometimes that the doctors go this route because they just out of safety for safety, right? They don't want to be sued. Right. And so they don't know a lot about what's going on. So it's all liability. Yeah, it's like, you cannot ever lift heavy against too risky, you know, and it's like, man, I would like to know a little more. That's why I said intensity versus load because often it's intensity that the doctor says, you know, because I could go, look, I'll tell you what, like, yes, I could, let's say I could squat 400 pounds for one rep. That's a lot of load and intensity. Or let's say I squatted 250 pounds for 30 reps. The intensity is probably higher on that 30 rep set of squads or this or take that 200 pounds and do just four reps still, but do them slow, do a, you know, five, six negative and I'll tell you what, it'll feel like it's grueling. It'll feel like it's 400 pounds. And that's what I mean. If it's intensity, you've got to be careful for, then it doesn't matter. Load, you know, it's how intense the set is, but she said specifically load. So I'm assuming it has something to do with her connective tissue and her joint, something that's causing issues with her instability. Yeah, that's what I'm assuming.