 All right in today's episode we have Brett Contreras on the show he's one of the world's most well-known trainers and coaches he's a PhD but he also has lots of experience training lots of different people and he's best known for developing some of the best butts in the business he's trained champion athletes and stage competitors and again he's well known for developing amazing butts round firm strong butts in fact the hip thrust was largely popularized by Brett Contreras in fact he'll say himself he invented the exercise not sure if I agree with him I think maybe that's true but I do know that nobody was doing them until he started talking about them he's also a PhD so as a science guy it's a great episode in today's episode we talk all about building the butt we talk about his business we talk about building muscle the science behind it the science behind recovery workout programming you're gonna love this episode today's program giveaway is maps aesthetic here say 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 also have a sale going on right now maps symmetry half off and the RGB bundle half off if you're interested in either one just click on the link at the top of the description below all right here comes the show with Brett Contreras check it out you know let's actually open with that Brett because that's interesting to me I did not know that so off air Adam asked you if you grandfather in your old clients with their old pricing or if you raise their pricing as you continue to grow and popularity and you said something shocking to me you don't charge anybody anything when they train with you yeah what no my does this work yeah I don't think I've charged anyone for about eight years it started in Phoenix but when I went to San Diego I remember I was waiting for my business license and I'm like God this is taking forever and people are like can I come train with you and I'm like you can train with me as a training partner not a client right like you're just a lifting partner because I I didn't and I'm like it's it's not business like because I don't have a business license well I probably still could have gotten sued I but I was just like I'm just gonna get started it's taking forever so I started training massa she's my she's Persian she's like high-level bikini competitor but everyone in San Diego wanted to be like massa so they all followed her so when I'm training like 30 bikini competitors I know when I got my business license I'm like I don't want to lose any of them even if I charge like 20 a session 30 like sick cuz I train groups I'd have 20 girls in there at once I'm like I want them to come more frequently the more they come the better results they see if I charge them money they can't come as much plus back then it's before the algorithms you know like back in the good old days when stories you know I get so many views they'd all be I'm not okay if I show up wearing Jorts you know I could wear flip-flops I could be 10 minutes late I can be ranting about my day I can be favoring one client they all love me though because I don't charge them I'm everyone's favorite they love me Mike Mike my clients adore me and you see it they're always I love my coach but if I charge them I better show up on time I better be wearing like a you know a colored shirt I better have a clip board a better count wraps I better be professional I better not talk about myself or my day it's all about them and I gotta be I hate training one on one can't do it anymore I hate this small talk trainer so how was your weekend I just I load it full of people I blare the music and it's it's the biggest rush like on my birthday while my clients surprise me they all wore Jorts Jorts and a tank top that's great and they look like me and they all showed up and I so I had everyone there and it was the best day for me because I can be like it's such a challenge and I can pull it off like one-on-one is so boring it's if I got 20 high-level people in there and they're all like what do I do next and I'm like I get to really you know but then but that after like three four hours I'm dead I can't train for I train people six days a week I'm in the gym and I think I'm the only evidence-based person by the way that's still in the gym they all talk to you you mentioned before this we found a way to do our dream jobs they all couldn't wait to make a lot of money so they could get out of the gym I couldn't wait to make a lot of money so I could be in the gym yeah all day long and that's where I remember watching the Louis Simmons documentary I could relate to it so much the passion yeah that's what I just love doing and but I don't charge people for a couple reasons number one because then they yeah they don't have expectations of me they're just happy they're all they all love me but number two it's giving back I used to be a high school math teacher in Scottsdale school district I made my starting salary back in like I think it was like two thousand or something when I started but it was like twenty nine thousand six hundred dollars and then my six year with a master's degree I was making like thirty four thousand so back then my friends at the time were like realtors and stuff killing it because before the housing market crashed and they'd be like but let's go out this weekend and I'm like where are we going oh let's go to the W oh they charge cover there it's an expensive night guys I gotta stay in no no no we got you and I'm like I feel like a doesn't feel very manly having my guy friends carry me but they're like Brett if you come you're gonna attract women you're gonna have you're always the life of the party I used to drink a lot and get crazy now I don't drink but anyway I looked at like a side job I'm like okay I like this I'm gonna I'm gonna go out and like be the most social person and be so much fun and then they'll pay for me but it was so cool getting having my friends take care of me I liked free stuff it helped you know if someone if you got 20 bucks back then I'm like oh my god that pays for like Netflix and something like I had to care about that stuff back then so now I live in expensive cities you know San Diego Fort Lauder these are expensive places to live so if I can help them out a little bit then they can use that for whatever they can they can use that few hundred bucks they save a month on something else and the third thing I just feel like then they're yeah they so in San Diego this strategy I didn't do it for this purpose but all of a sudden everyone was tagging me like I love my coach best coach ever and it was like social proof so I was thinking about I'm like everyone's you know companies pay to sponsor people I'm not sponsored they're all like they tag me more than they tagged their sponsors and I'm not paying them anything I'm just training them for free so I had all these trainers that my whole life have been you need to respect yourself you need us and I'm like like in the beginning when I sold my e-book for 30 bucks and they're like you should be charging way more for that or why are you giving away all your information for free no one's gonna want to see you speak and everything I was like I don't think they're giving me good advice I think they're threatened 100% I mean this is the the law of reciprocity right so you've hacked whether you knew you were doing that or not you hacked into that by leading from that place of wanting to help and to give the natural feeling that these people get is they want to give back especially when you change their lives or you know they've been working and building this physique for a year decades and then you come in and you teach them some things and completely change them I mean those people are so loyal that person goes and tells eight ten people about you and you start building that up I think it's an inherent thing that good trainers have couple inherent things first of all you always have a good instinct of what to like if I trained you I'd be like and I'm giving you the pendulum squad or something I know I'm gonna throw on I bet you can do three plates or you know what I mean like you know what to start someone out at people always said that about me but I also just care so much about the results my sister always jokes that you could stab me in the in the in the belly and as I'm bleeding out you I'd be mad at you with you like bread IPR didn't I'd be like good job I have five on my way out but I do I care about people's fitness more than they do yeah I want to be so you're you definitely the trainer that is passionate that's doing this because they care about people and most trainers are this way I do have to say though for most trainers because we got to get into the details the advice you're giving to train people for free to not try to essentially build your business in that way is terrible advice however you have turned this into an extremely successful business you're not not making money so it's not like you're living in a you know on the streets and training people for free and showing up or whatever you figured out how to turn this into business how did you do that how do you earn a living being able to do what you do when you're not charging people even today you said so yeah funny when when when I first started the industry I decided well I actually didn't Martin Rooney you know Martin Rooney he came up with a name I was at a perform better conference and I was talking to Martin Rooney and he's like you should call yourself the glute guy I've never known anyone so into the glutes and I'm like yeah I'm gonna do that I'm gonna I'm gonna call myself the glute guy and at that same conference there was this guy he's like their financial guru their business advisor and we're at this social event and he's kind of like drumming up business for himself he's going around Pat and people in the back and trying to and he's like son what's your what's your passion and I said glutes and he started laughing he goes that's a hobby you won't you'll never make a career out of that oh and I remember just right you know I was this was 2009 and I'm like no he doesn't get he doesn't understand how big the glutes are how big I'm gonna get them because I got all these new methods I'm gonna show people but I was the only glute guy for like 10 years and then now there's so many yeah glute glute people glute you name it there's glute doc glute yeah glute poppy that everything you can think of you know I but here was the turning point for me and it's it's funny because I always credit my friend Kerry and people are like I told you that before her but it doesn't matter if she got through to me sometimes it takes a few people but yeah Kerry was over at my house and my my client Kerry Northington she's a bikini competitor and a nurse and she's like Brett you're the world's glute expert and you don't have a flagship glute program I go yeah I do I got strong by Brett and she's like that sounds like powerlifting I don't want to do strong by Brett I want glutes by Brett and I go well I trademark booty by Brett I just never did anything with it she goes call it by booty by Brett and actually promote it you're doing all this work that requires more work out of you that doesn't require that scales like you don't you don't have to do any more work smart and so I went hmm she's right I probably had like say two three thousand members I changed it to booty by Brett and made a an ad I think I have that ad pinned but anyway it went to like six thousand overnight then I promote it and I think it's around twelve thousand members right now wow wow paying thirty bucks a month so that's exceptional yeah and so for obviously that one revenue streams like probably like I know three to four million I get most of that that's the easy business because um you know I have people I have a Facebook private Facebook group and I have three moderators and I have people help out with the videos but I get almost all that now BC Strength is my other main business real products are a pain in the butt you know that's like the the that's I do BC Strength because I love I also think at what age does glute guy become creepy like I'm forty I'm forty I'm trying to stay fit but like fifty five I don't know I'm not gonna be a six year old we'll do a poll we'll do a poll I'll write that on the way to the sunset yeah hey you know I'm an expert on butts I've got an expiration date on me so I think BC Strength and I love equipment and I feel like you guys can probably relate you guys could probably go to every machine in the gym and be like this could be better yes they should have done this differently yes and I get to do that and I get to make equipment that fits women too these poor five footers they're screwed with every piece of equipment so I try to make mine but anyway with with the real business you get so many of shipping problems you have you know when the price of steel goes up or there's that shipping disaster earlier the year that port whatever that that boat got stuck that get you get delays and then people type in their address wrong all the time and then they blame you and they will not accept like we don't touch that that's you you typed in and you confirmed it and then they get mad and give you like a bad review it's like crazy people and then you know FedEx UPS you'll order something it comes in two boxes you get one one day you get one four days later and it's like why did you get shipped at the same time but people get mad and I can relate I get annoyed too so but with that business I tried a really good customer service like because back when I first started ordering equipment I order equipment in 2003 I remember I spent like 15 20 grand and it took nine months to get to me geez nine months wow and I was so annoyed and and then rogue came out and they started you'd order something you'd get it the next week now with Amazon sometimes you get it the next day like so I try to when you order something from BC strength it ships out the very next day so I have to have it in stock so I always you have to it's like I don't just yeah you have to have a warehouse and have it in stock always but I I try to do a really good job with that but anyway there I split the profit so many ways I probably with beast with booty by bread I probably get 80% of it with BC strength I probably get 25% of it maybe but employees shipping overhead like stuff yeah but it sounds like a lot of fun especially if you're into biomechanics and training yeah one thing that we we've always liked about you Brett is you're a real trainer there's a lot of fitness influencers out there that are not real trainers and you can tell by the way they answer questions you know you you tend to answer questions like good trainers tend to do which is it depends and who am I talking about and sometimes this is better and sometimes that is better or PhDs that have done nothing but live it alive yes yeah saying like that they'll just raise the studies all day long but they haven't gone into evidence yeah that's that's actually the point that I'm and that's the point that I'm going to go to is because you also have a lot of integrity at least when it in regards to training and fitness and you actually displayed that very well recently with the study that came out that compared the squat and the hip thrust and before that you always made the case that the hip thrust was superior and in many different ways then the study comes out that shows that they're both very effective at developing the glutes and you came out and did a post and talked about it and with tremendous integrity first off let's talk about the study let's talk about your position before let's talk about the study and let's talk about if you change your position or if it confirmed your position or maybe if there's some nuance that we should discuss yep okay so this is the plot can study your describing I'm going to pull it up just so I have the title of it uh so people can google it so the title of the study is hip thrust and back squat training elicit similar gluteus muscle hypertrophy and transfer to the deadlift yes waiting for the load you can google that it's a preprint it's not published yet but it will be published in time um so the reason this study came to be is um a fake study emerged in 2020 by Barbalo and Gentile and it's funny because I remember having a I've never once read a study and been like this is fake but this was like a year prior in 2019 I was doing a seminar with my trainers on a volume study remember these studies were emerging showing like five and ten sets saw better results than 15 and 20 sets and it didn't match the rest of the research because it was fake but I'm looking at it and every single graph was like linear like perfect Brad and I I've published so many studies with Brad and you know he'll send me the data and we try to make sense of it like the mind muscle connection one we're like why did it work for the biceps but not the quads and then we have to try to explain that you know you try to come up with a reason but the data never comes out neat and I went I had this light bulb moment I want my god this study is fake then I looked at I'm like all this stuff I think this group's fake the research is fake so I called James Krieger I called Andrew Vagasi or called Brad Schoenfeld and I'm like I think all this this is it look it's too clean it's too neat and then back then they didn't care enough they're just like I don't know how you'd prove it like how would you you know I don't we don't know of any methods to show that it's fake well then like one year later I remember I was at the LA FedExpo greeting everyone it had to be a nice good mood and then all of a sudden I keep getting these emails and text messages and dms and stuff have you seen this have you seen this and it was like this study showing that squats greatly outperform hip thrusts and I look at the authors and it's Barbala and Gentile and I'm like it's I just knew right away it's fake but then that I put on a fake smile the rest of the day went home that night and I read it and I'm like this doesn't add up if you're a real trainer you know that you get a group of girls training with you they'll for like say 10 weeks they'll put on a hundred hundred fifty pounds on their hip thrust they'll only put on 30 pounds maybe or 20 pounds on their spot you know it's just the way it works so none of it added up from a like a practical perspective so I wrote this piece crit critiquing it thinking everyone was gonna be like hey Brad you proved that this study was fake and they'll got it backfired on me it's the first time I I learned like yeah when you're successful people kind of hate you yeah they really hate you and I went oh I had so many memes like Brett refuses to admit the truth uh me and they made like these buttons like evidence based or Blake like say the author doesn't let or the yeah like blame me say the author doesn't lift and I'm going for that button and I'm like how can you be in a lot of the evidence based people were like what an amazing study I can't you know I hate to say I told you guys so and I'm like how did you read this study that's what I realized the evidence based community is not very shouldn't you be in the gym to be evidence based shouldn't you be able to like I knew it was it doesn't even come close and I if you read my critique of it and the only way to know is because you actually train people actually train people every day yeah hundreds so you have like hundreds of examples going like if you actually train people like that that doesn't even work also even from the squat perspective these people became elite squatters in 10 weeks like they'd be like high-level powerlifters in 10 weeks from a shitty protocol the protocol was so silly I even did one of the I embedded the video I no one watched it I embedded a video of my niece doing the protocol and I said it's impossible it was like set of like four sets of 12 to 15 with 30 to 60 seconds rest in between sets you can't even change the plates within 30 to 60 seconds but you do to failure you do a set of 15 to failure and rest 30 to 60 seconds so she's a 200 my nieces can squat 205 so we worked out like what the 15 rep max would be and then I can't change the plates within 60 seconds quick enough but you go from getting 15 reps to stay in that 12 to 15 we had to go down to the bar and then her last set she only got yeah like eight reps with the bar yeah and she couldn't sleep on her stomach for because her quads were so crippled her quads were so sore so it's a it's so fake anyway so I'm talking to some of the evidence-based people including men oh handsome men's and I'm like man oh this is fake just trust me I it was really hurtful that people didn't trust me like when have I been you know dishonest and so we start talking about it where he's like you know they used ultrasound too I go I don't like ultrasound I bought for my phd I bought a 13,000 dollar ultrasound machine and I'm like I like like broad jump where it's like you chalk here you they jump you chalk you see their feet and then you're like I'm going to measure that distance I can't screw this up with ultrasound it's easier on muscles like the biceps and stuff but like with the small the glutes while you see bone and stuff with glutes there's no bone underneath it's another muscle depends on where it's like the glute medias or like one of the obturator like the deep hip external rotators or whatever and you see a fascial border and with like just not clear enough is that why I mean I'm not an ultrasound technician but I adjusted the gain the depth and I'm like two other girls I saw clear borders but on my girlfriend at the time and then another client I'm like I'm not confident with this and what were they looking at with ultrasound hypertrophy growth muscle thickness oh I see and so they I don't it was never even done but they anyway men when men I talked we said we should use MRI we should duplicate this study and use MRI well three years goes by or whatever and you know I don't know where Mike Roberts connect connects with me he's a he's a research professor out of Auburn and they do they're they're doing that stuff on like sarcomaic versus sarcoplasmic hypertrophy they're doing good stuff so he contacted me about something else and I'm like hey could you guys do a a glute max you know hypertrophy study using MRIs like yeah we could do it and I'm like he's like I got my student Daniel Plotkin I knew of Daniel because Daniel studied under Mike Isartone Brad Schoenfeld like he they were his professors he's he's a PhD student who has lifting experience that's always a good thing so Menno just happens to call me up as I just got a quote from them saying it would be 80 grand and I go okay I'll fund it because I'm gonna die not knowing the answer to this you know told you how much money I make 80 grand is not gonna kill me but but also by the way I just want to add this that again this is one of the reasons why we like you is you didn't know what the results are you thought you know you think you know what the results are but this public the study could have been published put in my mouth yeah completely crushed you oh it would have yeah you've been embarrassed man if I kind of am embarrassed by the results but anyway we'll get to that which I which I okay yes let's get there so so uh so like I'm talking to Menno and I'm like oh god Menno's gonna like block when he hears how much this is gonna cost he's like I'll split it with you well hold on there like I just got a quote it's gonna be 80 grand he's like okay like you'll contribute 40 grand he's like yeah you know what coach does that right what person does that like that's a car you know sure so he did it we split it we we want it would have been nice to have a third group a combined group but that's another 40 grand but they wouldn't have been able to do it see students do the research and it's like you know you gotta have universities do this and there's only so much manpower because people always critique study like you should have had a group do you should have measured the lunge you should have measured the RDL you should have measured the single leg leg press you should have had this you should have had a why didn't you have a group that did both why didn't you have advanced subjects and it's that's what we need more study that's what we need more studies this is the first of hopefully a long line but anyway we funded the study we got the results back and it's funny because before the study got started Daniel was trying to he's like I don't want to measure EMG it's not going to be related I talked to Andrew Vygotsky and Andrew's Andrew was my intern he's not like the smartest dude he's too smart for anyone he's like this Russian genius you I still call him and I'm it's like I need an interpreter it's funny because when he was my intern when he was like 20 it's crazy for you to say that 20 I know 21 and I'm like you you like me while you're 21 in one more year you'll be I can help you at 21 and then you're going to be out of my league and now he laughs at my like he taught him so statistics so anyway these are the guys Andrew Vygotsky Brad Schoenfeld Greg Knuckles James Krieger those are the guys who then did the white paper on the Barbalo stuff Barbo and Gentilin showed that it was fake this lab and they used the craziest statistical methods like they didn't they even made up methods that they wanted to publish the methods they used to expose them and yeah wonderful they they spent six months of their lives analyzing the data and basically showing without a shout of doubt and it's funny because then Greg wrote a blog post that was like further explain it it's like the chance of this happening is like one in 13 million or something you know what I mean it's just they use so many different ways even like down to like there's so many more even numbers than odd numbers like not so there so the Barbalo stuff didn't didn't um it didn't match up from a practical or from the you got to fool the to fake a study you got to fool the the coaches and trainers and the scientists and statisticians and they they they got too greedy they were getting away with it they might have never been caught but then they messed with the hip thrust what was the desired outcome why would they post a fake study any idea do you know I don't know so it's so funny that I've never talked about this before this is like crazy stuff so Paula Gentile is a professor in Brazil and in Brazil they like how many countries speak Portuguese just Brazil and Portugal so at this point most of Brazil knows he's a fraud but he still has a lot of fars and he's so like he will never admit that he faked his research he'll he doesn't he still like quotes them as if they're real but I think he just hated hip thrust he hated single joint movements he hated I don't even think of the hip this is a single joint movement really but but like he hate he he hates high ball he all is all his research would show that like you know single joint movements are inferior or like high volume is inferior to low volume and he was bashing the hip thrust from day one so he just I never knew whether a student Barbalo was a student were they in cahoots together was Matias Barbalo was he trying to please his professor and like fabricated it but there's no way because they even even Greg Knuckles in the white paper they showed that they're publishing way too many studies way more than any of the lab and like one of the studies involve so many people it would have been impossible to also even in that local area to get that many high level squatters that were like now squatting elite numbers it wouldn't happen in this small portion of Brazil where they like they went crazy on this they got like they were like trust at that point trying to one up each other with like new methods to expose them so I wrote Barbalo an email and it basically I just said hey we're on to you and then the the researchers got so mad at me because I wasn't involved in expo they won't let me I'm biased like they won't let me in on it it was like Andrew and and Greg and Brad and James and I I had no part of that because they're like you're biased right and that's what people would say right it needs to be us trying to go after and get retractions but I mean I have speculation it's you know you see this in the fields too with research is that researchers and scientists this is how you get your fame and credibility if you publish a study that then goes viral you're known for it and so and you know scientists and researchers are humans too and humans are flawed and so I think that's the you think that's the motivator absolutely you don't think it was a potentially direct shot at you I think that was a direct shot at me yeah I think I think for that way I think you but there was like why did they why are you faking studies about high volume and about single joint stuff it's like he went too far until sells books and has yeah but it's funny because so so I wrote this email to barbo like we're on to you your your careers of researchers about to be over but I'm curious why did you do it was polo putting you up to this or did you do it to serve I'm sure he's going to blame you but maybe you don't want to fall on the sword maybe you want to tell us what happened and he disappeared he vanished and the reason why I knew it was because right when I wrote my critique Barbo disabled his Instagram and I'm like guilty people don't do that I knew it I'm like I was calling my friends he's guilty he knows he disabled his Instagram account right after like polo published like we just did this study on the hip thrust it went viral and like I made my critique and right after my critique he disabled his account I'm like he's guilty if you're if you're look at Daniel Plotkin a real legit study Daniel Plotkin's going on podcast talking about it and he's we're transparent we'll give people the access to the data if they want it they were they weren't like that so Barbo was disappeared he like vanished I don't know what happened to him but I want to know what I want to know the story of what happened and no one will still a mystery today still a mystery and it's so funny because even back when the guys were like the guys were you know publishing that white paper they're like like Barbo is like uncle or grandfather or something or father or something is this J.D.R. J.A. D.E.R. Barbo and he's like a he's like you can google him on Wikipedia comes up he's been involved in corruption he's like a Brazilian like congressman or something who's been involved in corruption since the 90s and they're like what if something like backfires on us and i'm like oh i get killed you're gonna get murdered for exposing us for a hip-throb study he's probably like you idiot why are you fabricating studies like so funny what people get scared about but anyway yeah there's this and then and then now if like yeah when this comes out um Gentil will just post some some something nasty about me and he says that i'm like a criminal and all this stuff and then people believe it it's the stupidest thing so tell us about the so then tell us about the study that you guys did do so the plot can paper all right good thank you for getting me back on track okay so thank god we did EMG because i was basically saying Daniel EMG is going to be related to hypergivies like no it's not and i'm like okay then if it is you owe me a beer if it's not i owe you a beer so i owe him a beer um it was it didn't everyone got higher EMG activity with the hip thrust they also felt it more with the hip thrust he asked all the subjects what did you feel more in every subject that i feel my glutes working more with hip thrust so i'm surprised but i'm surprised and not surprised that you would think that being a trainer because we knew that with the EMG studies we all hated EMG studies because you often feel something more but it doesn't necessarily produce more results however i have a theory as to why you uh are going that direction and and and and we'll get to that in just a second but i i i think that you have a bit of a self-selection bias because the kind of people that hire you and these are the kind of people that are going to respond even more so to your training methods and we'll get to that in just a second let's talk about EMG what it does why you thought it connected to more to hypertrophy and then maybe why it didn't necessarily show that so i wouldn't think EMG okay like i've always i i've always liked the chin up and for years people would say why would you chin up wide grip pull downs work or pull ups or wide grip activate more lat i'm like yeah but you get a bigger stretch with the so it's always like stretch versus but it's funny because with the upper body i was always the camp of stretch versus activation but then with a lower body i've always been like activation over stretch i'm not consistent there i like sumo stuff you feel your glutes more when you do sumo but if you do narrow you get more range of motion so um we need research on that but basically in in this study since squats and hip thrust tide squats stretch you a little bit more hip thrust activates you a little bit more what what could be the case it's either two scenarios number one is that um when you tension there's two types of tension you know passive tension and active tension so the active force comes from you know sarcomere dynamics the passive force just comes from stretching everything and so you know active force requires activation and so passive force is higher when you activate it previously because then tighten connects to act in and tighten ends up being a very the stiff segment and that's probably a big singular of hypertrophy so to have like muscles activated and then stretch to a long length is right now i'd say that's the primary candidate for how muscles grow but some guys now run with that guys that are in the long-length camp you know stupid like chasm and mike isretel would probably be like tighten is everything i don't think i've heard him talking about that but chasm i have and it's funny because those guys are all about long-length training and i'm all about short length for glutes not for everything else but i've just seen it and i would i would tell all of them like i all right i'm going to go off on a quick tangent then i'll get back to the study results and in emg i've trained like like yorishna and bobby mono these are wellness competitors when i moved to florida and i'm like guys you're being told that your legs overpower your glutes you can get your legs big anytime we gotta spend like a whole year growing your glutes and i want to train your glutes three times a week quit doing squats leg press hack squats leg extensions lunges let's just do glutes three times a week and i'm gonna get you strong i'm gonna have you doing hip thrust this machine i have it's like a bent leg back extension um and uh the gludiator it's like um targeted glutes and this multi-hip hammer strength where you kick back to an abduction off of it and i'm just giving and it's boring no one wants to that's why you hire me because i'll make you do the boring shit over and over and over and i'm like i want you yorishna you're you're hip thrusting three plates for 18 reps you need to get to 20 then we're gonna go with three plates into 25 and when you get that for 20 i want you getting four plates for 20 eventually right now you're getting it for like six but that's how you're gonna keep growing your glutes and it within like two months their glutes look totally different their glutes respond they they're growing so this isn't just some something theoretical like it i put it to practice and i'm not giving them the long-length stuff and i do think the long-length stuff works well it's just that that fatigues you a lot you you take out squats and deadlifts and walking lunges and now you don't get sore really you can hit you can hammer these movements three times a week easy so um so i feel like i'm putting that to practice and if if those guys said well i'll take squats and lunges or rdls or whatever single leg leg presses it's okay you create a program and i'll create my program and i wish we could have like a duel off like we vanish for nine nine ten weeks and then you know you do pre-testing post-testing let's see who let's see who wins in real life in the real world i think you're on to the next viral tv show here so the biggest loser it's the biggest booty imagine how good that would do that's what i wish i could do because you have your theories you have your studies but in so i'm still team hip thrust and all that but i'm biased towards short muscle lanes but at the end of the day i am a researcher i'm a scientist it's important to know that everyone has biases i invented the hip thrust so i'm going to be so it could okay so back to why you got the same results it could be that hip thrust work through mechanisms that are geared towards activation for example maybe something in the z discs of the sarcomere when you have the the sarcomeres pulling together there's something in the middle in between those sarcomeres that gets activated like this Henning Wacaraj's Brad Schoenfeld's colleague in in like holland or something or wherever he lives up in europe somewhere and he's really smart about this stuff and he says that this filament filament 3 bag c or bag c filament 3 that's a big candidate and that would respond to like muscle activation and muscle contraction whereas another mechanism with titan titan would mainly respond to stretch and activate a stretch nuclear flattening when the nucleus flattens out it gets stretched and then you get the nucleus that flattens out and then there's pores in there and then that can release things like it can activate the hippo and the yaptas pathway there's all these crazy names you could spend your life studying this the physiology stuff i'm a more biomechanics guy but you can't have biomechanics without the physiology of it but anyway we don't know crap about it right now we don't we have so much to learn are there multiple mechanisms and so i'm leaning towards like hip thrust growing the glutes through different mechanisms through like maybe that bag 3 filament bag c filament 3 whatever it is and then maybe the maybe squats grow the glutes more through the titan mechanism or maybe it is simple and it's mostly just the titan mechanism but hip thrust do put you through enough range of motion because they people act like they just don't work you through a range it's like they get you into about at least like a like a 90 like a parallel squat position you know but people say well it's easy down low but it's not completely unloaded so maybe it maybe it gets you through enough range that it does activate that mechanism sufficiently and what is emg showing emg shows activation mechanisms so it's in a hip thrust beats the squat with yeah it has more probably more motor unit recruitment and more you know more more nervous system related stuff that activate the muscle but whereas the squat stretches you more and so that's what emg can't tell you is how much range of motion you do that they'll go in before i mean i would guess that even without seeing that i mean it's of course it's closer to an isolation exercise it's like glutes are directly opposing the way but there's always more of a story like people will think oh brett thought emg was going to matter um it doesn't not matter the reason why is there's something that no one i haven't published this yet i took like 12 of my glute squad girls and i i and the reason i looked at this is because there was this um controversy going around back remember how the seated hip abduction sucks it's the worst exercise it works the piriformis not the group max and i'm like because it works the group max and we got this huge argument and basically that i'm glad that arguments died down and you don't have to deal with that every day because my girls are always like what the i so you're making me do a piriformis exercise or no it works the group max um but basically when you get to the bottom of a squat and emg has shown this consistently for a while you get in the very bottom of squat you do feel your glutes a little bit but at emg at least been measured by surface electrodes only gets like 10 of max it's weird because i feel it when i'm in a pause squad but the emg is not very high now maybe if you did fine wire you'd get a little bit higher but emg activity does go down and when you're at the top of a hip thrust a full lockout emg goes up and so that's not the same with every muscle like the quads the quads when you're in a deep stretch you get very high quad activity so i was thinking like muscles that activate to a high degree and then you can take it further and look at the length tension relationship and that's this whole thing that you see chris beardsy going on on about like how if it operates on the descending limb and where you get peak active force and how the passive force if if so with the glute max i was so adamant about this because i used muscle modeling you know open sim is what biomechanics use and with the muscle modeling it showed that you get peak active force in the glutes right around neutral so that's where to me you're going to get the most signaling doing exercise that hits you at neutral and then passive force like with like the the semi tendinosis here's peak active force and passive force is like triple as high so it makes sense to stretch that muscle because you get such high passive forces but with the glute max you didn't get that high of passive forces so it's like they're probably not that good of signalers but then i saw a different model published and i went looked at that downloaded that model and it had a whole different curve this model had active force peaking at 30 degrees of hip flexion then passive force was very low and i'm going why 30 degrees of hip flexion what did they change in the model and chasm and i actually looked at this together and chasm went full like geek mode on this and he found that all they changed was the tendon slack and like they didn't measure tendon slack how do you measure tendon slack with the glute max especially because like probably 75 to 80 percent of fibers attach to fascia yeah so it's like they that wasn't measured they're modeling they're trying to make it fit and so they're making a model that fit deeper hip flexion tasks and so they just so what i learned in that experience was that muscle modeling has huge flaws emg has huge flaws functional anatomy has flaws sensation has flaws the the ideally we'd have training studies on everything because that shows you what really does happen but the problem is now we've got one training study but our training study is specific to in beginners and the protocol we use which was twice a week if we use advanced maybe different results would be seen if we used higher volumes and frequencies maybe different results would have been seen right i'm going to make this really simple okay because this made perfect sense to me when i read the study look i've trained clients as well and i a lot and i know for a fact that for some people the hip thrust is a superior but building exercise i also know for a lot of people the barbell squat is as good and then i would say better because it develops the rest of the body the rest of the lower body better which is what the study showed now here's why here's why you came in with a bit of a bias and why you might have been surprised in my opinion by the results the kind of people that hire you what are they interested in glutes okay now why are they hiring you because they struggled because their quads grow faster their butt's not it's lagging so you're training people with muscle recruitment patterns that favor things like quads now you do a hip thrust if you want anybody you know this if you want anybody a beginner to feel their butt and they don't feel their butt when they squat they don't feel their butt when they leg press they don't feel their butt when they like do a lunge you have them do a hip thrust and focus on the squeeze all of a sudden some other recruitment process that's right all of a sudden they feel their glutes you take two different people doing the same exercise you'll see similar recruitment patterns but they're not going to be identical this person squatting might use more glute and hamstring this person might use more quad this person's going to have more erector spinae you know activation it depends on the individual and the recruitment patterns and if you're somebody that has trouble getting your butt to grow with conventional barbell squats deadlifts and stuff like that the hip thrust is going to crush for you if you're the average person and everything works the way whatever it should it's 50-50 shot then you're probably going to be okay but by the way you probably should do both that's like the big the big thing is this whole either or is a stupid thing because everybody does both and you should do both but if I had somebody who had trouble feeling a muscle that you tend to activate with a compound lift I know as a trainer that I'm going to help them feel that muscle by getting them to squeeze it with say an isolation exercise first not pretty fatigued because there's studies that show that that that's not what I'm doing I'm teaching the person to feel it then I go do this other compound lift now what they've done is they've so very small and you might not even be able to see this but most really good trainers can have changed their technique in form enough to activate and feel the muscle because now they know what they're supposed to just like when you train a person to feel their mid-back sometimes what do you do you put your finger on their mid-back you give them that outside feedback oh there it is now I can feel that's why you see better results with hip thrust because the people that hire you have been struggling to develop their glutes I bet you that the the subjects in the study were just people just regular people and that's what you're going to get across the board I bet you if they took a sample size of 50 people who have been working out for a while who are like my butt doesn't respond and then they did that study I bet you hip thrust would win so yeah definitely a theory and I think there's merit to the people find me out of the people and not just that they respond best to glutes they they're going to push themselves harder on when they feel their glutes they don't want to push themselves as hard on squats if they float on their quads and deadlifts if they feel in their low back or something like that so yeah so yeah interestingly but what you said earlier this I called Andrew and he's like no you can't make this but this something Jose Antonio brought up in his podcast when you look at the individual plots you see like squats were all condensed in the in the middle they all saw similar results but with hip thrust you saw a few people way up here and then a few people who lost muscle with the how do you lose muscle when you're a beginner training for like nine weeks how do you lose muscle but a couple people lost muscle interesting but then you have these high responders there's a lot more variance but nothing could be made of that we needed like more subjects but anyway it was just an interesting yeah and also maybe there's really good responders and really bad responders to hip thrust where squats are more in the middle are there people that you've trained that are great responders and poor responders the same exercise of course of course it's always I mean my favorite part about what you said and what highlights is and we've talked about this on the show all time is just like I think it's important for coaches and trainers to understand studies to know how to read them to use that as somewhat of a roadmap for ourselves but there's still such a large individual variance there's so many variables with these studies and stuff like that so to get married to a study and then to throw out the things that you see right in front of you I want to touch on something that I've been hammered online about saying and I heard you say too in my experience because I've trained a lot of people that are trying to build their glutes also I had tremendous success with teaching them the sumo deadlift and I get so much so much shit for that as a as a glute builder but I'm like let me tell you I have trained fucking hundreds of people that had a trouble building their butt I've taught them how to sumo deadlift and their butt grew significantly how would you explain that to the average person on why why do you think I see that when you well this goes back to the we need to now learn the mechanisms like so the first of all it used everyone used to agree that sumo was best and then chasm came in and that's this is when paul carter was team chasm and now paul carter is team chris birsey so when paul was team chasm they both became adamant like and they're so vocal and paul so paul carter is so um that's the guy you got into with is he the run lift lift run bang oh he's he's a super secure individual like we gotta run it but he got like jpg that guy on tiktok he's got like I didn't even look lately but he had like four million back sure like a year ago so I don't know what he has now but j the jpg guy dr osz has more followers that tells you a little bit about how much that means but Eugene tail all these guys just started parroting them and that's the that's where I kind of realized like oh my god like you want to make money position yourself against me and go against all my of course and think about that back then it was like don't do hip thrusts do the cas glute bridge that's a hip thrust pulse like it's just the lockout of the hip thrust we've been doing that forever why does he get it named after him I don't even have hip thrusts named after me but it was like don't do sumo do narrow stands for the stretch so it's that's the argument stretch versus activation which is more important for glutes this plot can paper show that they're they might be equal we need more studies but so far what we have to go by is maybe they're equal so we would be cool is to have a conventional group and a and a sumo group now there's only one EMG study on this is eskimila back in like the early 90s I think it was a he showed similar glute activation with sumo and conventional but on the whole there's probably maybe like eight to ten papers on this probably 80% of them show higher EMG activity when you go wide because when you abduct an x when you rotate you gotta push your knees out you well you put you better align the fibers in my opinion some of the fibers are going to be more in alignment and it would make sense for maybe you improve the leverage the moment arm improves and then the that's this theory that chris has put out and it's funny because when I was applying for my phd I put this in there it was it's they call it neuro mechanical matching of the the nervous system senses when you have good leverage of a muscle and it activates it to a higher degree yes and I thought that made sense way back when I was getting my but there were only two studies on it back then and they were conflicting there was evidence for the delts but not the glutes but I said that in my phd my first year phd thing and they liked it but they said where's your evidence and I'm like well it's just more that it makes sense like there's not a lot of evidence but why would why wouldn't the brain or the nervous system do that and now we have evidence with like the respiratory muscles and there's some animal research but that's still a theory that needs to be fleshed out so in that case theoretically you'd get more passive related growth from conventional more active related growth from um the sumo but I'm a big fan of sumo and people love it on leg press on squats on deadlifts so we need to learn more about that and more about the not just them not just training studies but learn more about the mechanisms of hypertrophy in general it might differ from muscle to muscle because think about like muscles that stretch like pecs it makes sense like yeah you feel your pecs you feel your hamstrings get stretched a lot but delts yeah stretch the delts with the traps or something like that like so like but it could still be that like delts like maybe cables are superior to dumbbells but my thing with that just to go on a little side tangent people always talk about like because I do cable lateral raises I love delts if you really want to maximize tension at the bottom you would have the it be perpendicular at the bottom and you have the the handle set at the height of the hand but then when you get to the top the line would come up through and you'd have like nothing so it'd be everything here and nothing here whereas a dumbbell is theoretically nothing here everything here all the torque is out here but here's what people don't understand when you're doing 40 pound lateral raises and it's up here and you're trying to lower it under control you're fighting it all the way to the bottom that momentum brings you still working the muscle and the stretch on the way down and then reversing it not to mention the change of direction so people don't realize this yeah when you're when you're lowering a 40 pound dumbbell it might not weigh directly 40 pounds at the bottom because of the you know the way gravity works but because you're you're changing the momentum temporarily it actually does weigh quite a bit because you have to stop you're working hard in that range still that's right yeah that's right this is when this is when science annoys me because people get so myopic on all these different whatever and honestly it just it's very very simple okay it depends on the person and if you have trouble activating something muscles that squeeze that muscle excuse me, exercise that squeeze that muscle are probably going to be better for you or at least be super valuable to you more so than somebody that doesn't have trouble that's the point I was going to make that you made already why I would say the sumo and the deadlift is because most people again trying to build their glutes have a hard time feeling their glutes so doing an exercise where it forces them to feel it better which I think well to me why to me why try and stretch your glutes with a deadlift anyway when you bend your knees you get more deeper so to me you use deadlifts to stretch the hamstrings so I'm team sumo but also just train bikini competitors they love their sumo like they tend to feel I always say this people who become experts are the ones who care about it the most like women there's a study showing that they do you know like 40 sets of glutes a week whereas men do nine they care about glutes as much as we care about delts, buys, tries everything you combine that's how much they care they focus they pay attention now this study did show that like you can't just go by sensation however I do think there's some merit too like paying attention because I mean if we went around and pulled all four of us what are your favorite pack exercise what are your favorite bicep exercise we don't have to feel we'd have different answers look you can't why are you gonna do one you don't feel that much here's the bottom line too is that we like to separate or say say the science and evidence-based community likes to separate the subjective from the objective but workouts are both period end of story so a simple example is hey what's the best most effective form of cardio what a good trainer is always gonna be like well which one do you like the most because that's the one you're gonna do other ones you're not gonna do and they're not gonna be effective regardless of what the data says another example there was a study that we saw a while ago where they compared I think it was a leg press machine to a barbell squat and it was a short study it was like eight weeks long they took beginners and they found that the strength and muscle gains of the leg press were slightly better than the barbell squat now most people I saw lots of people posting this and saying oh look machines way more effective than free weights and blah blah blah they said look if I take a hundred beginners off the street they're gonna learn how to do a leg press very quickly and very quickly they'll be able to apply a lot of force it's gonna take me at least five to six weeks to get them to be able to squat properly I'm not gonna start reaping the real benefits of the squat until they have the biomechanics and the technique and the tension that argument was used there's this guy Chester Soko something that's this guy freaking worst scientist but he uses it to like he's he's so biased against long lengths but that he just ripped our study apart and said I he thinks that like he's one of these conspiracy guys that thinks everything's just well Brett fun of the study and Brett like I had nothing to do you can call these guys if you funded the study the barbell the squat the hip thrust wanna crush the squat wouldn't need it you are right you're terrible at this it did but he like doctored it but anyway he thinks that I that it was just me planning the methods and I'm like how can I come up with a way to give this the the hip thrust the advantage and so I chose just the perfect time period like nine weeks where the squat that's where you start finally mastering the coordination and then squat gains would have taken off but I kept it at the right time point to give the hip thrust the advantage I think it's the other way I think squats had the advantage with this study because probably what what if you guys were trying to grow your glutes how many times would you and you just had the squat you'd probably squat twice a week yeah it's fucking hard to keep three is too much taxing or you'd have to significantly reduce the effort yeah so for progressive overload two times a week is great pretty yeah for squat but for hip thrust if that's all you were doing eight four days a week four yeah three or four right and so I think for that reason hip thrust don't beat you up as much you could hip thrust more frequently and that's in in research you've got to to get it published you've got to equate volume but in the real world you don't have to equate volume you can write whatever program you want that's that's why that's why those studies that show that frequency does it matter as much if you equate for volume but the reality is you take the average person you have them divide up the volume they would do one day over four or five days or three days over time they're going to do more volume because they're going to be able they're going to be working out more consistent they're going to miss more volume while fresh more quality and also quality volume yeah yeah I agree with that too it's funny because like with that research I'm like that that can't be and I hate when people because like I said I'm in the gym working with people there's no can I say the outward oh yeah there's no fucking way that trading the glutes one day a week equating volume so these girls every bikini that's what you got to look at the pros so I loved full body training back in the day but I remember one guy's like so you think all the bodybuilders are doing it wrong and I'm like okay I've always been a scientist no they're not doing it wrong they're clearly training the best way for their results for their like like you're not going to maximize growth of all the upper body muscles training full body I like full body because I train I'm a personal trainer I get people two or three days a week and for most people it's the best it's the best right but not for these bodybuilders who need to could be in the gym too for two hours a day yeah exactly so I always temper things like what I know in this research what I know as a personal trainer with what the best of the best are doing and if you look at all the girls the influencers and the bikini competitors with the nicest glutes they're generally training glutes three times a week they're doing about 36 to 48 sets a week and you go oh my god that's so much more volume that's recommended but they're doing abduction they're doing different movement patterns they're doing abduction from flex positions abduction straight up those work different those target different areas they're doing some some hardcore like you know that stretch the muscle a lot vertical hip extension so they're doing horizontal those don't tax you as much it makes sense when you do but there's no way you could say do 36 do 36 sets in one day versus three days yeah no and they're not doing 36 sets sets squats heavy dead lifts and squats yeah no they're doing 12 or so like three sets three to four sets three times a week like yeah exactly absolutely 100% you can't just do all your volume from that so when you said you should do both that's what any logical person who read the study should conclude you should probably do both but that's not what happened I was very disappointed because I'm the only person that said I was wrong all the people who ever posted the Barbala study I hate to say I was right none of I only know of Lane Norton who who said guys I was wrong about this Lane's another guy's got a lot of integrity with that stuff yeah Lane I know I was argue was so about Lane and because Lane has a lot of you either love him or you hate him you know he's like why do you like him so much I'm like because I could offer him a billion dollars to fudge something or go get science and take it he won't take it tons of integrity yeah he can be an asshole for sure but I respect his integrity and and and let's be honest in the fitness space how rare is integrity right it's the most rare so rare most people are totally full of crap and fake and you know it right away yeah that's this is the this is the part again that annoys me with studies is they don't take into account individuals they don't take into account different populations they don't take into account length of time of the study like 8 to 12 it's the hypertrophy range well yeah if you only train for 10 weeks but train someone for two three years and you'll find they got to train low reps they got to train high reps they got to train moderate reps and then some point depends on the exercise too also the exercise try and do standing cable hip abduction in the sixth rep range it's doesn't make any sense you better do higher reps with that you know doesn't make any sense and lateral raises like it beats you up doing but I've always said this and I learned this early on if I got a client that had trouble feeling their glutes when doing traditional glute exercises like barbell squats and leg press and leg you know and lunges I knew that I could get them to feel them with the hip thrust and I knew I could get them to activate them with the hip thrust and I knew if I got them to have a little hypertrophy in the glutes and they knew how it felt to activate the glutes I could then move them or add barbell squats and then all of a sudden the barbell squat became for them a glute exercise and that's super important that's something that people don't you know ever really consider when it comes to this kind of stuff there was a study supporting that like that whole theory of when you activate and grow a muscle then you start in core you start using it more it always made sense but I think there's a study now showing that if I recall correctly but yeah it's because I we can probably fill our glutes with anything like some people can't they're so they're like I don't fill my glutes with that and I'm like how do you not feel your glutes I can feel it on any movement now do you know where I learned that the first time was I did no Mike Menser yeah and he wrote a book called Heavy Duty years ago and I remember as a kid I got it and he advocated for what they call pre-exhaust supersets so like isolation before compound his theory was probably not right but there was something there was some stuff that was right to it he just explained it wrong but one of the one of the compounds or one of the supersets was dumbbell pull-over to pull-ups yeah and it was the first time as a kid I ever got a pump in my lats now after I was able to get a pump on my lats from then on I could feel my lats when I did pull-ups whereas before it was all arms as a kid and that's when I pieced it together and said I got to learn how to feel something maybe with an exercise that's not necessarily as good but once I could feel it now I can do the exercise and I can make myself feel it and that for me was a game changer it's funny I remember being 15 and like looking in the mirror at my skinny little body and trying to flex different muscles and I'm like how do you flex your lats and like my how do I flex my delts well I can flex them this way but like and I would just pose in the mirror like flexing practicing and then I'd be like doing an exercise and I'd feel it more because I'm posing and flexing and same thing though then you learn okay this is the right feel this is how you do it you want to say have that same feel yes and then every once in a while you're like I remember staying at a hotel and I you know I was going to dinner with a girlfriend like probably this was probably 12 years ago or something but the hotel had a universal gym you know where those old sweet universals and I went in I just I had like 20 minutes to kill before I had to shower and I just did like four sets of like whatever on the universal but I remember like I didn't go for I'm not trying to beat any records you're just going for feel and I got the greatest pump of my life but I'm like I feel like that was the first time I really used my lats during a pull down like just isolated or like not isolated but like targeted them you know and you you learn that that's why it's important to just I always say your knowledge is a pie chart in broken down into equal thirds what you know as a coach as a trainer as a content person that's like one third you learn from you learn so much from training yourself but you got to work out and experiment you know and then the other third is through training other people because we're all so different you know I've just started training girls six one but her legs are longer than mine and it's fun it's so fun for me and then the other third is through reading and listening to podcasts and going to seminars and reading research and all the stuff you learn through you know like reading studies and talking to other people and networking and all this stuff you learn on social media and stuff well now now now I'm probably more of it's bad than good I like that that really highlights I mean we talked to a lot of coaches and trainers we have a lot of coaches and trainers that listen to this podcast and I think that is an important that's the perfect that you've got all that like you can understand you can read studies you've got some education experience certifications around there you train yourself you've done it enough to where you fit or you've been very very fit so you know how to do that and then you have enough application where you've gone and taken all those things combined that you've tested on yourself that you've read and studied about and then you got an applied and more than likely saw a lot of things like oh shit that surprised me or I didn't think that was correct that's so important I got proven wrong with clients so many times it taught me so much because I had an idea and then I got that one person that didn't work and I was like how do you because you're such a student of this kind of stuff and I can relate to that because I just have I'm so passionate about learning all of it I also like to learn about historical strength training wisdom because I think okay so I was going to ask you do you like to go back and look at like training methodologies of let's say the bronzera the soviet studies when the iron curtain was up we used to learn through books and there are books that we had and then if you were coming up as a strength coach in the 90s you had to have read super strength super training yeah you're at all mouse stuff and you know Virko Shansky you had Zads Djorsky's books the science and practice strength training you didn't understand it the first time you read it you understand like one tenth then the second time two tenths and then if you read it like the third time you get to like maybe you understand like 30 40 50 percent of it but like and now I can go back because mouse stuff was my hero just such a he died to or they died in his fifties from a heart attack but he was just a legend that critical thinking but not only those you read like Mike Mencer's heavy duty but related to those were brawn and and beyond brawn and for the brawn that was a Stuart McRober whatever the high the hit training one set to failure I think that okay here's this weird dichotomy Arthur Jones but this weird dichotomy because I saw the best results of my life when I started doing one set to failure yeah but for a short period of time that was at age 24 so I started lifting when I was like 15 16 so for basically eight years I did high volume and people would puke when they do my leg workout because it was like four sets of squats stiff leg deadlifts leg press lunges leg extensions leg curls hip abduction and hip adduction when I do when I do my I should have given them way less why was I trying to hurt people like so we all did that yeah stupid but anyway when I learned a new exercise I'd incorporate it but nothing went out I just kept adding yeah and so then I started doing I'm like one set how would you see results with one set but it intrigued me they had a following they mentioned Dorian Yates they mentioned I'm like okay I'm going to try two sets I'm going to do two sets instead of four sets I'll do two sets and I saw some results then I'm like okay I'm going on for eight months I gained so much strength I felt like then I really learned how to push myself with one set remember the breathing sets yes the breathing squats oh oh my god I did program that one we put that in one of our programs I did uh I did okay so my friend Larry and I back in the day I was like 24, 26 maybe this was my first garage gym and I bought a carport tent and I didn't have enough space so I put it at my mom's house but my Larry and I would have meet at my mom's house and I had a carport tent with a power rack interesting I made this wooden thing basically have you seen my T-Bell it's a loading pin with a like a cedar row handle basically kind of like okay and um but back then I made this wooden blocks with space in the middle and you'd stand on it and I bought a loading pin from Ironmine a cedar row handle and a carabiner and you'd load plates up but it was basically like doing trap bar delis put it with the inside the legs it's so comfortable and now I do those I have my BC blocks and I have the T-Bell I was doing those 23 years ago and basically I only had a few things though I had the power rack I had one pair of dumbbells 25 pound dumbbells I still have them at Glutelab San Diego and um but we started doing lunges with them me and Larry and Larry got 50 lunges and then the next week you know I tried you know I matched him then the next week he got 70 then I got 70 then the next week we got like 90 we started doing where we tried to do 50 steps in a row so 25 with each leg without stopping then you'd be like then you'd keep going so it got to a point after like I don't know say six or eight weeks where he got 200 steps but I got 170 but I have longer strides than him so I beat him in distance but we had a choose it was a 11 minute set oh my you have 11 minutes of holding 25 pound dumbbells your forearms your traps oh my god but that was the only time when I've ever then returned a heavy weight and I went up on my like 185 pound lunges from doing these 25 pound lunges because we pushed it so hard usually there's such a specificity to weight training yeah but that much of a great game yeah it was 11 minutes and I'll never do it again it's like I I've deadlifted 405 for 20 I'll never do that again it's good to tip but if you've done those breathing squats I think I did 225 for 30 and but it was like nine minutes it was like you do like eight and then oh it's terrible two more and then it's just this so I saw amazing results from it but I think that mindset screwed me because the logic was with Arthur Jones and Stuart Roberts Mike Mentzer was the only thing that causes gains like you have to do a little more than you've ever done before if you just do the same thing then nothing will happen and you that that further they called it like inroads into your recover like you have to do more than you've ever done before but that mindset's always I'm all about PRs that's I've always been about PRs and progressive vote but that that one set to failure and that's the only thing that matters anything else than that you shouldn't have enough in you to do a second set and now with like Brad Shonville and Krieger like their research show it's too far it's too far volume matters yeah volume matters people take the volume stuff too far and you know this if you train a lot of bikini competitors and probably male a lot of males do it too they just get volume overload where it's like you know they're doing so much but it's not quality suffers no no no no it's range of motion matters connection matters volume matters intensity matters recovery matters recovery matters and then you create a program and a formula and you figure out how to work it and then move out of things as the body tends to stop responding to the same kind of yeah stimulus application yeah we wrote a program called maps anabolic advance where we incorporated failure training but the way that I did it and this is pretty cool it works really well is you have a week of low volume failure training and a week of high volume sub volume failure training and that alternating tempo and there's much more to it seems to stretch out those gains that you get from failure because failure training you get gains quick but they stop fast for most people I wanted to ask you what you thought about because this is something that I think is hugely missed in our space by the way real quick yes sorry I want you to ask this question but the way I train people I was training my client Allegra during COVID quarantine times and you were breaking the law that was a good time good we all got so close during that time we all will say 2020 was the best year of our lives I know people were dying it was horrible but we got so close because we had nothing else to do I just let people in the back and put the construction paper over the windows and we had the time of our lives because that's all you wanted to do you're getting out of the house so they'd stay for three hours they'd come six days a week and I got them so freaking strong and during that time I was training Allegra and I call it the Allegra PR plan it laid the basis for what I did subsequently in San Diego all my girls started doing that and then it lays the basis for what I do with my girls now if I say to you guys with bench press because we all care about bench what's the most reps you've ever done with 225 275 315 you know it so you have like three loads and what's the most you've done with those loads you know well you write it down and then each day I want you to try to beat one something beat one of those PRs but you can have like five of them so let's say you're feeling beat up and tired well you haven't hit 185 for a while which you've done for 20 reps so you'll get 22 but it's not going to affect you as much as like but when you have it maybe we'll go for a new one rep max so then my girls we do this with the big six that's my strong lifting like my six favorite lifts are squats, deadlifts, hip thrust, bench press chin ups and military press so yeah they get and they're always going for PRs and then yes gains come into a halt so then you switched a new variation you do pause rep something you do front squats you do sumo deads you do deficit something that's different but you're then you're laying a baseline and then trying to beat it and it still lays the foundation for what I do it's so funny because it's taken me a few months to get my girls to have buy-in in Fort Lauderdale but now they're all loving it and I'm finally this last week I had all my girls crush crushing PRs and they're like wow like I'm starting to see results people are commenting on my glutes and people are and I'm getting stronger and they make that connection to being stronger and and setting PRs and they're physique changing which finally people understand but it's been a you've been in the space lungs we have hitting PRs and getting stronger especially for females wasn't even like connected to getting in better shape but we knew this is trainers like if I could get you to hit PRs get stronger the results are going to come we always knew like okay if you wanted bigger pecs yes hit it from the different angles but they're not going to grow that much unless you know when you see your friend with giant pecs and he can bench press 315 for 12 and you're getting 315 for one you're like I should probably not maybe not bench but if you like dumbbell bench you like incline these guys with the best pecs or do an incline with you know they can incline 405 and I can incline 285 I probably should work on growing my incline press for bigger pecs it wasn't just I need to add more exercises and hit more angles you actually just touched on something that we talk a lot about so it'd be fun to talk about with you I found that over years of training clients that someone who wanted to build their chest incline press it ended up being like one of the best exercises now I attribute that to I think most young men that want to build their chest they're better at flat bench so they end up just constantly going there so there's probably this novelty stimulus I also noticed with beginner clients one of the hardest things to teach a client is to retract and depress the shoulders while they bench press and not allow them to roll forward and that the arms and shoulders kick in and that angle on an incline bench kind of naturally sets the shoulders back in that place so have you experienced that with incline press with clients that are wanting to build their chest well it's funny because I think I liked incline just made more sense like upper pecs look so cool I remember seeing Arnold's up there and like I'm like I want that put a glass of water on it but like with women training women you know they have boobs so it made sense to me to focus more on upper of course incline press but also women who have implants a lot of times I'm like let's try close grip or let's try incline or even close grip incline if you feel the stretch well we won't do it but you might be fine with them and usually they're like oh I didn't feel anything that's fine so but I just think yeah I love bench press from a straight point but I think from a pack hypertrophy incline wins yeah I need to make a good comment too about the implants is that you want to avoid deep stretched resistance with implants because of the way they're positioned and they're under the pack and it can cause problems or encapsulation issues and that kind of stuff yeah now I want to ask you about so this is something that is totally neglected in our space but if you look at the research and the data it shouldn't be neglected this should be a part of everyone's routine and if they haven't done it and if they do it they'll see very quick gains in very short period of time isometric style training what do you feel how do you feel about isometric style training as like the soviets applied it to their athletes and stuff like that yeah so it's like uh there's overcoming isometrics there's yielding isometrics so like uh explain if you if you have a a bench press and you just hover yes that's yielding but if you're pushing against uh and a movable object yeah a pins then it's overcoming but then there's also flexing and posing well there was a study by Brittany Denkel it was Jeremy Lenneke's group they did posing oh no they did sorry they did just flexing the biceps so this wasn't really isometric I shouldn't even go there but they but basically one group did dumbbells one group just flexed throughout the range of motion they saw equal growth so it's like melt sif in super training called it loadless training that's what I loved about mouse sif he didn't hate anything it was all science to him stretching pnf stretching posing he talked about a lot of bodybuilders noticed more density when they ramp up their flexing and so I like doing pause reps I don't do a lot of like isometrics for time and things like that I've went through those phases it's funny there's so much stuff that you know it's like we're four people in this room and there's this big giant bag of tricks and then you know of a hundred things and you're gonna like 20 of them you're gonna like 20 of them but you stick to things but I I'm fascinated by the science of it all you gotta try I think in in I think what we should be doing based on this long length stuff like yesterday I trained at a the 24 hour fitness and I did the hammer strength and it's like it's hardest at the top you can still finish off with a few partial reps at the end and then an isometric you know five seconds of pushing as hard as you can but as pure like programming actually just pure straight up isometrics I don't do that much of it I do pause reps but I would say I would think especially yeah I would think you could grow muscle would it be better then a lot of times I get annoyed when people point out like all the research on advanced methods is lackluster which I remember looking at all I did a presentation on this for the ISSN conference probably like six years ago drop sets have good research supporting it but aside from that forced reps negatives like nothing shows that good results compared to traditional strength training so people take that to mean you shouldn't do it but half the time you're training around injuries you can have a pec strain and do slow e-centrics with 225 do five five six second lowering and you only get four reps but you're like oh and it didn't feel anything on that strain or like maybe an isometric thing maybe some there's always if you've got 10 minutes and you need to do a quick arm workout you do drop sets you know and super sets and nobody ever applies advanced in the studies that I've seen nobody uses the it's like knowing when to use them exactly and like you that's why they're advanced you talked about pre-exhaustion yeah and then you said the research turned out to be opposite on that when you did flies and pec deck before you did bench press you end up using more triceps and delts and less pec so then you can use that to your advantage sometimes when I have people do 45 rehypers I'll have them do a set of leg curls on Nordics beforehand get rid of the hamstrings and they're like oh my god my glutes are burning so bad they end up feeling their glutes more when you pre-exhaust the synergists so it's just no one knows how to apply the things properly that's it I'm curious to hear about how you do isometrics so overcoming isometrics right this is this is for advanced people because I think there's a not all isometrics are the same okay it would be like saying every exercise is the same it's all considered isometrics but hovering or pausing is not or flexing is not the same as pushing against something as hard as you can that won't move the overcoming type of isometrics which would be the most advanced form in the study show activate the most muscle fibers and in a short period of time so here's the negative the negative is long-term doesn't the gains drop off very quickly but in a short period of time the gains are absolutely insane and so the way I and now here's the other part that's a benefit they don't damage that much they don't cause that much damage to the body so you can add it and it's not like really compromising recovery you recover really quickly yeah and my experience doing a set and you have to learn how to do these because this kind of isometric requires you really know how to activate and control your force but if you do it at the beginning of a workout with like a set let's say of overcoming you know with a squat or a press and then go to your traditional workout watch what happens it's pretty true were you doing the stretch the deep stretch so it depends if I'm looking just to activate as much as possible I'll do it in the part that I'm most comfortable because if you go in the stretch position and you overcome like in the bottom of a squat some people's technique and form and stability is not so great to where they could just drive as hard as they possibly can at the bottom you'll see things start to break down so I'll start you know above it and you still get that 15 degree carry over which was at the data shows but it activates muscle fibers like crazy I think for strength too like you know everyone's stronger at the bottom of the top you're especially with like deadlifts you have a weak point either struggle getting off the floor or you struggle with the lockout so I'm very interested in isometrics from a strength standpoint from isometrics I think for hypertrophy I'd be I know there are some studies for there's four studies looking at muscle growth and most of them will show greater in the stretch position but I wonder with glutes that's actually I just filmed a video I think it's going to go up today it's like 35 minutes I don't think anyone will even watch the whole thing but it's on this muscle length debate pertaining to glutes right so the first study I'd like to do is just standing glute squeezes versus seated glute squeezes Oh right and you know leaning forward and flexing your glutes as hard as you can where you're more in the flex position versus standing up because I feel more when I stand up I feel like I can squeeze harder interestingly yeah it'd be cool to see which one led to greater glute growth but it might depend on the muscle and the individual and I bet if you took some of your athletes and you had them do a super hard set of at the top glute overcoming absymmetrics for 10 seconds just hard as they can at the top squeezing and then they go do their sets I bet you would see some so that's interesting I've thought about that a lot because there are some power lifters there's my friend Steve Clevver he was a he invented this deadlift lever thing that sells on rogue it's really nice but he was a really good natural bodybuilder and power lifter but he got dequeued on a squat once because what they would do is they'd squeeze their glutes right before and then drop down on the squat and they can't have movement so when he squeezes glutes he'd go into some posterior pelvic tilt Lane might have done that too back in the day they'd like squeeze their glute and then drop down and I wonder if it had any post activation potentiation effect like sure if you squeeze the glutes and then you go down I'm sure yeah it was interesting because why would you do that if it didn't give you an advantage one of the things I like about you is that and here's where I think a lot of trainers and coaches miss now obviously most of what you do is around development hypertrophy you train a lot of people who are looking a particular way or you want them to look a particular way however you borrow a lot of training from other strength sports powerlifting Olympic lifting athletic training and I think people miss out on this like bodybuilders only look at stuff pertaining to bodybuilding but they could learn so much from the techniques of power lifters and Olympic lifters and like I learned frequency training I learned incredible benefits from frequency with Olympic lifters Olympic lifters practice all the time I learned about progressive resistance chains and bands yeah from power lifters yeah I think it's stupid that people don't let I notice that you do this I notice in fact that you do you'll teach how to feel the muscle which is bodybuilding but then you'll also teach how to practice the exercise which would be powerlifting practice the movement I'll give you an example I have a hack squat machine and I have three hack squat machines but anyway different locations but my hack squat in San Diego is a little bit less angle so you can use more weight for some reason that thing it's a nautilus and I have a Cybex in Florida that's steeper when it's less of an angle you can push it's almost like the breathing squats where you could it's like gets aerobic you can keep going one is hard and somehow you end up getting 10 and it annihilates you like it's too much your quads get too sore from it so I've done 10 reps with five plates that's my record and this killed me now I've also I take a trap bar I take a hex bar I put it underneath the seat and then I stretch a band from that from the peg to the peg okay and I put the strongest band we have I have to have someone on the other side doing it exact same time as me and then I put a smaller purple band so I put the thick gray and then the purple and my record's 10 it's they're both so hard to do the bands make it easier at the bottom but hard at the top but it's still it's really hard to do but I don't get sore from that so okay if you just did three sets of each which would grow your quads more probably the straight weight but I could do the bands twice a week that's right I couldn't do so that's what that's this whole theory of squats versus hip thrust yes I could hip thrust more so this equating volume thing the four of us would do whatever it took yeah right we're not so yes maybe the long-length stuff and the peak torque in the stretch is best is best but maybe we're if we just get myopic about that you're missing out like if you could train biceps you're only going to do preacher curls and dumbbell incline curls are you going to throw in concentration are you going to throw in the concentration curl you're going to throw in the the drag curl where you feel it more at the top I'm going to do both until we learn more I said we're all building a house we'd be a fool to only use a hammer like why would you not could you build a house just a hammer why would you not use all the tools at your disposal and instead of getting an argument of which tool is better for building this house it's like all of them have an application and if I have access to all of them I think I could build the best house yes this is why I think it's so important to train yourself and train other people because on paper for example a band attached to a bar and then down at an anchor or a band attached to the bar and then up at the top of the squat rack essentially do the same thing they make the exercise easier at the bottom harder at the top they don't feel the same at all same thing with the chain I could put a chain on a bar and yes if the resistance gets lower at the bottom comes up use chains it hammers your body way more than I could do bands very frequently I put chains on the bar and it's beats me up totally different so I'm going to program them totally different you wouldn't know this if you just looked at them like data you'd have to actually apply it and see for yourself and then you'd know oh bands I could do them way more often I'm 47 low bar squats give me this or we call the arm pain of death just you're already going to get the arm pain from low bar squats in here because you're holding super tight yeah it's it's and then your bench sucks and it's not a muscle it's like the bone but I think it comes from the nerves it's like the brachial plexus or something anyway so I so I started doing more high bar squats but even high bar can do it sometimes if I'm like flexing a lot so I said you know what tired of my upper body getting compromised because of squats I'm just going to do safety bar squats when I do safety bar pitches me forward it's I hate it but it's so much quads and I'm so weak at it but I did six or eight weeks of safety squat went to high bar instead of PR yep I'm still learning at 47 I've been lifting for 31 years I'm still learning the PRs aren't very often anymore but I'm still setting PRs and I look at all the guys I was you know blogging with back in the day most of those guys they don't go for PRs anymore they don't you know they're they they peaked and I'm still trying to you know I'm still learning I'm still learning on myself and in trying new things and I so agree with that it's like how many exercises did I look at and I thought that that's stupid but then you get injured one day and then you try it you're like single leg RDLs off the off the hammer strength like deadlift mid-to-level squat lunge I'm like because I had a hamstring injury on one side but I could train the other leg and I'm like wow this works good and you know a lot of movements that you would have never done and then when you're injured I always say I learned 50% when I know from injuries but um this is how I this is how I really started learning how to value the the sled I used to look at the sled it's out for athletes for hypertrophy there's no eccentric so it's not going to build much muscle Joe DeFranco big big proponent of the sled he trains football players but I also respect the Halladom he's an amazing trainer yeah same Justin huge sled guy so I started using the sled and then this is where things get really fun is you notice something's strength in its weaknesses and then you see it as a puzzle piece of where you could plug it in you're programming what's great about the sled is exactly what I thought the weakness was no eccentric what does that mean doesn't hammer my body as much I could sled drive every single day volume up yep and I could hammer the volume all day long and oh my god and then I got the secondary benefits of stronger feet which benefited me in things like sports yeah so kettlebells I would know I thought it was so stupid and then you know I found I like kettlebells a lot of ways and I like especially when you get heavier kettlebells yeah but like sleds for that same reason they I remember seeing Juan Carlos Santana back in the day he's like because everyone started making this was like in the early 2000s when the physical therapy gained momentum and everyone was like you know this exercise is dangerous this and he's like look you you were trainers I've never had someone not get a good workout I've never had someone who couldn't push the sled yeah and it's so true we start to get so critical and that's back when the movement screens were you gotta be you know and he's like I can give anyone an awesome workout and sleds are amazing for that also backwards sled drags oh amazing if you have knee problems it's wonderful use it as a warm-up and your knee pain goes away and all of a sudden now you do your next exercise pain-free yeah it's such a good tool I love every tool and that's what makes me mad is that me being a aficionado of biomechanics and a student of straight training and an educator I want people to learn the benefits of everything so I hate these posts this is worthless this is literally useless this is garbage that's what makes me so mad is this new it's a social media era where why can't you just say like you you talked about earlier was with leg press versus squats it's like what I love about training but free weights I can like yesterday I put it on the my workout was like stack times 12 stack times 15 I can put it on the stack on most machines through barbell training if you can squat a ton of weight you can go to most gyms and max out the stack on the leg press the leg extensions you know what I mean and and so you get strong at everything if you just do leg press you don't get strong at squats if you do squats you get strong at everything so I always prioritize barbell training but I love everything I love every machine of course every exercise every method every tool has its place and you train enough people and you realize the pitfalls of everything and the benefits of everything you mentioned something else earlier because you make equipment and you talked about how you know try and find good equipment for a five foot tall woman free weights don't have that problem free weights follow the person whereas with machines a person has to follow free weights so I've never had a client that I couldn't use free weights on appropriately but I've had lots of clients that couldn't use certain machines because their bodies just didn't fit or move the way the track or the cable or whatever you know was in that machine however made it made them move whereas free weights mold to the person it's literally the most versatile piece of equipment my programs are centered on free weights but I've always been fascinated like it started with Arthur Jones he was the first go but he was like too he went too far he was so biased well he invented Nautilus didn't he he was yeah the Nautilus machines but he would make those cams and I'm so obsessed with these cams because you can oh you can adjust the tension my buddy has a Arturo he he works for he used to work for Jim 80 and there are this big manufacturer in Europe and he could like program in whatever he wanted it would show you the shape of the cam like they could like design so it's like do you want and and I love that old Strive now I think prime has it where you can load it up in different positions yes but if you look at the I'm so obsessed with this stuff like you look at the hammer strength squat lunge where you do deadlifts obviously it's called the squat lunge there's two loading positions the top loading pin as you come up moves closer to the fulcrum so that so the the resistance moment arms decreases so that loads up the stretch more but then the other loading position stays very linear so if you load up plates in that bottom position it's going to be around the same resistance throughout the whole but if you load up only the top it's harder at the bottom easier at the top so it loads up the stretch position more so that the Rogers pendulum squat has that too where you you can load up so you you could do them twice a week one where you have a more consistent one where you load up or you could use bands and only load up the top and it will be a cool thing to see if I just geek out on that stuff but now it's like they're saying well hip thrust like a lot of the long-length people like I heard Mike Israel tells hip thrust would be good if you could design a special machine a way to make it really hard at the bottom the problem with that is that it pinches units so uncomfortable at the bottom when you have it heavy loading I think that would be fine for people who are really good at hip thrusting but I think it would be terrible for the people that we talked about earlier who have trouble activating their glutes you want the activation to be at the top because that's where they can finally squeeze the glutes I think if you got someone like that and had it made it made it a machine so it was heavy at the bottom and easy at the top they would have trouble it wouldn't actually work very well and they wouldn't feel it very well they wouldn't feel it as would no because it works even better when you put bands on and stuff it might get even harder at the top but yeah, these machines with the adjustable cams they're not very popular because the average person is too complicated the average person goes in well, he made the cams to fit your strength curve so it's like oh, you test yourself and then it goes? no you can't do it individually you do it for the masses got it but like people in general you can take the average of us four and put us through a pec deck range of motion and it's like you're stronger here you're weaker here but he noticed that like he even said this back in the 80s or 90s he said some people are so weak in this position it takes them like three weeks of training just to be able to use good form because they're so strong in here so weak in here and I've always had such stronger pecs like I would just do pushups half range and dips half range because if I'd locked out on my dips I could only get 20 but if I stayed in the middle, mid range I could do 50 getting a deep stretch only come out here because my triceps are always so much weaker than my pecs looking back I was doing it the right way probably then full range became everything maybe we should have been like look at all bodybuilders they'll do like I was watching Larry Wills he did 405 for 10 incline the other day and his first seven reps were only to here and then I think he locked out eight and then like or like eight, nine and 10 he might have locked out but like his first seven and everyone's like partial you read the comments and everyone's bashing him but all bodybuilders tend to do that because they're trying to target their pecs well I was you were reminding me of our friend Ben Pacolski who we've talked about him and I have talked obviously about bodybuilding and he's a very smart dude and he said in his theory that people that have a lagging body part almost always if not always in his experience are weak in the in the contracted position of that muscle so that it's almost like if they have interesting yeah and so that he's had that he says almost every single time I've ever had a client who can't develop a body part when we measure and see how weak they are through that for it it's almost always they have a really poor connection or strength in that in that contracted position so I think it's funny I think what we'll learn in time right now the pendulum swung to stretch it's just like EMG got super popular and then it got yeah and it probably has some uses like I want to know I still care about EMG I still care about a lot of stuff but like with this length it's all long length now because I think there's 25 studies currently and probably like 22 of them show an advantage with training in the long muscle length but it's all on beginners almost every study is on beginners maybe it changes I know Paul Carter and Chris Beersy have that theory that over time you know muscles don't continue to grow longitudinally and we say there's two types of muscle growth the sarcomere genesis is sausage links you're adding more sausages to the links whereas myofibrillar genesis is more sardines than a can adding sardines so you don't just keep lengthening the muscle over time you do if you do static stretching like you will keep lengthening but eventually going through that same range of motion doesn't doesn't stimulate muscle length changes so all the growth would then become but it's too myopic because here's what's missing okay okay great we have 20 studies that show that training a muscle in stretch position is superior for hypertrophy you know what else those studies showed that mid-ranging interacted also causes hypertrophy not that they didn't and it's did exactly is that this is a little better but these also did so why are we going to avoid all of those ranges of the other ranges of motion to go for just the you know what's going to happen is you're not going to get better gains you're going to take away from the gains that you got from those other ranges of motion and that's what I think too yes and as a trainer I'm also looking at this fine your goal is just hypertrophy that's very rare that you're just trained someone purely focused on how they look and I also think it's irresponsible anyways a trainer to train someone's for aesthetics and cost them their function to the point where they because we've had bodybuilders in here that we filmed yeah for our programs we can't use them just to demonstrate certain exercises and they could not do a proper fully extended shoulder press because they always train in this so okay great you got nice looking shoulders but you have terrible function now when you go to the beach and throw a frisbee or whatever you hurt yourself that sounds silly to me doesn't make any sense and I don't think you grew more muscle because you avoided that range of motion I think you just avoided that range of motion in fact I think you would grow more if you also put you know focused on that's what we need to ascertain over time because I agree with you and like what we said earlier if you were training biceps you got four exercises wouldn't one of them be a concentration curl tight movement it's in the squeeze if you're doing pecs wouldn't one of them be like contract crossovers or peck deck where you're squeezing I would yeah I would have them all four or say all six exercises be stretch position do you remember that book from that might have been from the 90s thing it was called positions of flexion P.O.F. you know that I have both of them I went back and bought them off Amazon you're the first person I brought this up that remembered that book and they talked about that they said train of muscles stretched mid-range and contracted and that's just wisdom bodybuilding with them iron man magazines yes and I remember those from way back in the day because when I started doing my like writing for T-Nation and I wrote like advanced glute training methods and stuff my e-book I thought I came up with that and then I went wait sometimes you forget yeah you read it somewhere else and I'm like oh my god I read this in the 90s and that positions of flexion and I went back and bought them off Amazon I have them in my Vegas home and it's cool looking through them and going they got this right but they they didn't understand so I went explain it wrong sometimes well I went and got my PhD because I one reason was I was so annoyed I didn't speak the language I pretty much got my PhD because I didn't understand how to say that squats and hip does have differing hip extension torque angle curves I didn't know so I would describe it they have different angular kinematics I didn't know how to say that now I speak the lingo and then and then you I went through my probably like five years was trying to impress everyone and talk about hip extension torque angle curves and then you realize you're not reaching as many people so now I don't say that anymore I just say this one's harder at the top in the squeeze position this one's harder at the bottom in the stretch position and then people understand you do you have any favorite so we all joke around because I think that machines some have gotten better but I think a lot of them got worse I agree for the okay in fact yesterday being at the 24 of fitness the body master stuff was great no the body master the body master so it's great and they have these different knobs and stuff and some of the equipment that I'm like I think they're worse now yeah no so we talk about this all time in the name of safety and making it easier yes machine because you know machines I used to love I loved now they use cables or whatever like a nylon I don't know what it's called like a strap or whatever belt but the best machines I ever used to use the chain they use the chain Nautilus ones yes dude they were the best they feel so good but they were dangerous because someone put your finger in there you're gonna lose a finger and then there's a machine that we all joke around is if we see it we're gonna use it and it's the old school Nautilus pullover pullover are you so they have it at the that 24 of fitness you are either either Monterey or Parkmore Parkmore Parkmore yeah you're at the Parkmore they have an old weight training just go there just for that they have all the great bodybuilding stuff in there yeah that Nautilus it's so good no they have that if that room I've been there a long time but they have that one dedicated room that's great it's got all old school stuff on there for sure that's one of the better ones so I'm such a fan of everything the machines the equipment the history of training how the old time strongman the circus feats how you know the hip thrust oh I know that that was they used to do bench press they no with bench press they would people lined up on the bench oh no no this is how they'd get the bar to bend yeah yeah yeah so with hip thrust they did a pullover and press because you didn't have benches no and it wasn't a pullover like the exercise you just have to get it over your head clear your face so you'd have to kind of like go like that and then press it up and then people started realizing that if they bridged up they were stronger it was called the bridge press yeah yeah yeah so that was the bridge press and then people started realizing they could help themselves up so they catapulted up it was kind of like a hip thrust like a barbell glute bridge but they'd catapulted up and then catch the lockout and then this guy came along with crazy flexibility and just bridged it all the way up and arch arch arch arch locked it out and then came back down and then they're going okay he didn't even use his pressing muscles to get it to that position so they outlawed it but you could say that's the first loaded but it was for pressing they didn't do it for the glutes so they also did something called I think we call it hip lift where this is the most weight ever lifted or this was the being a bridge and you'd have like a like a horse like your knees and stuff well no they would be on their hands and their feet yeah and they would like they'd lift a horse like a horse yeah like stuff like that yeah I mean this is all I mean lost wisdom I think there's so much value in training you know but it's not popular because it's hard but it I'm I love you know thinking about man someone thought that up way back then or someone thought this up and and studying the trends and the history of everything I'm so fascinated we just wrote a whole program I would love old-timey strength I would love to send it to you like the bent press and like we we brought out back all these old movements some of the stuff like this the we read sacks and like all these yes I made a blog post all the lists named after people like George Hatchman yeah a lot of them are old yeah I I'll send you act squads are freaking hard like Barbara real ones we have them in there no no I'm gonna send you this program because you would love you would appreciate we went we bought a bunch of books and I'm a historian with this kind of stuff and we literally programmed I think it's serious strength by Alan Calvert that was written in the 1920s yeah I have a PDF of it I'll send it to you no no I think we have that book I think that's one of the books that we have oh really yeah yeah and then there was one by Eugene Sandow it's so funny you're reading it and he writes about taking cold showers and he says it invigorates the nervous system yeah how the hell did they even know like now we have studies that show yeah this kind of stuff but it's it's totally fascinating to me I wanted to ask you about this because there was a recent study that talked about muscle fiber hyperplasia and this is something that we've speculated on a long time and it's not necessarily what we think did you did you see the study are you familiar was it recent yeah and it showed that muscle fibers don't split and become new muscle fibers but they fuse okay so this that research dates by I think Jose Antonio yes in the 90s he looked at like birds and you know like like loaded the loaded stretching and showed hyperplasia in animals and it's always been talked about and if you talk to him he'll say you know no one's going to do this research because it's so painstakingly slow to count fibers and it's hard to do too so so it's always been talked about same with the whole sarcomeres and series about growing it's that's a that's been there's people that don't think that happens they think it's just but anyway with hyperplasia it's probably overstated like we don't grow a ton more muscle fibers you just grow the ones you have more but I think the problem is I think I think Andy Gopin's no he showed that you could change the the type one to type two and vice versa but like I don't think you grow a ton through gaining more more you know well let me ask you this because you're great to ask you've been working out for a long time we all notice this I think hyperplasia or something like it occurs it just takes a long time like years and years and years of training like have you noticed today that it's really easy for you to maintain a certain level of muscularity whereas in your 20s you had to like force feed yourself and train and act crazy just to get over a certain body weight oh my god in my 20s I was always like you'd get sick and you'd lose everything why though you're in your peak hormonal period right it is interesting yeah you know like it's almost like there's a I don't want I mean this is not an accurate term but it's almost like closer to like a permanence with you ever meet an old person like an old man who used to be a weightlifter doesn't even work out anymore yeah still got the forms still got the calves like where'd that come from so there's something going on there so that it's funny laid the basis for my the way I do booty by brat it's unlike any periodization system I've ever read about and what I what I start thinking was man if you guys wanted to set a chin up PR you could do it you just start doing chin ups three times a week first yeah fresh start hammering them fresh first first thing in the workout now but that strategy won't work for deadlifts start doing deadlifts hard as fuck three times a week because we can recover so I was like every lift has its own strategy bench press we could probably do it three times a week just don't also do incline and dips and everything else but it's like every lift had its own strategy if you wanted to maximize your bench your squat your deadlift your deadlift I would say deadlift hard one day a week then another day do some lighter stiff legs not not as crazy but then also do hamstring movements and stuff and it's like there's different lists that transfer as well so what I and then the research on maintenance was like crazy like guys doing three sets a week for a muscle group and maintaining their size and strength that study that came out how long it was not that long it was just the last year or two that they said one seventh of the volume is required to maintain I think that was an older study was it older oh I thought it was recent yeah no there was one study I blogged about it way back in the day oh okay it was like one ninth ah yeah I believe it I believe it that's me yeah I can train once a week and keep everything I just think that's fascinating as shit so that's what I start doing I was like look it makes sense because we read about periodization and it's always like volume and intensity that's all anyone talks about go you could have periods of accumulation where you're doing higher volume and lower intensity and then periods of you know higher intensity lesser volume kind of have them like that when no one talks about it's just assumed what you'd no one talks about exercise selection I've never read about you know you have like block training all these different dup and all these things but like in my opinion for glutes I want them being strong squatters strong hip thrusts or strong deadlifters but if you've done powerlifting it's hard to go like I feel like deadlifters always do all three there should be times where you focus more on your squat and not your deadlift and other times you focus more on your deadlift and not your squat because if you try to grow all three lifts but I started doing the strong lifting with just my clients where we compete with six lifts it's like powerlifting but with six exercises well we train for that and you think training for powerlifting is tough try training for six lifts so what I started realizing is you know I'd have a month where the squat was the focus you're still gonna hip thrust but you don't hip thrust for PRs it's just that's on the back burner you maintain it just fine and it's easy to maintain but the focus is on trying to set a squat PR at the end of the month so I would have I changed it because people got bored of it I thought it was so effective though there was a well-rounded month where you squat Monday hip thrust Wednesday deadlift Friday and then you're doing like four to six exercises for the glutes then month two let's focus on the squat and then I have an upper body lift to like bench or something or military you know but then then after that month your knees gonna be beat up if you're prone to getting FAI your hips might be beat up a little bit so then what a great time to focus on the hip thrust that's not gonna beat up your hips and knees so then I'd focus on the hip thrust that next month well you'd when you during the squat month you'd squat hard two days a week and then another day do a single leg lift like a laundry step because those transfer well the hip thrust week you can hip thrust three times a week now you're feeling good after the hip thrust month let's have deadlift month so you hammer the deadlift but on the deadlift month you're only deadlifting heavy one day a week you do 45 degree hypers one day because it's a similar movement pattern like weighted and then stiff legs another day you're still doing squat and hip thrust and abduction movement patterns they're just on the back burner more then after that month you do deadlifts your low back is gonna be beat up especially after week four where you really crush it so that's a good time to do a single leg month and then dumbbells for upper body more and that's a critical month because what you learn that month is I did all single leg stuff it's brutal because one set is really two sets you do like one leg and it was only and then you got to do the other leg it's really like such a hard month and you do the single leg month and you're like God you're worried like am I gonna go down the way I'm not doing squats I'm not doing deadlifts I'm not doing barbell hip thrust you come back and you come back and you're fine and it's good mentally for the people to learn that that you don't because we get so obsessed I have to have this in my program think about training in your 20s you'd bench even if you were messed up because you didn't want to lose your bench gains and then you learn that month but anyway you irons out and balances and stuff and then you return to the well-rounded month that was my kind of five month rotation for a long time and it was just I've never heard anyone talk about periodization that way about rotating exercises yeah that's our program that's how we write workouts Brett sounds familiar and it's all experience based I mean we had to figure that out I think you figure that out over time you do I can get this person to PR on their chin up or whatever we got to focus on it especially first you start lifting everything goes up but after a few years it's like you want to set up here you got to focus on something but then it's so easy to maintain totally totally well Brett I could talk to you forever especially if you go down the the path of geeking out on some of the stuff you're so passionate about it I love it I love that I finally met someone that knew the book P.O.F. I must have brought that up like three or four times and nobody knows that book so but it's a good time that's always great that was revolutionary in my opinion I agree train them also in the stretch the mid-range in this in the contracted position I agree and I encourage coaches and trainers I think this is I nothing taught me more than the following finding old books in manuals because fitness is so fad driven that we forget and it's no longer popular like there was a second there it was a while there nobody deadlifted nobody deadlifted in the gym now everybody deadlifts because that's the thing but there was so much time there for that well people forgot the wisdom of this incredible exercise so reading old books old magazines old manuals different strength sports like you will revolutionize your physique and your training you're studying history it's like it's important it's important in every field here where we came from right totally totally yeah well thanks for coming on man thank you any time I thought we were gonna delve into some social media stuff but oh yeah all right drama another time yeah time to get into drama stuff drama that was good no like like just the trends that it's going it's a different that's another time I get so frustrated with the algorithms these days you know it's the other day this this woman these two sisters made this post and and this comes up every it was happening 10 years ago with that Brazilian butt lift which is BBL but this was before BBLs were a thing it was the Brazilian butt lift by Leandro Carvalho he was a he was a infomercial in the early 2000s but he would they would say this trend like basically they'd show the gluteus maximus it would be like here's the glute max here's the glute medius and here's the glute minimus and it's like that's not the anatomy it'd be like if I was like guys there's like you know and I made up the biceps here's here's the the long head long head and here's the short head and like you're just making up anatomy the gluteus maximus goes like this and the glute medius and minimus are both up here the glute minimus is underneath how do you get away with that but anyway these girls made a video and there were yeah there we go this this um this this these two sisters made a video and it got 6 6.6 million views and now it's probably at 10 million more than anything I've ever done and ever will do and they're probably don't not scholars they probably believe it and they're they they don't that means you never even learn what anatomy you never even took an anatomy physiology class and that will get more never Google the picture of the gluteus yeah but here's a thing though Brett and I'm sure you could attest this I know we can you know we've now we've had we've been doing this for multiple decades but this is our eighth year of running this business yeah and you know we've never gone viral like that 3 million 4 million views on something overnight and yet the business has grown year over year year over year year over year and these people like this they may have this moment of time if they go yeah when they go at famous because they say something outlandish or that goes viral that's catchy or that's controversial and they get all kinds of attention maybe they make a bunch of money for this but then no one will talk about them they won't be around in 10 years selling something like I I totally agree with you my only annoyance is that like you said when you're getting slammed for programming sumo dead list because a few people decided to say this doesn't work the glutes at all that's what they were saying sumo only works the adductors and it's like do a set of sumo you feel it and then you're getting bashed and me as a scientist I'm going I could make any okay what would annoy me and you have to be a scientist to understand this I want my fellow PhDs and researchers on social media will you have to make it worth their time so like if I made a post saying here's the correct the glute max is here glute medius and minivus are here here's the exercise to do if I did a the correct version it would probably get a couple hundred thousand views or if I corrected them it would still wouldn't get nearly as much as their fake video so how do you control the truth how do you teach it didn't used to be that way and that's what frustrates me is like now PhDs won't want to be on the platform it's a waste of their time if you reward pseudoscience and you don't give legit scientists an avenue to flourish like we used to we used to be able to silence those types of people and now we have a strategy and I'll tell you what and with all due respect Brett you use the worst forms of social media because with the reason why we chose a podcast is because we could get on here and we can discuss and talk and if you listen to us you know right away oh that information was totally wrong they totally broke it I can't do that on Instagram it doesn't work on Instagram and then the second strategy is this our goal has always been to reach the masses but really to influence the coaches and trainers because who makes the biggest impact if you influence the coaches and trainers over the next five, 10, 15 years eventually you create the trends and that's our goal our goal is to reach the coaches and the trainers to get all these people and fitness that like to fight with each other because we're so damn tribal and say okay yeah let's find what we have in common because what's the real goal here the real goal is to win this war on poor health and we have the answer and if we all work together and we unify our message and start fighting each other over whether or not a lunge is more functional in a squad whether or not whatever like let's all unify and you know distill our message communicate to the average person communicate to the coaches and trainers and we'll win we'll win this battle you do a great job with that bro you guys do a great job too and I just want to say I appreciate I just love like you guys do that we do this podcast and then you guys take this the studio is amazing the quality is amazing it's um so these it's it's worth my time to come out here whenever you guys want and do a high quality you gotta ask great questions you take this very seriously and it's so cool because I look at this is intimidating to me because you say you picked the worst where people have told me to do a podcast for years but this is I appreciate look at the lights oh my god everything that goes into perfecting your craft you guys have crushed it so I appreciate it thank you for having me on I appreciate it and uh yeah in every couple years we gotta do another we'll do it sooner I didn't realize we let that much time go by so maybe we'll do something together too long yeah yeah we'll do something sure appreciate it man