Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2155: The Art & Science of Building Perfect Butts With Bret Contreras

Episode Date: September 4, 2023

In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin speak with the Glute Guy, Bret Contreras. His strategy for not charging his clients. (2:30) The creation of the ‘glute guy’. (10:04) The fabrication of a study. (16:15) Breaking down the recent study on hip thrusts and barbell squats eliciting similar muscle hypertrophy. (33:27) The benefits of the sumo deadlift for building the butt. (50:28) Respecting integrity over clicks in the fitness industry. (58:13) Your knowledge is a pie chart. (1:04:57) The wisdom from the older generations. (1:09:00) Hitting PRs and getting stronger in the process. (1:15:43) Using the incline bench to build the chest. (1:19:06) His take on isometric training for building muscle. (1:20:45) You’re missing out if you’re myopic. (1:29:08) The lost wisdom of old-timey athletes. (1:47:25) How much training is necessary to maintain muscle and strength? (1:51:24) His annoyance with the current state of social media. (2:00:30) Related Links/Products Mentioned Visit Seed for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! **Promo code MINDPUMP at checkout for 30% off your first month’s supply of Seed’s DS-01® Daily Synbiotic** "Visit ZBiotics for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! Promo code MINDPUMP23 at checkout for 15% off your first order!"  September Promotion: MAPS Symmetry | RGB Bundle 50% off! **Code SEPTEMBER50 at checkout** BC Strength - The world's best glute training products by Bret 'Glute Guy’ Contreras Hip thrust and back squat training elicit similar gluteus muscle hypertrophy and transfer similarly to the deadlift THIS Is The BEST Side Butt Exercise! Effect of 8 weeks of free-weight and machine-based strength training on strength and power performance Will Flexing make you Bigger? Posing for Muscle Growth Positions of Flexion and the Rep-Range-Overlap Technique MAPS Old Time Strength Muscle Fiber Splitting Is a Physiological Response to Extreme Loading in Animals How Much Training is Necessary to Maintain Strength and Muscle? Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources Featured Guest/People Mentioned Bret Contreras PhD (@bretcontreras1) Instagram Brad Schoenfeld, PhD (@bradschoenfeldphd) Instagram Paul Carter | Hypertrophy | Education (@liftrunbang1) Instagram Layne Norton, Ph.D. (@biolayne) Instagram Joe DeFranco (@defrancosgym) Instagram Ben Pakulski (@bpakfitness) Instagram Chris Beardsley (@chrisabeardsley) Instagram Andy Galpin (@drandygalpin) Instagram

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind, hop, mind, hop with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness health and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Alright, today's episode, we had one of the world's best trainers on the show. Brett Contreras, he's actually widely regarded as the person who popularized the hip thrust.

He's known for helping people develop better, but he's the glute man, the butt man. He helps women and men develop nice rears, nice back sides. He's an excellent trainer, science focused. The guy talks about studies, but he's also very experienced. And in today's episode, we talk all about training the butt. And then we get deep into the science

on building muscle, fat burning, better performance. We talk about expert exercise programming. It's a really, really great episode. We know you're going to enjoy it. And you probably already know who he is, but if you don't, you can find him on Instagram at Brett Contreras One so it's really really cool. This episode is brought to you by some sponsors The first one is seed. This is the world's most effective best probiotic

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You know what, 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 some shocking to me You don't charge anybody anything when they train with you. Yeah 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 were 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 didn't, and I'm like, it's not business like, because I don't like business license. Well, I probably still could have gotten sued. I don't But I was just like I'm just gonna get started. It's taking forever

So I start training Masha. She's my She's Persian. She's like high-level bikini competitor But everyone in San Diego wanted to be like Masha so they all followed her So then so I'm training like 30 bikini competitors. And I'm, I don't 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, because 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 the 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'd get so many views, they'd all be, I'm not, okay. If I show up wearing shorts, 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. My clients adore me Yeah, 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 clipboard. I better count reps. I better Be professional. I better not talk about myself or my day

It's all about them and I gotta be to be, I hate training one on one. Can't do it anymore. I hate the small, honest 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, on my client's surprise me, the award, George.

George's in a take-top. That's great. And they look like take-top. That's great. And they look like me and they all showed up. And 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. 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, they all talk, 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 all day long. And that's where I, I remember watching Louis Simmons documentary and I could relate to it so much. The passion. Yeah, that's what I just love doing. And I don't charge people for a couple reasons.

Number one, because then, yeah, they don't have expectations of me. They're just happy. They all love me But number two, it's giving back. I used to be a high school math teacher It's got still school district. I made my starting salary back in like I think it was like 2000 or something when I started But it was like $29,600 and then my six year with a master's degree, I was making like 34,000. So back then, my friends at the time were like real jerseys and stuff killing it because

before the housing market crash. And they'd be like, let's go out this weekend and I'm like, where are we going? Oh, let's go to the W. They charge cover there. It's expensive night guys. I got to stay in. No, no, no, we got you. And I'm like, I feel like it doesn't feel very manly having my guy friends carrying me with our bread. If you come, you're going to attract women, you're going to 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 going to, I'm going to 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 Lauderdes. 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, 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 him, like everyone, you know, companies paid a sponsor people. I'm not sponsored, they're all like, they tag me more than they tag 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 to, and I'm like, in the beginning when I sold my ebook 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 wanna 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 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 wanna give back. Actually, when you change their lives, or, you know, they've been working at 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 8, 10 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 going to throw on, how about you can do three plates or something.

You know what I mean? 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 belly and as I'm bleeding out, I'd be mad at you with you, like, Brett, I PR did and I'd be like, good job. Yeah. I had five on my way out, but I do. I care about people's fitness more than they do.

Yeah, I want to, so you're 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 gotta 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 making money. So it's not like you're living in a 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 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 going to Martin Rooney and he's like, you should call yourself the glue guy. I've never known anyone so into the glutes. And I'm like, yeah, I'm going to do that. I'm going to call myself the glue 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 a business for himself. He's going around patting people on the back and trying to. And he's like, son, 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, wow. And I remember it just right. You know, it 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 going to get them because I got all these new methods. I'm going to show people. But I was the only glute guy for like 10 years. And then now there's so many glute people.

You name it, there's glute doc, glute, glute poppy, everything you can think of. You know, I, but here was the turning point for me. And it's funny because I always credit my friend, Carrie and people are like, I told you that before her, but it doesn't matter as she got through to me. Sometimes it takes a few people. But yeah, Carrie was over at my house and my client, Carrie Northington,

she's a bikini competitor and a nurse. And she's like, Brett, you're the world's glue expert and you don't have a flagship glute program. Like, oh, yeah, 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 trademarked 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't you don't have to do any more work smart and so I went she's right. I probably had like say to 3000 members. I change it to booty by breath and made a an ad. I think I have that ad pinned but anyway. I think I have that ad pinned, but anyway, it went to like 6,000 overnight, then I promoted it and I think it's at around 12,000 members right now. Wow, wow.

Pinned 30 bucks a month, so. That's exceptional. Yeah, and so for obviously. That one revenue streams like probably like, I don't know, three to four million. I get most of that. That's the easy business because, you know, 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, that's, I do BC strength because I love, I also think at what age just glute guy become creepy, like I'm 40. I'm 47. Good foresight, that's what I said. I'm close.

I'm trying to stay fit, but like 55, I don't know, I'm not going to be a six year old glute. Will you a poll, will you a poll? Six year old. I'll write that on the way to the sunset. Had you known an expert on butts? Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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 can probably go to every machine in the gym and be like, this could be better. 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 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 boat got stuck, that 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. That's like crazy, people, and then, you know, FedEx, UPS, you'll order something, it's comes in two boxes, you get one one day, you get one four days later, and it FedEx, UPS, you'll order something, it's comes in two boxes, you get one one day, you get one four days later, and it's like, why did, you get shipped it at the same time, but people get mad, and I can relate, I get annoyed too. So, with that business, I try to have really good customer

service, like, because back when I first started ordering equipment, I ordered equipment in 2003, I remember, I spent like 15, 20 grand and it took nine months to get to me. Three. Nine months. Wow. And I was so annoyed 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 try to do a really good job with that.

But anyway, there I split the profits so many ways. I probably, with booty by bread, I probably get 80% of it. With BC Strength, I probably get 80% of it. With BC strength, I probably get 25% of it maybe, but. Right, employee shipping overhead. All that stuff. But it sounds like a lot of fun, especially if you're into biomechanics and training.

Yeah. One thing that 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, the questions, you know, 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 in a lab. Yes, yes. They'll just point to the studies all day long, but they haven't gone into love. That's actually the point that I'm going to, and that's the point that I'm going to go to is because you also have a lot of integrity, at least 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 in many different ways. Then this study comes out that shows that they're both very effective at developing glutes and you came out and did a post and talked about it. 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. This is the plot in study you're describing. I'm going to pull it up just so I have the title of it 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. Wait a minute. I love it. You can Google that. It's a preprint. It's not published yet, but it will be published in time. So the reason this study came to be is 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 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're trying 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's fake. And 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 Vagatsky, I called Brad Schoenfeld, and I'm like, I think all this, 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 know if we don't know if any methods just show that it's fake. Well then like one year later, I remember I was at the LA FIT Expo greeting everyone, it had to be in a 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 thrust. And I look at the authors and it's Barbalo and Gentile. And I'm like, I just knew right away it's fake.

But then 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 150 pounds on their hip thrust. They'll only put on 30 pounds, maybe, are 20 pounds on their squat, you know?

It's just the way it works. So, none of it added up from a practical perspective. So, I wrote this piece, critiquing it, thinking everyone was going to be like, hey, Brad, you proved that this study was fake and they'll got it back for it on me. It's the first time I learn, like, yeah, when you're successful, people kind of hate you. They really hate you.

And I went, oh, I had so many memes, like Brett refuses to admit the truth. And they made these buttons, like evidence-based or blight, like say the author doesn't, or the, yeah, like blame, 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 or 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 when 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 doesn't even come close. And if you read my critique of it, and the only way to know is because you actually train people. I actually train people every day.

Yeah, hundreds. So you have like hundreds of examples going like. So if you actually train people, 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 power lifters in 10 weeks from a shitty protocol.

The protocol was so silly, I even did one of the, I embedded the video, I know and 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 it to failure. You do a set of 15 to failure, and rest 30 to 60 seconds.

So she's a 200. My niece 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 like eight reps with the bar. And she couldn't sleep on her stomach for because her quads were so crippled. Her quads were so sore. So it's so fake anyway. So I'm talking to some of the evidence-based people including menohanselmen and I'm like, man, oh, this is fake. Just trust me.

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 about a $13,000 ultrasound machine and I'm like, I like like broad jump where it's like you chalk here, you, they jump, you chock, 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

glutes. 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 are like one of the obterator, like the deep hip external rotators or whatever. And you see a facial border. And with like, just not clearing out that one. 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? Hypertraffique growth? Muscle thickness. Oh, I see. And so, it was never even done, but anyway, when Mino and 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, out of nowhere, Mike Roberts connects with me. He's a research professor out of Auburn, and they're doing that stuff on like Sarko-American or Sarko-Plasmic 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 hypertrophy study using MRI?

He's like, yeah, we could do it. And I'm like, he's like, I got my student, Daniel Plockin. I knew of Daniel, Daniel Plockin. I knew of Daniel because Daniel studied under my Gizartel and Brad Shonfeld, like he, there was 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 going to die not knowing the answer to this. You know, told you how much money I make. 80 grand's not going to kill me. 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 were going to be. You thought, you know, you think you know what the results are, but this public, the study could have been published. I put in my mouth. I completely crushed you.

Oh, it would have been embarrassed, men. I kind of am embarrassed by the results, but anyway, we'll get to that. Which I, okay, yes, let's get there too. So, so I, I'm talking to Menno and I'm like, oh God, Menno's gonna like, Bach, when he hears how much this is gonna cost. He's like, I'll split it with you. Well, hold on there'm like, oh God, Mano's gonna like Bach when he hears how much this is gonna cost. He's like, I'll split it with you.

Well, hold on there, I just got a quote, it's gonna be 80 grand. He's like, okay, you'll contribute 40 grand. He's like, yeah, what coach does that? What person does that? That's a car, so he did it. We split it. 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 got to have universities do this and there's only so much manpower because people always critique studying, like, you should have had a group do that. You should have measured the lunge. You should have measured the audio. You should have measured the sing-like leg press. You should have had this. You should have had it. Why, you should have measured the lunge, you should have measured the audio, you should have measured the single 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 just, 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 Vagatsky and Andrew is my intern. He's now like the smartest dude.

He's too smart for anyone. He's like this Russian genius. I still call him and 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. I know, 21 and I'm like, 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 Vagatsky, Brad Shonfeld, Greg Knuckles, James Krieger. Those are the guys who then did the white paper on the Barbalo stuff. Barbalo and Gentile and show that this lab and they use the craziest statistical methods. Like they even made up methods that they wanted to publish the methods they used to expose them. And yeah, wonderful. They spent six months of their lives analyzing the data and basically showing without a

shot of a 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 these so many different ways, even like down to to like there's so many more even numbers that odd numbers like so there so the barballist of didn't didn't um It didn't match up from a practical or from this to you got to fool the to fake a study

You got to fool the the coaches and trainers and the 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 publish the fake study? Any idea? Do you know?

I don't know. It's so funny that I've never talked about this before. This is crazy stuff. So, Paulogen Till 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 far as and he's so like he will never admit that he faked his research. He doesn't, he's still like quotes them as if they're real, but he just hated hip thrust, he hated single

joint movements, he hated, I don't even think of the hip thrust as a single joint movement really, but like he hates, he hates high volume, he, all his, all his research would show that like, He's high volume. He, 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 Barbolo was a student where they and Kahootz together was, my test Barbolo was he trying to please his professor and like fabricate it.

But there's no way, because they even, even Greg Knuckles and the white paper, they showed that they're publishing way too many studies way more than any other lab. And like one of the studies involved so many people who 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 basically I just said, hey, we're on to you and then the researchers got so mad at me because I wasn't involved in it but they wouldn't let me, I'm biased, like they wouldn't let me head on it. It was like Andrew and Greg and Brad and James and I had no part in that because they're like, you're biased. It was.

That's what people would say, right? You need to be us trying to go after and get retractions. But I have speculation. It's, you know, you see this in other 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 would be 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 that was, I think you, but it was like, why did they, why are you thinking studies about high volume and about single joint stuff? It's like he went too far. Gentile sells books and has, yeah, but it's funny because so, so I wrote this email to Barba, like we're on to you. Your, your career is a researcher is about to be over, but I'm curious. Why did you do it? Was Paulo putting you up to this or did you do it to serve?

I'm sure he's gonna 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, right when I wrote my critique, Barbolo disabled his Instagram, and I'm like guilty people don't do that.

I knew it, I was calling my friends, he's guilty. He knows, he 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 Paulo published like we just did this study on the hip thrust It went viral and like I might made my critique. Yeah, right after my critique He disabled his account and I'm like he's guilty If you're if you're look at Daniel Pl, a real legit study. Daniel Plotkin's going on podcast talking about it. It is we're transparent. We'll give people the access to the data if they want it. They were, they were like that. So Barbara 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, oh, like Barbolo's like, uncle or grandfather or something or father or something is this J.R. Jator, J-A-D-E-R, Barbalo. And he's like a, he's like a, you can Google him on Wikipedia comes up. He's been involved in corruption. He's like a Brazilian like congressman or something.

He's been involved in corruption since the 90s. And they're like, what if something like backfires out of something, I'm like, what, oh, I get killed, you're gonna get murdered for exposing his, all right, for a study. He's probably like, you idiot murdered for exposing his head for studies. He's probably like, you idiot, why are you fabricating studies? I got so funny what people get scared about.

But anyway, yeah, there's this. And then now, if like, yeah, when this comes out, Gentile 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 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 this, 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 gonna 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, oh, you a beer. So I owe him a beer.

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? And 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 MG studies. We all hated the MG studies because you often feel something more, but it doesn't necessarily produce more results. However, I have a theory as to why you are going that direction and we'll get to that in just a second. But I think that you have a bit of a self-selection bias because it 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 hypertrophy and then maybe why it didn't necessarily show that. So, I wouldn't think, okay, like I've always, I've always liked the chin up. And for years people would say, why would you chin up? Wide grip pull downs 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 we need research on that. But basically, in this study, since squats and hip thrust tied, squats stretch you a little bit more, hip thrust activates you a little bit more.

What could be the case? It's either two scenarios. Number one is that 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 Titan connects to Actin and Titan

ends up being a very stiff segment. And that's probably a big signaler of hypertrophy. So to have like muscles activated and then stretched 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, like chasm and Mike Israel would probably be like tightness everything.

I don't think I've heard him talk about that, but Kazim 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 gonna go off on a quick tangent and then I'll get back to the story results and in EMG I've trained like like Yerishna and Bobby Mono. These are wellness competitors when I moved to Florida. And oh my guys, you're being told that your legs overpower your glutes. You could get your legs big any time. We got to 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 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 and the gluteator it's like Targeted glutes and this multi-hip hammer strength where we're gonna kick back the 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 over and I'm like, I want you, you're issuing your hip-dusting three plates for 18 reps. You need to get to 20 then we're gonna go with three plates and a 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 within like two months, their glutes look totally different. Their glutes respond. They're growing. So this isn't just something theoretical, like I put it to practice and I'm not giving them the long-lite stuff. And I do think the long-lake stuff works. Well, it's just that that fatigues you a lot.

You take out squats and deadlifts and walking lunges and now you don't get sore really. You can hammer these movements three times a week easy. So I feel like I'm putting that to practice. And if those guys said, well, I'll take squats and lunges or RDLs or whatever, single like leg presses, it's okay, you create a program and I'll create my program and I wish we could have like a dual off. Like we vanish for nine, nine, ten weeks and then, you know, you do pre-testing and 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. Yeah, so the biggest loser. The co-job. Yeah, I know. Like it's booty. I don't know which I could do. That's what I wish I could do because you have your theories. You have your studies.

But 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 sarcomere's pulling together, there's something in the middle in between those sarcomeres that gets activated like this Henning Walker Raj's Brad Shunfell's colleague 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 three, bag C, or bag C, filament three, 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 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 is 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 have so much to learn. Are there multiple mechanisms?

And so I'm leaning towards hip thrust, growing the glutes through different mechanisms, through maybe that back three, philoman, back C ph C filament three, whatever it is. And then maybe the, maybe squats grow the glutes more through the tight mechanisms or maybe it is simple and it's mostly just the tight mechanism, but hip thrust do put you through enough range of motion. People act like they just don't work you through a range. It's like, they get you in about at least 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 mechanism. So in a hit press, It beats the squat with that. 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 know. You knew that they'll go in before. I mean, I wouldn't guess that even without seeing. I mean, it's, it's closer to an isolation exercise. It's like glutes are directly opposing the way. But there's always more to the story. Like people will think, Oh, Brett thought EMG was going to matter. 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 glutes, squad girls. And the reason I looked at this is there was this controversy going around back.

Remember the seated hip abduction sucks. It's the worst exercise. It works the piriformis, not the glute max. And I'm like, because it works the glute 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, so you're making me do a piriformis exercise or something like no, it works the group max. 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 a squat, you do feel your glutes a little bit, but 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 positive 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, 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, 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 use muscle modeling, you know, open sim is what biomechanics use. And with the muscle modeling, it shows that you get peak active force in the glutes right around neutral. So that's where to me, you're gonna get the most signaling, doing exercise that hits you at neutral,

and then passive force, like with like the semi-teninosis, here's peak active force and passive forces like triple as high. So it makes sense to stretch that muscle because you get such high passive forces, but with the glues max, you didn't get that high of passive forces. So it's like they're probably not that good of signolers. But then I saw a different model published and I went and looked at that, downloaded that model, and it had a whole different curve. This model had active force peaking at 30 degrees of hit flexion, and then passive force was very low.

And I'm going, why 30 degrees of hit 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 gluteus mexas, especially because like probably 75 to 80% of fibers

attached to fascia. So it's like that wasn't measured, they're modeling, they're trying to make it fit. And so they're making a model that fit deeper hit 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 beginners and the protocol we use, which was twice a week. If we used advanced, maybe different results would be seen. If we used higher volumes of 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 butt building exercise. I also know, for a lot of people, the barbell squat is as good 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 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 the interested in? Glutes. Okay. Now why are they hiring you? Just a struggle. Because they're quads grow faster, their butts 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,

well 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 do a lunge, you have them do a hip thrust and focus on the squeeze, all of a sudden, 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 gonna be identical. This person squatting might use more glute and hamstring. This person might use more quad. This person's gonna have more erector spinae, 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, dead lifts and stuff like that, the hip thrust is gonna crush for you. If you're the average person and everything works the way whatever it should, then you're probably gonna be okay. But by the way, you probably should do both. That's 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 fatigues. 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 chains or technique and form enough To activate and feel the most because now they know what there's 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. 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 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, definitely a theory, and I think there's merit to the people find me or the the people and not just that they respond best to glue They they're gonna 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 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 of people lost muscle. Interesting. lose muscle in your beginner training for like nine weeks. How do you lose muscle? But a couple of people lost muscle. 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 interesting. Yeah, and also, maybe there's really good responders and really bad responders. I hope there's 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 the 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 to, 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 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? 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, everyone used to agree that Suma was best and then Casm came in and this is when Paul Carter was Team Casm and now Paul Carter is Team Chris Beardy. So when Paul was Team Casm, they both Became adamant like and they're so vocal and Paul so Paul Cours so

That's a guy you got into with you the run life lift run bang. Oh, he's super secure in the visual But he got like JPG that guy on tiktok. He's got like I mean looked lately, but he got like, JPG, that guy on TikTok, he's got like, I mean, he looked lately, but he had like four million back. Sure. Like a year ago, so I don't know what he has now, but that JPG guy, Dr. Oz has more followers,

well, now it tells you a little bit about that. Thomas, that means, but Eugene, Tae-O, all these guys just started parodying them. And that's the, that's where I kind of realized, oh my God, you want to make money positioning 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 Kaz Glute Bridge.

That's a hip thrust pulse. It's just a 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 thrust named after him. That's what I'm like. But it was like, don't do sumo, do narrow stands for the stretch.

So that's the argument. Stretch versus activation, which is more important for glutes. This plot can paper show that they might be equal. We need more studies, but so far, what we have to go by is maybe they're equal. So what would be cool is to have a conventional group and a, and a sumo group. Now, there's only one EMG study on this. This is Eskamele 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 10 papers on this, probably 80% of them show higher EMG activity

when you go wide, because when you abduct an X-Toy and rotate, you put your knees out. You, well, you put, you better align the fibers in my opinion, some of the fibers are gonna be more in alignment, and it would make sense for maybe you improve the leverage, the moment arm improves, and then 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's called Neural Mechanical Matching, the nervous system senses when you have good leverage of a muscle and it activates it to a higher degree. And I thought that made sense way back when I was getting my put, 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 first year PhD thing and they liked it, but they said, where's your evidence? And I'm like, well, it's just more than it makes sense. There's not a lot of evidence, but why would the brain or the nervous system do that? And now we have evidence with 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 the sumo, but I'm a big fan of sumo. Now people love it on leg press, on squats, on dead lifts. So we need to learn more about that, and more about the, 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. So, but it could still be that like delts, like maybe cables are superior to dumbbells. But my thing with that, just to get on a little side tangent, people always talk about like,

because I do cable batteries, 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 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, nothing here. Whereas the dumbbells, they're basically 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 here, and you're trying to lower it under control, you're fighting it all the way to the bottom. That momentum, you're still working the muscle in 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 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 changing the momentum, temporarily, it actually does weigh quite a bit, because you have to stop. You're working hard, you're working hard in that range still, right? That's right, yeah, that's right.

This is when science annoys me because people get so myopic on all these different, whatever, and honestly, it's 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, it's probably gonna be better for you,

or at least be super valuable to you, more so than somebody that doesn't have trouble. That's right, the point I was gonna make, you made already, why I would say the sumo on 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 deadlift to stretch the hamstrings. So I'm team Sumo. But also just train bikini competitors. They love their Sumo. I always say this, people would become experts or the ones who care about it the most. Women, there's a study showing that they do 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 know, 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 exercises? We don't have different answers. Look, you can't. What are you going to do? 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 and of story. So a simple example is, hey, what's the best, most effective form of cardio? A good trainer's always gonna be like, well, which one do you like the most?

Because that's the one you're gonna do. Yeah. The other ones you're not gonna do, and then I can 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 strengthen muscle gains of the leg press were slightly better than the barbell squat and it was a short study. It was like eight weeks long. They took beginners and they found that the strengthen 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 100 beginners off the street, they're going to learn how to do a leg press very quickly and very quickly, they'll be able to apply a lot of force. It's going to 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 technique and attention. That argument was used. There's this guy, Chester Soko, something. That's just this guy, freaking, worst scientist,

but he uses it to, like he's, he's so biased against long lanes, but that he just ripped our study apart and said, I, he thinks that like, he's one of these conspiracy guys and thinks everything's just, well, Brett, fun to the study and Brett, like I had nothing to do, he can all do the study. The squat, the hips rest, the crush the squat.

What an idiot you are. Well, terrible. It did, but he like doctored it. But anyway, he thinks that it was just me planning the methods, and I'm like, how can I come up with a way to give this, 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 throws the advantage. I think it's the other way. I think squats had the advantage with this study because probably, 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. You think four, you'd have to significantly reduce the intensity. Yeah. So for progressive overload, two times a week is pretty, yeah, for squat, but for hip thrust, if that's all you were doing, four, three or four, yeah, three or four, eight. And so I think for that reason, hip thrust don't beat you up as much. You could hip thrust more frequently. And in research, you've got to,

to get it published, you've got to quate volume. But in the real world, you don't have to quate volume. You can write whatever program you want. That's why those studies that show that frequency, doesn't matter as much if you quate for volume, but the reality is you take the average person, you haven't divided up the volume, they would do one day over four or five days

or three days over time. They're gonna do more volume because they're gonna be working out more consistent. They're gonna miss one volume while fresh, more quality volume. And also quality volume. Yeah, I agree with that too. It's funny because like with that research,

I'm like, that can't be, like you can't, and I hate when people, because like I said, I'm in the gym working with people. There's no, can I say the awkward? There's no fucking way that training 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, 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 bodybuilders are doing it wrong and I'm like okay I've always been assigned is 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 be the gym two for two hours a day, 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 compares 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 hardcore like, you know, that stretch the muscle a lot, vertical hip extension exercise. They're doing horizontal, those don't tax you as much. It makes sense when you do it, but there's no way you could say, Some hardcore like you know that stretch them also a lot vertical hippoc I'm hard core like you know that stretch the muscle a lot vertical hippoc You know that stretch the muscle a lot vertical hippoc that's 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 any logical person who read the study should conclude, you should probably do both, but that's not what happened. The, I was very disappointed because I'm the only person to the set I was wrong. Yeah, that's the best. All the people who ever posted the Barbala study,

oh, I hate to say I was right. None of, I only know of Lane Norton who said guys I was wrong about this. Lane's another guy's got a love integrity with that stuff. Yeah, Lane, I know, is arguing with someone 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 to go get science Same take it. He wants a touch of integrity. Yeah, he can be an asshole for sure But I respect his integrity and let's be honest in the fitness space How rare is integrity? 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 multiple 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. Yeah, if you only train for 10 weeks but train someone for two, three years and you'll find they got a train low reps, they got train high reps, they got train moderate reps. And at some point, it depends on the exercise too. Also the exercise. Try and do standing cable hip abduction in the sixth rep range. It's, it doesn't make any sense. He's gonna do high reps with that, you know?

Doesn't make any sense. You know, lateral raises, like it beats you up to it. 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 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. Yeah. And that's super important as something that people don't ever really consider when it comes to the study.

There was a study supporting that. Like that whole theory of when you activate and grow a muscle, then you start, in court, 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 we can probably fill out glutes with anything. Like some people can't, they're like,

they're still, they're like, I don't fill my glutes with that. And I'm like, how do you not fill your glutes? I can feel it on any movement now. Do you know where I learned that the first time was I did, no mic mentor. 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 compounds or one of the supersets was dumbbell pullover to pullups. And it was the first time as a kid, I ever got a pump of my lats.

Now after I was able to get a pump of my lats, from then on I could feel my lats when I did pullups, whereas before it was all arms as a kid. And that's when I pieced it together and said, I gotta 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 thing. 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? I don't know if it's on. And like, 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 wanna say have that same feel. Yes. And then everyone's like, I remember staying at a hotel, and I was going to dinner with a girlfriend, like this was probably 12 years ago or something,

but the hotel had a universal gym. Remember those old schooled universals? And I went in, I just, I had like 20 minutes to kill before I just shower and I just did like four sets of like whatever on the universal, but I don't 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 those are first time I really used my lats during a pull down, like just isolated, they're like not isolated, but like targeted them, you know? And 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. It's like one third, you learn so much from training yourself, but you gotta work out and experiment. And then the other third is through training other people, because we're all so different. I've just heard training grows six, one, but our legs are longer than mine.

And 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 this 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 will now, now I'm probably more of it's bad than good. I like that, really, that really highlights. I mean, we talk 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 thing. That's a perfect idea. Yeah, 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 got to take in all those things combined that you've tested on yourself, that 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've gone and applied. And more than likely, saw a lot of things like, oh shit, that surprised me, right? 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, of this kind of stuff? And I can relate to that, because 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 wasn't asked you, do you like to go back and look at like training methodologies of let's say the bronze era,

or the Soviet studies when the iron curve was up. We used to learn through books and there are books that we had and then if you were coming up as a straight coach in the 90s, you had to have read super training. Of course. You're at all Mellstaff and you know, Virkoshanski, you had Zadzyski's books, the science and practice of the straight training. You didn't understand it the first time you read it,

you understand like one tenth. And 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% of it. But like, and now I can go back, because Mel Siv was my hero. Just such a, he died two or they died in his 50s 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 beyond brawn. You're the strongest man. You're the strongest man. That was like a Stuart McGraw, whatever, the hit training, one set to failure. I think that, okay, there's this weird dichotomy out of the joke, but this weird dichotomy, because I saw the best results of my life when I started doing one set to failure. But for short-period. 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 abduction. When I do a new kit, I should have given them way less. Why was I trying to hurt people? So stupid.

But anyway, when I'd learn a new exercise, I'd incorporate it, but nothing went out. I just kept adding. 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 gonna try two sets. I'm gonna 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 feel like then I really learned how to push myself with one set. Remember the breathing sets? Yes. The breathing squats? Oh my God.

I did program that one. Yeah, we put that in one of our programs. I did a, I did, okay. So my friend Larry and I back in the day, I was like 24, 26 maybe. This is 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 Lairon 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 if you see my T Bell it's a loading pin with a like a Cedar O handle basically kind of like okay and um loading pin with a like a Cedar O handle basically kind of like okay and 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 iron mine a Cedar O handle and a carabiner and you'd load plates up But it was basically like doing trap bar delus But it with the inside the legs. It's so comfortable and 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 Glutlaib San Diego. But we start doing lunges with them, me and Larry. And Larry got 50 lunges. And then the next week, I matched him. Then the next week, he got 70. Then I got 70. Then the next week, we got 90. We start doing where we try 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 to choose it with 11 minute set. If 11 minutes, oh, holding 25 pound dumbbells, your forms, your traps. 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 but that much of a great game. Yeah, it was 11 minutes and I'll never do it again. It's like I've deadlifted 405 for 20. I'll never do that again. If you've done those breathing squats, I think I did 225 for 30. But it was like 9 minutes. It was like you do like 8. That's terrible. 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 Rower's Mike Mensa 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 and nothing will happen and you that that further they call it like inroads into your recovery 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 over, but that one set to fill in, 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 Brad Schumfner and his Krieger, like their research show, it's too far. It's too far. Volume matters. Volume matters, people take the volume stuff too far. It's too 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 mail a lot of mail to it too, they just get volume over load,

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, connection matters, volume matters, intensity matters, recovery matters, recovery matters, and then you create a program in a formula and you figure out how to work it and then move out of things as a body tends to stop responding to the same kind of stimulus application. Yeah, we wrote a program called

Maps and Abolic 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-failure training. And that alternating tempo, and there's much more to it, seems to stretch out those gains that you get from failure. Yeah. 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 schedule. By the way, real quick. Yes. Sorry, I want you to ask this question. Yes. But the way I train people, I was training my client, Allegra during COVID quarantine times and you were breaking the law. 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 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 a legra and I all I call it the the Allegra PR plan It laid the basis for what I did subsequently in San Diego all my girls started doing that and then then it lays a 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 right you know it so you have like three loads and what's 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 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 gonna affect you as much as like but when you have it

Maybe we'll go for a new one-wrap max So then my girls we do this with the big six. That's my strong lifting, like my six favorite lifts are squats, deadless, hip thrust, bench press, chin-ups, and military press. So yeah, they get, they're always going for PRs. And then yes, gains come to a halt. So then you switch to a new variation.

You do pause rep something, you do front squats, you do sumo deads, you do deficits, something that's different, but 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 crushing PRs, and they're like, wow, like I'm starting to see results. People are commenting on my glutes,

and people are getting stronger, and they make that connection to being stronger, and setting PRs and their physique shape. Which finally people understand, but you've been in the space longs we have, hitting PRs and getting stronger, especially for females, wasn't even connected to getting in better shape, but we knew this is trainers.

If I could get you to hit PRs and get stronger, the results are gonna go. We always knew, okay, if you wanted bigger packs, yes, hit it from the different angles, but they're not gonna grow that much unless, when you see a friend with giant packs and he can bench press 315 for 12, and you're getting 315 for one, you know, when you see a friend with giant packs and he can bench press 315 for 12, and you're getting 315 for one,

you're like, I should probably, and not maybe not bench, but if you like dumbbell bench, you like incline, these guys with the best packs are doing incline with, you know, they can incline 405, and I can incline 285, I probably should work on growing my incline press for bigger packs.

It wasn't just I need to add more exercises and hit more angles. Totally. 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, and 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, and so there's probably this novelty stimulus. I also notice with beginner clients, one of the hardest things to teach a client is to retract and depress the shoulders, why they bench press and not allow them to roll forward and the arms and shoulders kick in. And that angle on an incline bench

kind of naturally sets the shoulders back in that play. 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, I'm like, I'm like, I want that.

But it's a lot of on it. But like with women, training women, you know, they have boobs. So it made sense to me to focus more on upper pal, or 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, 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, it's nice. And you need to make a good comment to you 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. 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 about isometric style training as like the Soviets applied it to their athletes and stuff like that? Yeah, so it's like, there's overcoming isometrics, there's yielding isometrics. So like, if you have a bench press and you just hover, that's yielding, but if you're pushing against

a pin, it's overcoming. But then there's also flexing and posing. Well, there was a study by Brittany Dangle. It was Jeremy Lannicky'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 basically one group did dumbbells, one group just flexed throughout the range of motion,

they saw equal growth. So it's like, Maltsef in super training called it loadless training. It's what I loved about Maltsef. He didn't hate anything. It was all science to him. Stretching, pan-F 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 going to like 20 of them. You're going to 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 what we should be doing based on this long length stuff. Like yesterday I trained it a 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 isometric, 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, I did a presentation on this for the ISSN conference probably like six years ago.

Dropsets 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 5-6-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, in supersets.

And nobody ever applies advanced in the studies that I've seen, nobody uses the... But it's like knowing when to use them. Exactly. And like you talked about pre-exhaustion. And then you said, the research turned out to be opposite on that. When you did flies and peck deck before you did bench press, you end up using more triceps and delts

and less peck. So then you can use that to your advantage. Sometimes when I have people do 45 rehypers, all of them do a set of leg curls on Nordics beforehand. They're really hands-free. 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 curious to hear about how you do it. So overcoming isometrics, right?

This is for advanced people, because I think there's 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 this 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, so here's the negative. The negative is long term doesn't, the gains drop off very quickly. Been 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, 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 over 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. Do you do it in the stretch, the deep stretch? It 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 to see things start to break down. So I'll start, you know, above it. And you still get that 15 degree carryover, which will let the data shows

But it activates muscle fibers like crazy. I think for strength to like, you know Everyone's stronger at the bottom of the top You're especially like dead lists. You have a weak point either Strong getting off the floor or you struggle with the lockout. So I'm very interested in isometrics from a strength with the lockout. So I'm very interested in isometrics from a strength standpoint. From isometrics, I think for hypertrophy, I know there are some studies. There's four studies looking at muscle growth and most of them will show greater in the stretch position. I wonder with glutes, that's actually, I just filmed a video, I think it's gonna 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. So the first study I'd like to do is just standing glutes, glutes, quises versus seated glutes, and leaning forward and flexing your glutes as hard as you can where you're more in the flex position versus staying 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, gloot overcoming up some metrics 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 the thing I've thought about that a lot because there are some power lifters. There's my friend Steve Klaava. He was a, he went to 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, de-cute on a squat once because what they would do is they'd squeeze their

glutes right before and then dropped down in a 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 they like squeeze their glute and then drop down and I wonder if 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 other thing I like about you is that and here's why 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 pertain to bodybuilders, but they could learn so much from the techniques of powerlifters and Olympic lifters. And like I learned frequency training. I learned incredible benefits from frequency with Olympic lift, 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. From power lifters, 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 HAC squat machine and I have three HAC squat machines, but anyway, different locations, but my HAC 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, it 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 set 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. And I put the strongest band we have. I have to have someone on the other side doing it at the exact same time as me. Then I put a smaller purple band. I put the thick gray and then the purple.

My record's 10. They're both so hard to do. The bands make it easier at the bottom, but hard at the top, but it's really hard to do. I don't get get sore from that. So, okay, if you just did three sets of each, which would grow your quads more, probably the straight way, but I could do the bands twice a week.

That's right. I couldn't do, so that's what it, that's this whole theory of squads versus hip thrust. 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-lake stuff and the peak torque in the stretch 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 the concentration curl? Are you going to throw in the drag curl where you feel it more at the top? I'm gonna do both until we learn more.

We're all building a house. We'd be a fool to only use a hammer. Why would you not use all the tools that you're disposable 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 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 it 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, the resistance gets lower at the bottom, comes up. Use chains.

It hammers your body way more than that. I can do bands very frequently. I put chains in the bar, and it speeds me up, totally different. So I'm gonna 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 know, oh, bands, I can do that. I'm 47. Low bar squats, give me this, we call the arm pain of death. You're going to get the arm pain from low bar

squats in here. Because you're holding stupid. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's, and then you're 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 break-y-all plexus or something. But anyway, 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, oh, it pitches me forward. 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 a high bar instead of PR.

I'm still learning at 47. I've been lifting for 31 PR. 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 studying PRs. And I look at all the guys I was blogging with back in the day. Most of those guys, they don't go for PRs anymore. They don't, they peat.

And I'm still trying to, I'm still learning, I'm still learning on myself and trying new things. And I so agree with that. It's like, how many exercises do I look and I thought that's stupid? But then you get injured one day, and then you try it. You're like, single leg RDL is off the,

off the hammer strength, like deadlift, make those left leg, that's what lunch. I'm like, ooh, because I had a hamstring injury on one side, but I could train the other leg and I'm like, wow, make those levers. It's a lot lunch. 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 a lot of movements that you would have never done. And then when you're injured, I always say I learned 50% of what I know of the injuries.

But this is how I really started learning how to value the sled. I used to look at the sled. It's else 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 Halleux and amazing trainer. Justin, huge sled guy. So I started using the sled, and then this is where things get really fun, is you notice

something strength in its weaknesses, and then you see it as a puzzle piece of where you could plug it in your 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. 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. Yeah. So is catabels. Ibells, I thought it was so stupid. And then, you know, I found I like kettlebells with a lot of ways.

And I like, especially when you get heavier kettlebells, but like sleds for that same reason. They, I remember seeing one carless Santana back in the days, 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're trainers.

I've never had someone not get a good workout. I've never had someone who couldn't push the sled. Yeah. And that's so true. We start to get so critical and that's back when the movement screens where you've got to be, you know, and it's so true. We start to get so critical, and that's back when the movement screens where you've got to 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, in ways like. If you have knee problems, it's wonderful. Use it as a warm up, and your knee pain goes away, and 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 fissionado 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 is literally useless, this is garbage.

That's what makes me so mad is it's a social media era where why can't you just say, like you talked about earlier 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 of 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 stronger squats. If you do squats, you get strong at everything. So I always prioritize 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, trying to find good equipment for a five-foot tall woman. Free weights don't have that problem. Free weights follow the person, whereas with machines, the 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 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 fascinating, like, it started with Arthur Jones.

He was a first go, but he was like, too, he went too far, he was so biased. Well, he invented Nautilus, didn't he? 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 works for... He used to work for Jim 80 and there's this big manufacturer in Europe. And he could like program in whatever he wanted and it would show you the shape of the cam. Like they could like program in whatever he wanted and it would show you the shape of the cam. Like they could like design. So it's like, do you want, and I love that old strive. Now I think prime has it where you can load it up in different positions.

But if you look at the, I'm so obsessed with this stuff. Like you look at the Hammer Strait squat lunge where you do deadlifts, I'll call it the squat lunge. There's two loading positions. The top loading pin, as you come up, moves closer to the full grum. So the resistance momentums 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 gonna be around the same resistance throughout the hole. 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 the Rogers pendulum squat has that too, where you can load up. So 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 would be a cool thing to see if, well, I just geek out on that stuff, but now it's like, they're saying, well, hip thrust, like a lot of the long-weath people, like I heard Mike Izartus, 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 you

and it's so uncomfortable at the bottom when you have it anyway. 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 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, man. No, because it works even better when you put bands on and stuff like it even harder to help. 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. But like people in general, you can take the average of us for and put us through a peck deck range of motion. And it's like,

we're stronger here, you're weaker here. But he noticed that like, he even said this back in the 80s or 90s, that 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 have always had such stronger pecs.

Like I would just do pushups, half range, and dips, half range, because if I 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

a bit like, look at all body bows. They'll do like, I was watching Larry Wheels. 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, 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 pets.

Well, you were reminding me of our friend, Ben Pekolsky, who we've talked about, him and I have talked to obviously about bodybuilding and he's 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 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 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, and it probably has some uses.

Like I wanna 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 Beersie have that theory that over time, you know, muscles don't continue to grow longitudinally. We say there's two types of muscle growth. This sarcomyrogenesis is sausage links.

You're adding more sausages to the links. Whereas myofibular 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 static stretching, like you will keep laying thing, but eventually going through that same range of motion doesn't stimulate muscle length changes to 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 and stretch position is superior for hypertrophy. You know what else those studies showed? That mid-ranging shirac did. Also causes hypertrophy. Not that they didn't and it did. Exactly. It's that this is a little better, but he's also did.

So why are we gonna avoid all of those ranges, the other ranges of motion to go for just the, you know what's gonna happen is you're not gonna get better gains, you're gonna 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.

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 for aesthetics and cost them their function to the point where they spark because we've had bodybuilders in here that we filmed for our programs. You 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, focus on that. 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. One of them be a concentration curl type movement. Totally. It's in the squeeze. If you're doing pecs, one of them be a concentration curl type move. It's in the squeeze. If you're doing pecs, one of them be like

contracted. Cross overs or peck deck where you're squeezing, I would. You wouldn't have them all four or say all six exers be stretch position. Do you remember that book? From the might've been one of the 90s thing. It was called Positions of Flexion. It was a POF.

I have both of them. I went back and bottom off and I thought. You're the first person I brought this up that remembered that book. Yeah, they talked about that They said train a muscle stretch mid-range and contracted. Yeah, and that just wasn't a lot of Ironman magazines. Yes, and I remember those from way back in the day because when I started doing my Like writing for a tination and I wrote like advanced glute training methods instead of my ebook.

I thought I came up with that, and then I went, wait, sometimes you forget. You read it somewhere else, then. I'm like, oh my God, I read this in the 90s, and that position's a 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 didn't understand so I went I want to I want to go to my PhD because I one reason was I was so annoyed I didn't speak the language I'm well I pretty much got my PhD because I didn't understand I just say that squats and hip-toes have differing Hip-exension torque angle curves. I didn't know I was I would describe it They have different angular kinematics. I didn't know how to say that. Now I speak the lingua. And then, and then you, I went through my, probably like five years was trying to impress everyone.

I just thought about making a hip-hop engine 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-hour fitness, the body master's stuff was great.

No, the body master's, the body master's something 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 the time. In the name of safety and making it easier. Yes.

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 it felt, I think. But the best machines I ever used to use that chain, they used the chain. They're not the list ones in the factory. Yes, they were the best.

They feel so good, but they were dangerous because someone put your finger in there, they'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, not a list pull over. Pull over. So you feel the same.

They have it at that 25th. Yeah, either Monterey or Park over. Pull over. Are you, so you feel the same? I've had it at that 24 or so. Yeah, either Monterey or Parkmore. Parkmore. Parkmore. Yeah, you're at the park. 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 a whole old school stuff in there, for sure. Yeah, 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 strong man, the circus feeds,

how, you know, the hip thrust. Oh, I know that. That was the, the bench press. The demo press. No, with bench press, they would, people lined up on the bench. Oh, no, no, this is how they'd get the bar to bench. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So with hip dress, 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 that. Clear your face. So you'd have to kind of like, like that, and then press it up.

And then people started realizing that if they bridged up, they were strong. It was called the bridge press, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So that was the bridge press. And then people started realizing they could help themselves Yeah. So that was the bridge press. And then people started realizing they could help themselves up. So they'd catapulted up.

It was kind of like a hip drive, like a barbell glute bridge, but they'd catapulted up and then catch it lock out. 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 it, I think it's called it hip lift, where this is the most weight ever lifted or this was like being a bridge and you'd have like a horse. Like a horse. Like your knees and so on. Well, no, they would be on their hands and their feet. Yeah. And they would, like, even up the horse. Yeah, I'm 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 look the horse. Yeah, I'm like a horse.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, 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 this is not popular because it's hard. But I love, you know, thinking about, man, someone thought that up way back then or someone thought this up and studying the trends and the history of everything.

I'm so fascinated. We just wrote a whole program which was a whole old, old, tiny strength. I would love to send it to you. Like a bent press and like we brought out back all these old movies and stuff like the facts and like all these.

Yes. I made a blog post all the lists named after people. Like during a time of the year. Yeah, a lot of them are old. I like all these. Yes. I made a blog post all the lists named after people. Like, do a lot of them are old. Yeah. I'll send you. Squats are freaking hard. Yeah.

No one has, we have them in there. No, I'm going to send you this program because you would love it. I appreciate it. We bought a bunch of books and I'm a historian with this kind of stuff. And we literally programs. 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, 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 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 about he think Jose Antonio. Yes In the 90s he looked it like birds and you know like like loaded the the way he's 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 gonna do this research because it's so painstakingly slow to count fibers that it's hard to do too. So, it's always been talked about, same with the whole Sarkamers and series about growing. 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.

We don't grow a ton more muscle fibers. You just grow the ones you have more. But the problem is, I think Andy Galpins, no, he showed that you could change the type one to type two in my source of, but I don't think you grow a ton through gaining more, more, you know, more. 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 hyper pleasure or something like it occurs. It just takes a long time, like years and years and years of training. 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 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 get sick and you lose everything. Why, though? You're in your peak hormonal period. It is interesting.

Yeah, yeah, like. It's almost like there's a, I don't want it. I mean, this is not accurate term, but it's almost like closer to like a permanent. What, like, you ever meet an old person, like an old man who used to be a weight lifter, doesn't even work out anymore. Yeah.

Still got the forms, still got the calves, you're 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 Brad, 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 first fresh. Start hammering them fresh first first thing in the workout. Now, but that strategy weren't work for deadlifts. Start doing deadlifts hard as fuck three times a week. Because we were clever. So it 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 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 ago. 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 That's about it way back in the day. Okay. It was like one night. Yeah, I believe it. I believe it That's yeah, I can pray once a week. I just think that's that's fascinating. You 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. You could have periods of accumulation where you don't hire volume and lower intensity and then periods of, you know, higher intensity, lesser volume. Cut to have them like that. No one talks about, it's just assumed what you, 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 squad or strong hip-thrus

or strong deadletters, but if you've done powerlifting, it's hard to go, like I feel like deadletters 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 lists,

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 going to 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 was on trying to set a squat pair 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

too like bench or something or military, you know. But then after that month, your knees going to be beat up if you're prone to getting F.A.I., your hips might be beat up a little bit. So then what a great time to focus on the hip thrust. That's not going to 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, you, you hammer the deadlift, but

on the deadlift month, you're, 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. I'm not going go down the way. I'm not doing squats, I'm not doing delus, 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 bench even if you're a messed up because you didn't wanna lose your bench gains. And then you learn that month,

but anyway, you irons out imbalances 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. So that's how we work out. It's all familiar.

And it's all experience-based. I mean, we had to figure that out. I think the hard part. You figure that's our program. That's how we work out. 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 we got to focus on it, especially at 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. And but then it's so easy to maintain. Totally, totally. Well, Brett, I could talk to you forever, especially if you go down 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, POF. 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. Training them also in this stretch, the mid-range

and the contracted position. I agree. Training a muscle in the stretch, the mid-range, and the contracted position. I agree. And I encourage coaches and trainers. I think this is, nothing taught me more than the following. Finding old books and 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 had deadlifted in the gym. Now everybody deadlifted 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 in every field. You have to feel. It's like, it's an important and every field we came from, right? Totally. Yeah. Well, thanks for coming on, man. Make me time.

I thought we were gonna delve into some social media stuff, but I dropped one. I dropped one. Another time. We were talking to drama stuff. And drama was good. No, 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. It was the other day this woman, these two sisters made this post and this comes up every, it was happening 10 years ago with that Brazilian butt lift, which is BBL, but this was before BBL's were a thing. It was the Brazil and Butler by Leandro Carvalo. He was a, he was an infomercial in the early 2000s. But he would, they would say this tri, like basically they'd show the Glutius Maximus and it would be like, here's the Glutmax,

here's the Glutmedius and here's the Glutminimus. And it's like, that's not the anatomy. I mean, if I was like, guys, there's like, you know, and I made up the biceps. If you like, if I was like guys, there's like, you know, and I made up the biceps. Here's 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 medius is underneath. How do you get away with that? But anyway, these girls made a video, and there were, yeah, there we go. These two sisters made a video and it got 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 not scholars, they probably believe it and And they're, they, that means you never even learn an anatomy.

You know, even took an anatomy physiology class and that will get more of you. You never Googled a picture of the glue test. Yeah, but here's the thing though, Brett, and I'm sure you could have tested 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. Three million, four million views on something overnight. And yet, the business has grown year over year, year over year. Yeah. And these people like this, they may have this moment of time.

Inflation. Yeah, they go, yeah, they go it 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 just, I totally agree with you.

My only annoyance is that like you said, when you're getting slammed for programming Sumo Devas 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 annoys 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 Minus and Minus are here, here's the exercise to do. If I did 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? 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 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 do 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, just stop fighting each other over whether or not a lung is more functional in a squad whether or not whatever. Like let's all unify and 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 so these it's it's it's worth my time to come out here whenever you guys want and do a high quality you can 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 for people who 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, thank you for having me on, I appreciate it.

And yeah, in every couple of years, we gotta do another. We'll do it soon, I didn't realize we let that much time go by. couple years we got to do it. We'll do it sooner. I didn't realize we let that much time go by. We'll do something together. We'll do something together. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance,

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