Ep 145: Bryan Boorstein on Failure Training, Intensity, Home Gyms, Specialization, and Cardio
Have you ever wondered how to maximize muscle growth while saving time? Tune in as Bryan Boorstein reveals intensity techniques that’ll transform your workouts!
Today, Philip (@witsandweights) is joined by Bryan Boorstein, the mastermind and training genius. His extensive knowledge of training methods takes center stage as he delves into captivating topics. From lengthened partials to maximizing metabolic stress and from intensity techniques for efficient workouts to ideas for leg movements in a limited home gym, Bryan shares insights that will elevate your fitness game.
As a true “Renaissance Man” of health and fitness, Bryan’s training approach seamlessly integrates elements from bodybuilding, powerlifting, and athleticism. His content and coaching exude knowledge, nuance, and infectious passion, all aimed at helping YOU optimize your physique and performance.
With 25+ years of training experience, Byran collaborates with top athletes. As founder of Evolved Training Systems and Paragon Training Methods, he offers goal-oriented online programs for strength, physique, and skill development. Bryan co-hosts the Eat Train Prosper podcast, sharing practical strategies on nutrition, training, mindset, and lifestyle. His philosophy blends science, experience, and intuition for effective workouts.
Today, you’ll learn all about:
3:20 Lengthened partials - Bryan’s take
9:06 Failure training vs. effective reps - resolving the debate
15:59 Failure vs. submaximal training
24:21 Metabolic stress techniques - favorites and periodization
30:33 Strength vs. hypertrophy training
35:43 Building legs without machines
49:32 Optimizing cardio for muscle growth
58:09 Basic specialization approach
1:02:20 The question Byran wished Philip had asked
1:04:19 Outro
Episode resources:
Instagram: @bryanboorstein – Tons of programs
Episode summary:
Philip Pape invites training expert Brian Borstein to share his extensive knowledge on enhancing physical self-mastery. The episode unfolds with a deep dive into the intersection of cardiovascular fitness and muscle recovery, which, when balanced correctly, can amplify muscle development. Brian enlightens us on the concept of stretch-mediated hypertrophy, where exercises are performed in a muscle's stretched position, a technique that can maximize tension and muscle growth. They explore the benefits of lengthened partials, metabolic stress, and intensity techniques that could revolutionize home gym workouts for leg day.
Brian brings a fresh perspective on cardio, once thought to detract from muscle gains, now understood to be a synergistic component when properly programmed. Cardiovascular work is not only an integral part of fitness and fat loss, but also plays a crucial role in enhancing recovery and allowing for increased gym volume. In this insightful conversation, Brian and Philip dissect the effective reps model, the concept of training to failure, and the merits of personalized workout regimes. They share their personal victories across various training volumes, laying out a roadmap for listeners to tailor their path to fitness success.
As they continue, the focus shifts to the evolution of training methods and intensity techniques. Philip recounts his journey through various fitness programs, from the high-intensity MaxOT to the sub-failure efficiency of CrossFit, and the influence of the evidence-based fitness movement. They touch on the mental and physical challenges presented by intensity techniques like rest-pause and drop sets, emphasizing the need for balance and a sustainable approach that maintains health for lifelong fitness.
Moving into practical application, the episode details how to optimize quad and hamstring training with adjustments for different gym environments. Brian provides actionable tips for those limited to home gyms or commercial gym settings, demonstrating how innovative methods, like the foam roller hack squat, can mimic experiences one might get from professional gym equipment. He further discusses the relevance of single-leg exercises and their versatility in targeting specific muscle groups.
The conversation takes a turn towards the relationship between cardio and muscle gains, busting myths surrounding the interference effect. They delve into recent research that underscores the complementarity of cardiovascular and resistance training, emphasizing improved fitness, recovery, and adaptation from workouts. Brian shares his personal experiences with zone two heart rate training, a measure of cardiovascular fitness that can indicate better mitochondrial function.
Lastly, they explore strategies for body part specialization within a training program, discussing the concept of rotating specialization cycles to focus on volume for targeted muscle groups. The discussion includes practical implementation advice, adjusting exercise order, and proximity to failure to achieve the best results for physique optimization.
This episode is a treasure trove of knowledge for anyone looking to elevate their fitness regimen. Brian Borstein's insights and Philip Pape's engaging discussion provide listeners with a comprehensive understanding of the latest strategies in muscle growth, cardio synergy, and the art of personalized training. As they conclude, listeners are left with a wealth of information to apply to their workouts and a motivation to push the boundaries of conventional fitness wisdom.
🚀 Click here to apply for coaching!
👥 Join our highly engaged, active Facebook community for even more support, live trainings, free challenges, and Q&As
✉️ Get access to the FREE Wits & Weights email list with insider strategies, bonus content, and conversations with experts on evidence-based fitness.
🩷 Enjoyed this episode? Share it on social and follow/tag Philip at @witsandweights
🤩 Love the podcast? Leave a 5-star review
👩💻 Schedule a FREE results breakthrough call with Philip
📞 Send a Q&A voicemail
🔥 Support the show for as little as $3 to keep it ad-free
Have you followed the podcast?
Get notified of new episodes. Use your favorite podcast platform or one of the buttons below. Then hit “Subscribe” or “Follow” and you’re good to go!
Transcript
Bryan Boorstein 00:00
It seems intuitively that if you're able to increase your cardiovascular fitness at least to like a decent base level, that this then improves your recovery adaptations allows you to do more volume in the gym and thus you know elicit better gains across the board.
Philip Pape 00:16
Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast. I'm your host Philip pape, and this twice a week podcast is dedicated to helping you achieve physical self mastery by getting stronger. Optimizing your nutrition and upgrading your body composition will uncover science backed strategies for movement, metabolism, muscle and mindset with a skeptical eye on the fitness industry so you can look and feel your absolute best. Let's dive right in. Wits & Weights community Welcome to another episode of the Wits & Weights Podcast. Today I'm joined by mastermind and training genius Brian Borstein. I brought Brian on the show to share with you his vast knowledge on train methods. And we're gonna get into some fun topics like lengthen partials, maximizing metabolic stress intensity techniques to save time and ramp up muscle growth, ideas for leg movements and a home gym. His nuanced and Recently Updated thoughts on cardio and how to specialize your training to get jacked and swell in all the right places. Brian Borstein is a renaissance man of health and fitness. His approach to training combines the best of bodybuilding powerlifting, and athleticism. And he always brings knowledge, nuance and infectious passion into his content and coaching to help you optimize your physique and performance. With over 25 years of training experience, Brian has worked with some of the world's top athletes. He's the founder of evolved training systems and Paragon training methods, offering online goal oriented training programs for strength, physique, and skill at all levels. He's also co hosts of one of my favorite shows, eat train prosper, along with Aaron Stryker, where he shares practical strategies on nutrition training, mindset and lifestyle. Ryan's philosophy combines science experience and intuition to create effective and enjoyable workouts. He's also an intellectually curious dude who takes knowledge from multiple fields, everything from neuroscience and psychology to elite athletic coaching, and even philosophy and he makes cross disciplinary connections that would elude narrower minds. Brian challenges the myths and assumptions in the fitness industry and today he brings his formidable intellect to Wits & Weights, to share his wit and wisdom to empower you to become your best self. So if you self identify as an athlete, aspiring athlete, or you're just a seeker of excellence and personal growth, get ready to learn and be inspired by the master the innovator Brian Borstein. Welcome to the show, Brian.
Bryan Boorstein 02:37
Hey, man, you know, I had high expectations coming in and and you exceeded them. So, you know, that is that is a great trait upon yourself to be able to go in with high expectations and then come out, still exceeding them. So I appreciate the introduction. I'm glad to be here. And yeah, thank you for having me.
Philip Pape 02:56
Yeah, we were joking before because when I reached out to Brian, just for the listener knows what the epic introductions. I sent him a funny video some of my past intros. He's like, ah, the bar is really high, man, you gotta you gotta top that. So Challenge accepted. And, and well deserved. So anyway, you know, I want to jump right into some of the topics. I think the audience will get to know you what you do and your philosophy through our conversation. And I just want to start with lengthen partials. This is a technique where also called long length partials and I think Stretch, stretch mediated hypertrophy, where you perform only the bottom half the exercise, right where the muscles are most stretched. And the intent is to increase tension to produce more hypertrophy. My question for you is do you use these in your personal training? And then do you find them effective?
Bryan Boorstein 03:42
Yeah, you know, I started using them and experimenting with them back in, I want to say 2019, maybe it was early 2020. But there was this initial study by Mao and colleagues that came out around that same time and ascent, it was the first one of this era of research to kind of promote the benefit of lengthen partials or not even LinkedIn partials per se, but that there is benefit to training at long muscle lengths. And so in this study, what they did is they simply compare to a seated leg curl in a hip flexed position, where the hamstring is pre stretched to a lying leg curl in which the hamstring is not pre stretched, and transited shorter muscle legs. And the most interesting part of this whole study wasn't just that the hamstrings grew more from the seated leg curl. It was actually that three of the hamstring muscles grew more from the seated leg curl, but the was it the chrysalis. There was one specific hamstring muscle, the one that wraps around, it's not the chrysalis. It'll come back to me. But one specific hamstring muscle grew more on the lying leg curl Sartorius it was a Sartorius and it's because the sartorius is actually more lengthened, more stretched out in the line. Lying leg curl. So three of them grew more in the seated leg girl because they're more stretched out. And one of them grew more in the lying leg curl because it is more stretched out. And I am always one to jump on things early not to sit there and try and promote to the world that this is the greatest thing. And like one study says we need to do this. So everybody needs to train with these stretch mediated movements, more just that I had been training 20 years at that point. And the opportunity to experiment with something new, was really exciting to me. And so I began training with this notion of long muscle lengths at that time. And then that progressed very quickly from the next sequence of studies that came through that actually did compare lengthen partials to full range. In fact, the next study that I was privy to was Pedrosa and colleagues. And they compared leg extensions that were done at five different ranges of motion, but the only three of them are really important. So they compared one group that did full range of motion leg extensions, one group that just did the bottom of the leg extension up to 50, or 60 degrees of range of motion, or 50 to 60% of the range of motion, it was up to 150 degrees, maybe 140, something like that. And then the third group only did the the short range of motion. So they went from that, like 130 degrees of knee flexion, all the way up to 180, where the legs would be straight, and they just did the top half. And so the the group that did the bottom half only outperformed not just the short muscle length group, but also outperformed the full range of motion muscle group, muscle range group. So at that point, I was like, fully, and that was 2000 22,021. And I began experimenting with them in pretty much all of my movements at that point.
Philip Pape 06:47
And I mean, so just for the average guy who's you know, running a standard hypertrophy Program, or 40, split or something like that, do you recommend adding them in replacing sets with them doing a more for isolation work versus, you know, some bigger lifts because I know, Jeff nippert and others, you know, post content about this all the time, and he's doing them with squats. So what are your general recommendations there?
Bryan Boorstein 07:07
Yeah, I've been a little slower to jump on the bandwagon for lengthen partials for movements that are already lengthened. And so for that, you know, we have movements like an RDL. We have movements like a squat, we have movements, like dumbbell bench press, things like that. And so in my mind, for the first few years of this experimentation, I was thinking, Why would I need to do a lengthen partial on a movement that is already lengthened, overloaded, it's biased to that range of motion already. And even now, I have been experimenting with those, I still mostly feel the same way that you know, there might be very, very, very slight benefit to doing lengthen partials in those movements. But because it is lengthen, overloaded, all the real benefit is by doing a lengthen partial there is spending more of your time under tension in the length and range. Whereas I think a movement that is short overloaded in nature, think, pull downs, rows, leg extensions, leg curls, things like that. Lateral Raises are another really good one, if you're spending the majority of your time or the movement is hardest in the short position, it seems to me that there would be even extra benefit in doing lengthen partials there, and or going to failure at the full range and then letting range of motion drop off as fatigue increases. Ya
Philip Pape 08:34
know, it's interesting, because I have friends that are that are, you know, swear by it. And it's not like it's, it's easier, necessarily, especially when you're doing like you said, for movements that are already lengthen, you know, if you try squats, you realize that, like you said, you're just constantly under tension, it's pretty hard. So it's just trying to, you know, these nuanced things, like you said, they're the become hot topics in the industry, everybody wants to try them, but they're not, you know, they're not gonna replace what's tried and true there may be going to enhance and optimize. So alright, yeah, I was just curious about that. Cool. All right. So another topic that's that's big these days. And you you recently posted about it is the effective reps model, you know, failure training, but specifically the idea that only those last few reps, you know, before failure are the ones that actually count are the ones actually stimulate muscle growth. And for various reasons, the motor motor unit recruitment, the velocity slowing down, whatever. And yet, you pointed out that you can still see effectiveness by modifying volume, even when you're using low or IR which isn't in that range that regime. You in your post, you concluded by saying the following quote, There are many roads to Rome, hypertrophy is extremely forgiving, and that you can train in a variety of ways and achieve hypertrophy. Just make sure the big rocks are satisfied, sufficient effort, sufficient volume, sufficient recovery. So doubling down for us. What are your thoughts on the effective reps model without a four hour podcast and always
Bryan Boorstein 09:59
Yeah, this was from a four hour podcast by data driven strength. And so for anybody that wants the full unabridged version, you can go check that one out. But yeah, I mean, you know, I get questions from young kids all the time in my DMs or elsewhere on the podcast, whatever. And they're always really obsessed with these super nuanced topics like long muscle length training, or like training to failure versus volume, or volume being the primary driver of hypertrophy and all of these things. And at some level, that matters, eventually. But I think that what gets you the most benefit, and probably who's going to take you to 98, or 99% of your genetic potential, is just going to be doing it for a really long time, doing a decent amount of volume, and working pretty damn hard. And recovery is a necessary evil that comes along with that, right? The more work you do, the harder you do that work, the more you have to recover. Another thing that these kids often forget to consider is that they want to do this for life, potentially, they don't just want to get jacked in five years, and then be like, oh, sweet, I'm jacked. Now I can stop training as hard. And I can just go like, be jacked. And that's not really the way this works. I mean, it's a, it's a lifelong game. And for somebody that's been doing it for 25 years, there's a sustainability piece to this as well. And so even if we can look at this new envious study that came out, where it's like, oh, 52 sets to failure per muscle group per week, is gonna get you the most jacked. People fail to look at that, and extrapolate out and back up and say, okay, even if during six or eight weeks, or whatever that study was, the people that worked up to 52 sets did get more jacked than the people that were doing less sets, you got to think of the long term and what does 52 sets a week to failure due to your motivation? What does it do to your joint structures? What does it do to all of the elements that go into creating a lifelong commitment to this endeavor? And so I think, dialing that back to back to the effective reps model is that there are many ways to rope. I have heard so many stories in the trenches from people that swear that, you know, they were doing high volume training. And when they cut their volume back, and they just started going to failure on one or two hard sets, their physiques completely changed. And then I've heard the exact opposite, where people were going to fail, you're doing one too hard, too hard sets per muscle group. And they're like, everything changed when I started doing high volumes and stopped going so close to failure. And I've heard enough of these stories that I just believe them, I think the literal Right, right. Everybody's right, everybody's getting jacked, and everybody's doing things. And so ultimately, my sense of this is that whatever method it is, that speaks to you, and keeps you motivated to train and keeps your body healthy, is probably the one you should do. And so for many people, that's, you know, hey, going close to failure, maybe your form gets compromised, and you end up tweaking your shoulder, tweaking your low back, jacking up your knees squatting, whatever it is, maybe you're not the type of person that should be doing one or two hard sets to failure for each muscle group, maybe you'd be much better off doing 20 to 30 sets at four to six RSR whatever. And so, you know, kind of dialing it back to that actual study. And the thoughts on the effective reps model is the effective reps model essentially states that the closer you get to failure, the more stimulus you get. And I don't really think that that's arguable. Right? Right. The part of it that is arguable are the people. And there's plenty of them out there that say that nothing prior to five reps from failure is stimulative. And that's kind of kind of absurd to even like I almost like struggle to even fathom that, that somebody could say that, because they're literally saying at that point that somebody could do 100 sets, but because they're all at six reps from failure, that they're not going to get any gains. And like, you can just look across the board through anecdote at the way football players have trained for years or the way Olympic lifting athletes train like explosive athletes, and they almost never go to failure. They're just idling technique gets all submaximal work styling technique. All these people are jacked. And so yeah, I think that, you know, there's a number of misconceptions out there about that. But the one thing that isn't arguable is the closer you get to failure, you get more stimulus. But what you do with that is up to you and how many sets you decide to do is going to be dependent upon how close to failure you train.
Philip Pape 14:40
Yeah. And the reason I'm asking you all these is it is kind of a little bit of a bait, but you knew it was coming because that's what you get all the time to get into these other principles of why these things matter. I think Eric helms said recently on his show, like science looks at the norm right looks at the population mean, no matter how big of a sample size you have, what the takeaways are, what may work for most people most of the time, well, that leaves a huge percentage of people that it doesn't work for, like you said, and it's going to vary. So number one experiment right over time, don't just assume that one thing is going to work for you. And I'm sure you see that as somebody who programs, you know, for people, but keeping your body healthy, you know, I didn't start this young, like you or maybe others have, there's a lot of folks who listen here just getting into this, like in their 40s, or 50s. And whether you started young or not, recovery is a huge issue. And you know, we get injuries and surgeries and life and stress and all these things that pile on, I would rather find something that is modest volume, slightly submaximal. That doesn't kill the joints, but still gives me like you said, the 98% progress. A friend of mine, were joking about these nuanced things that the 20 year olds bring up or like that that might be for the point zero 1% elite, that's not you. Like that's just shut up? At least not yet. Now, yeah, not now. Go for it. But it's not yet. Right. So have your views changed at all over the years on the failure versus submaximal training, like, as you've aged, and as you've trained all this time? Yeah, I've actually gone through
Bryan Boorstein 16:08
a number of iterations of training philosophies through my life. So I have a number of different experiences. If you don't mind, I'll just take you through like, very brief version of it. But when I first started in 1997, I stumbled across a group on a community chat board at the time, if you know, there wasn't social media, so it was a easy board. And the group was called power in bulk. And the big voice in power in bulk at the time was a gentleman named Paul Carter. And we all know Paul Carter. Now, Paul Carter is a very antagonizing voice in the industry. And I think that, you know, I personally don't agree with a lot of what he says these days. But one thing that he did that I really think was great for me starting out was he told me back in the late 90s, to basically pick six big movements. And it was a it was a horizontal push a horizontal pole, a vertical push a vertical pole, a squat and a hinge. And he was like, just do those six movements get brutally strong at them, when you can, you know, bench 300, squat, 400, deadlift, 500, then you can start thinking about body part splits and volume manipulation and all of these things. And I thought that was incredible advice. And so that's exactly what I did. If you fast forward about 15 years, I found him on Instagram, seven or eight years ago, and I was like, Hey, dude, like, thanks so much for that great advice you gave me so many years ago, you know, and he goes, Oh, that was stupid advice. I would never give that advice again, you know, and I was like, Well, I thought I thought it was really good advice. But anyway, so I did that for three or four years, basically, three times a week, full body with those six big movements spread across the week. And I got great results. Nothing to complain about. I learned how to train hard and it was super important, mostly like kind of five by five or three by eight type stuff. And then after that I got distracted by the muscle magazines would probably be the best way of saying that as as many of us do. And I followed some of the like Muscle and Fitness body parts splits for a while. But luckily, I then stumbled across a program called Max O T. And God, are you familiar with Maximus? You know, I haven't heard of that one. Alright, cool. So Max O T is a program, you actually can still find it online at as T sports science. It is a body part split program. But what they promoted was low volumes, so is six to nine sets per week per body part. So it's like, you know, Monday's chest day, Tuesday's back day, Wednesday's legs type thing. But it was six to nine hard sets per muscle group, and everything was in the four to six or four to eight rep range. Depending on isolation movements were like the eight, six to eight rep range. But all compounds were four to six. And every set was taken to absolute failure. But because the proximity, or because the volume was low, you could get away with taking all these movements to failure. And then they also did something that was pretty unique at the time, which is that they promoted a D loader Recovery Week, every eight to 10 weeks. So this program I ran off and on literally until 2009, I would say I ran that program off and on for like six to eight years. And I thought it was extremely productive. The best gains that I made through my entire training history was was on Maxa tea. I think that could have been partially because that's when I was turning into a man. And you know, I was eating a bunch of food at the dining hall at college and all that stuff. Yeah, you can't just just give credit to the program. But it did happen to to be that timeframe. After that, I found CrossFit in 2009. And I went through about seven years of competing and coaching in CrossFit. And so that was a completely different stimulus to anything I had done prior. Pretty much everything you do in CrossFit is sub failure because it's all about maximizing efficiency over Time. So that was definitely different. And then when I popped out of CrossFit in 2016, there was this whole new evidence based sphere. And it didn't exist. In the past. There wasn't Brad Schoenfeld and all of these different research RCT research controlled designs and, and all of this stuff. And so I became obsessed with it as as the nerdy science brain that I have. I was like, Oh, my God, like my brain was exploding 20 years into training, I was like, felt like a newbie in the gym again. And the first thing I stumbled across was RP. And Mike is retail. And so that was really my first experience into purposefully not training to failure, and purposefully trying to prioritize volume over proximity to failure stimulus
Philip Pape 20:45
to fatigue ratio. Yeah,
Bryan Boorstein 20:47
yeah, exactly. And, you know, working on exercise selection as an important component, like, does this exercise give me better stimulus to fatigue and that exercise, and so it opened up this whole new world of framing how I was training. And so that was interesting, because I found myself continually trying to push volume. And the way that they programmed at RP and they still do is to the best of my knowledge, is they start mesocycles, far from failure, and then they progress them closer and closer to failure until you reach a point where you're basically at failure, you fatigue is super sky high, and then you d load you recycle and repeat. And so I did that for about two years. And I think it was fine. I, I, I would say that if anything, I lost motivation. It was like the volume was so high, and the fact that you could start a mesocycle at one hour of training. And by the time you add volume, and add proximity to failure and all this stuff, you finish a mesocycle. And your sessions are taking two hours. And they're doubly as hard as they were in the beginning. And so to me, that didn't make a ton of sense. Then I kind of went the other way, and began slowly reducing volume and slowly working closer to failure, which has sort of settled me on the philosophy that I've used for the last few years now where, for the most part, I stick between six to 10 sets per body part per week. And one thing I actually do that I think is semi unique is I took from the RP approach is this progression of proximity to failure across the cycle. And I also in a sense, progressive volume, but I do it very differently than they did. So they would progress it by adding sets week to week, what I tend to do is I add intensity. So we'll go from two reps from failure to one rep from failure to failure by week three, and then on movements that are conducive to it, we'll go into partials and then we'll do rest pause sets. And then we'll do drop sets, and then we'll do lengthened sets. And so each week from three on, we're adding intensity techniques to further bias the length and position to further add stimulus. But we're not doing it by adding a full set, we're just adding like a little teeny dose of stimulus. And, and I've found this to be extremely productive for me. And for clients for the last three years or so.
Philip Pape 23:11
Man, there's so much there. And I could identify with a lot because of your age. And when you've been alive, you're sort of at the ground floor of all of these shifts that we've seen over the last 20 years, from the muscle magazines to the training with the maxilla team and I was in CrossFit for eight years myself. So I get it I started at around 2011 and wasn't very consistent with it. But first time I ever touched a barbell was in CrossFit. So give them credit for that. It's funny because it sounds like you've come a little bit full circle back to the max O T stuff you were doing the 60s and like roughly the same volume per body part, roughly the same kind of in that low end hypertrophy, high end strength range, let's call it you know, my coach is Andy Baker, you probably know any Baker. He's been on the show a few times. But a lot of what you're talking about reminds me of like conjugate style programming does a little bit of that, right? Where you're testing your one RMS to get the intensity, but then you have this dynamic work. That's at a much lower, you know, that's submaximal later in the week. Anyway, it's cool stuff. So with the RP, Renaissance periodization stuff, that's that's all RPE based, right? You were saying? Yeah, well, I
Bryan Boorstein 24:14
mean, that's what I started back when I came out of CrossFit like 2016 1718 That was kind of my RP time. Yeah.
Philip Pape 24:20
So then you mentioned intensity technique. good segue. You've been recently talking about that a lot, too. And I love that stuff, too. Man, the rest, pause the dog crap, rest, pause and drop sets and things like that. So you've been talking about metabolic stress intensity techniques, techniques, like mile reps and drop sets. Why is that principle important? Is it mainly for saving time and taking advantage of the training to failure theory we just talked about or is it? You know, is there another reason to incorporate them?
Bryan Boorstein 24:47
Yeah, you know, I think metabolic stress is certainly a piece of doing rest pause sets and drop sets that that you wouldn't get by just doing straight sets. But I do. I do. would say what you said May is probably more of the reasons in that, it ensures that you're close to failure, especially for clients like intermediate clients that I'm working with that really need to know where failure is, there's nothing like getting them to failure, then making them do rest, pause or drop sets, drop sets can be a little tough, you don't want to drop too much weight, or else it just becomes they're not really reaching failure because of metabolic fatigue, or mental fatigue. It's just like it burns too much. It's like cardio. Yeah, exactly. But when I do drop sets, I tend to drop very little. So the typical drop that you see in studies is like 30 to 40%, I'll usually drop 20%, at most. And so it's usually getting about the same amount of reps that you would get from a rest pause. So if I'm doing a set of eight reps to failure, close to failure, and then I do a rest, pause, where it's 20 seconds rest, I might get three reps, maybe four, if I do a drop set, and I dropped 20%, but I don't take any rest, it's basically the same thing, you're getting four, maybe five reps. So you're still in that zone, where you can actually be confident that you're hitting failure without it being because you're mentally weak, or it burns too much, or it's metabolic fatigue, or something like that. So I love both of those. For that reason, I also love them for time saving, which you also noted, because, you know, everything comes back around in the industry like drops, this used to be so popular in the muscle mag days, you would always be like 10 864 Plus drop set back to the 10 rep weight, like that was that was the way we trained, you know, 26 for increasing weight, you hit a setup for failure, dropped the weight back to the 10 go to failure, again, that was so standard, and it was so effective. And then there was this this period of time and the evidence based space where it seemed as if drop sets got this really bad rap because you're reducing load, which means you're reducing mechanical tension. And mechanical tension is the primary driver of hypertrophy, or whatever. But in reality, my statement is always the muscle is a dumb piece of meat. And it only knows tension. And it doesn't know if you're like this, this is an example, if you're doing a hack squat or some sort of squat pattern movement, and you're taking long as rests at the top of every rep, you can do more weight. But that doesn't mean you're getting more mechanical tension that if you did constant tension reps and therefore used less weight, your your muscles only know the tension that they're receiving. And so when you look at it from that perspective, things like drop sets and rest pause sets and these other intensity methods that force weight reduction, they should be in theory just as effective as doing the straight sets with higher quote, mechanical tension, because you're using higher loading, right? And it seems like the new studies are showing that man, if you look at I think it was Max Coleman was part of the group that led the recent study on drop sets and meta analysis. And they found basically the same thing that I mean, I could be misquoting this, but I think it was five sets of one top set plus four drops was the same as doing three straight sets. Which if you think about it, man, like that's a way faster approach that way faster. Yeah, do a set rest three minutes, do a set rest three minutes, right, you can do one top set, drop that shit four times, and you get the same effect as doing three straight sets. So at least when it comes to hypertrophy, I have been a huge fan of those techniques. And then the other thing I've been using a lot is the progression into lengthened work. So many people that are into lengthened work, they use it from the get go and week one, it's like, Hey, we're biasing this lengthen position go. I really think it's something that you can use as a tool to elicit a higher stimulus throughout a mesocycle. So why not get those easy gains in the beginning in weeks 123 When you're sensitive to the stimulus, and then use the lengthen work more as a tool to increase that stimulus as the mesocycle drags on. Man,
Philip Pape 28:54
I love all that just even the fact that you can use these techniques to teach yourself about failure. You know, my coach has a lot of these programmed in just yesterday I was doing earlier in the week, xe presses with rest pause and it's like, you get 10 then you get five then you maybe get to you know, on that last set, you're just like I can't lift it. So obviously there's some stress there and some and you get a pump and everything so it makes sense.
29:19
My name is Tony, I'm a strength lifter in my 40s Thank you to Phil in his Wits & Weights community for helping me learn more about nutrition and how to implement better ideas into my strength training. Phil has a very, very good understanding of macros and chemical compounds and hormones and all that and he's continuously learning. That's what I like about Phil. He's got a great sense of humor. He's very relaxed, very easy to talk to. One of the greatest things about Phil in my view is that he practices what he preaches. He also works out with barbells he trains heavy you notice that he has made but he trains heavy so if you talk with him about getting in better shape eating better, he's probably going to give you some good advice and I would strongly recommend you You talk with him and help you out thanks.
Philip Pape 30:04
Descending sets are another one actually where you know, you work in a rep range, and you simply drop the weight 10% with the full rest period. So, rather than an intensity technique, you were talking about the fact that we should still be able to get just as much hypertrophy even at a lower weight, a lower load. That's another example that comes to mind. That's not an intensive technique, right? But you can at least let's say you're, you're in the eight to 12 range, and you hit eight or nine reps, you drop the weight after the rest period, and now you still hit it eight or nine, you're still training close to failure just had a lighter weight. What's the counter argument, though? You mentioned for hypertrophy, what about the argument that intensity has its own benefits in terms of load for, say, motor recruitment? Is that reserved mainly for strength and specificity in that regime, like with the big movements, or whatever? Yeah,
Bryan Boorstein 30:50
I mostly speak from a hypertrophy angle. And so I'm getting the sense of the fact that you work with Andy Baker, I'm getting the sense that you have more strength or neural based goals along the way,
Philip Pape 31:01
which I'm actually running his bodybuilding track right now. Okay, personally, it's a six day like a lot of what you're taught, okay, actually, but yeah, but like,
Bryan Boorstein 31:08
even conjugate and stuff like that, like, I don't use I don't touch conjugate type stuff. But yeah, I mean, everything that I come from, from my perspective is in optimizing hypertrophy. And so if we're talking strength, or neural adaptations, or skill development, or anything along those lines, yeah, the game changes for sure, I mean, rest becomes extremely important, because you need to optimize efficiency. And if your like, the biggest problem I see with strength work is people going too close to failure. And when they go too close to failure, they're compromising their motor recruitment. Like, you can just imagine, you know, what a deadlift looks like at rep eight to failure versus rep one, when you're seven reps from failure. And there's not a single person in the world that can make rep eight look exactly the same as rep one, or maybe like, you know, professional powerlifters. And whatever can but but the majority of people out there, there's going to be something that is compromised in the technique, even if it doesn't look like it to the naked eye, even on camera. There's something internally, that joint angles are just slightly shifting, different muscle groups are coming in to do the job. And so it seems to me from what I understand of the research, that the strength gains are just better, manifested further from failure. And I remember a study a number of years ago, that compared four sets of 10, to five sets of and noted to five sets of 10 to 10, sets of five or something along those lines, it was something where the volume was matched. But the group that was doing the sets of five was using their 10 rep max. And what they found was that hypertrophy was relatively equivalent across the groups, I think the group that was going to failure at 10 rep sets actually did better. But the group that was doing the sets of five, with five RSR on each set, they got significantly better strength gains. And so that just speaks to exactly what I'm saying. I mean, you just have to move perfectly. My basketball coach used to always say, practice doesn't make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect and bad practice makes bad habits permanent. And and I think that that applies to, to to strength training as well.
Philip Pape 33:20
So is there is there a logical leap from that to say to saying that, maybe you don't need deadlifts in your programming, if you're going for hypertrophy, like and I'm just making a big logical leap. Right, but because it's such a big taxing movement that requires that motor, you know, yeah, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, no,
Bryan Boorstein 33:40
I don't program deadlifts for for clients. I haven't programmed to deadlift for a hypertrophy client. In since I left CrossFit, really, I mean, literally, it was Mike is retelling the Renaissance periodization group back in 2016 17. When I started following that, they were big on that train of why would you do deadlifts when you can do RDLs or stiff legged deadlifts and get more for the target muscle with less fatigue to the other muscle groups stimulus to fatigue ratio, right. And so yeah, I haven't programmed deadlifts. I don't personally do deadlifts. I brought them back into a cycle for myself during a strength cycle maybe two or two and a half years ago. And for like, two weeks, I was like, Yeah, deadlifts. This is awesome. I haven't done deadlifts for so long. And then by week three, I was like, What am I doing? Like I am so taxed.
Philip Pape 34:30
There's so toxic. Yeah. So,
Bryan Boorstein 34:33
yeah, I don't really think they have much of a place and a hypertrophy program, I think that I could program them in in an intelligent manner. And if someone was really adamant that they wanted them in there, right, they could be used as a hypertrophy movement. But it's like it's so ambiguous as to what they even train you don't know do you put it on like upper body polling day do you put it on in ham day like, like, where do you put it? Because it just it trains everything. It's true
Philip Pape 34:59
is through and and I've seen that rationale of like, sometimes they're included in that particular programs just because people want them just want to do them. Or maybe they're trying to have their cake and eat it too. It's like a power building, you know, program where you maintain some of that specificity for strength, but then also build muscle. But you're right. It's so fatiguing for us older guys, too. Like that's one of the areas you really get hit. When you do too many deadlifts. Yeah, I can tell from personal experience. Cool, man. So I know. Here's the here's another segue then since you were just talking about hamstrings and leg work is a lot of folks are working in their home gyms and I know you, you offer programming for folks who you know, online, who may be going to their own commercial gym or at home, speaking to the home gym goer, so to speak, legs are one of the toughest, at least in my experience in talking with my nutrition clients of trying to get a good well rounded workout because now you need like eight different machines, if you're trying to get everything done. Like for I personally have a vertical leg press and I have a leg developer which is more than most people have in their own gym. We have a rack and maybe maybe a leg developer. How does somebody with you know, and I joked chicken legs? Who wants to build those clauses hands, get the bigger legs? Do it at home? What are your, like two to three most effective movements or equipment or whatever? Yeah,
Bryan Boorstein 36:17
you know, okay, we just did an episode on the train, prosper where it was, it was quads training. And we cool, we basically discussed how you would optimize your quad training for a commercial gym for a home gym. And then for people that only have dumbbells. And so there's three different tiers of kind of how you could go about this. And really, what you just want to do with the home gym, is try to emulate the commercial gym as closely as you can. And so when we're like us, for legs, specifically, we're not just looking at quads, so I'll give you two or three movements for quads, two or three movements for hamstrings. Yep, cool. So for quads, the first thing is to focus on what is your big compound squatting movement going to be. And so you don't have a hack squat machine, you don't have a leg press, you don't have a pendulum squat. But we have two really cool variations that you can do at home. And the first most accessible easiest one is simply the foam roller hack squat. And this was an incredible creation that came out of COVID times basically, a you Jack a foam roller up behind your back horizontal, you put it in the bottom, crease your low back, you put your feet out in a proper squat stance, and you squat down and you grab some dumbbells off the ground, and then you just keep squatting. And the foam roller against the wall essentially acts as a back support for you. And that was a primary movement that I did for six months during the beginning of COVID. And I found that it was extremely productive for quad development. Now if you don't want to do that movement, or you want some other variation, a heels elevated back squat is an extremely quality movement as well. I love doing the heels elevated back squat with a three or four second eccentric with a two or three second pause at the bottom with your ass your ass on your ankles, basically, getting as much knee flexion forward as you can, which is the benefit of the heel wedge there. And then high bar high bar you're so high bar. Yeah, so this is this is the caveat is when you ascend up, the first thing that people want to do is stick their butt up in the air and let their torso fall over. But by doing that, all you're doing is shifting all the tension to the glutes. So what you're gonna have to do is you're gonna have to drop the weight about to 60% of what you would use for a standard back squat without a heel wedge, just doing it for load. And you're gonna now we're doing it for hypertrophy. So what I would I would, here's an example, I would squat, safe 365 For six would be my best like, just hey, I'm going to try and get strong high bar squat. When I went to the heels elevated squat the way that I just talked about it with the slow negative the pause at the bottom, the big chest coming up not making making sure my house doesn't fly up first. I dropped the weight first down to 225. And I stuck there for a few weeks. And then eventually I worked up to 265 for sets of six to eight. But that's a paltry weight compared to 365 You're literally talking like two thirds of the weight and it took me months and months to even work up to that. So I would drop the weight to 60% maybe even less dial in that form your quads will be screaming at you sounds
Philip Pape 39:22
like a man. But is that is that a do? Can you just have weightlifting shoes with plates underneath? Is that enough? Or do you need like a really steep ledge? Yeah,
Bryan Boorstein 39:30
you can do weightlifting shoes with a plate underneath that's fine. The the wedge, even the wedge that I would recommend would probably be a 20 degree wedge. And so that's not like a super super high wedge. I find for most people if you have weightlifting shoes on, you can use a 10 pound plate which isn't even that high, and that'll give you enough knee flexion for most people. If you have really bad ankle mobility, you might want to use a 25 pound plate, but now you're looking at stability concerns potentially. So you do kind of have have to walk that fine line there.
Philip Pape 40:01
And it sounds like a safety bar be a good option for this safety bar would be the best. Yeah, I
Bryan Boorstein 40:06
mean, if you have a safety bar 100% Yeah. Okay, so those are the first two quad movements. Then you have single leg squats of all varieties, you have front foot, elevated split squats, rear foot, elevated split squats, walking lunges, glute dominant, or quad dominant, and that basically just is determined by your torso and Shin angle. So just much like the heels elevated back squat. If you want to target your quads, you want your torso super high up and you want your knee super far over your toe. If you want glute dominant, you send your torso forward, almost like a hybrid RDL squat type movement. And then you try to keep your front chin vertical. And if you can keep your front chin vertical, and how to send your torso over your knee, you're gonna get a lot more glute priority from that exercise. So, so single leg squats of all varieties. And then the last quad movement that you need is something for the rec FEM. And since you don't have a leg extension machine, the go to that I always uses sissy squats. Some people aren't huge fans of sissy squats. So we'll use the reverse Nordic or some people call it the bodyweight leg extension. Kind of hard to explain, but you basically kneel on the ground with your feet behind you, and you kind of fall backwards, but you fall backwards without your hip angle changing. So your torso should form a straight line through your quads, and you fall back till your butt touches your heels, basically. And then you come forward again, without breaking your hip angle at all. Yeah, that'll
Philip Pape 41:37
really stretch out that. That quad tissue there.
Bryan Boorstein 41:39
I'm like, exactly, yeah, so those are the those three quad movements are gonna slay. And then hamstrings are not super challenging. The one thing that you really struggle with with hamstring work without a commercial gym is leg curls. And so the primary movements that we've used in this situation are different hacks to do them at home. My favorite one is actually a slider leg curl. So you put your heels on a towel on a floor, and then you'd kind of lift your hips up, and you just basically slide your feet back toward your butt and then slide your feet back out and slide your feet to where your butt and slide your feet back out. That'll get you a nice hamstring stimulus. You can also do it with banded leg curls. So you can set up a band anchored against the bottom of your power rack, and you can do lying leg curls that way. The problem with the band is it often loses tension at the length and position. And so I've found if you connect two bands together, so you have like a really thick band connected to a slightly thinner band, and then you're basically further away from the anchor point as a result of that, but it kind of evens out the resistance profile for you a little bit. And then another one you can do if you have a rower like a C two rower at home, is you can put your heels onto the seat of the rower and with your back off the edge of the back of the rower on the ground. And essentially do the same slider leg curl where their heels are coming toward you and your heels are going away from you type thing. So that'll get you that RDL stiff legged deadlifts you don't need a commercial gym. For that you just need a barbell or some dumbbells. And then if you have the ability to do any sort of, like you mentioned, a glute ham developer, that that's kind of a semi typical piece of equipment that you might have in a home gym. If you can do any sort of those hip extension, back extension type variations, that will also give you a really solid glute and ham stimulus there as well. So now you've got six exercises, three for quads and three for hams that, you know, should be really solid to get you some good gains.
Philip Pape 43:36
Those are good. And to clarify what I meant developer, it's literally just an attachment on a incline bench to do leg curls, leg extensions. Okay, which day, which is kind of chintzy because like you have to literally stack the whole thing to get to the load you want. And it's wobbly, you know, but um, I really miss the GHDs at the CrossFit gym. That's one thing that they had loads of, yeah,
Bryan Boorstein 43:58
you know, another cheap piece of home equipment that I would just encourage most people to buy if they're at home is a 45 degree hip extension. And, like, if you go on Amazon, there's models for anywhere between 102 $100 and you'll get a ton of use out of that. I mean, very, very effective. I used one for a number of years, just one of those cheap models. And just last year, I upgraded to a like really solid $500 Nicer hip extension 45 degree, but those 100 to $200 ones do the trick, and you'll get plenty of stimulus from those two.
Philip Pape 44:33
How does that compare to a 90 degree? What's what's the difference?
Bryan Boorstein 44:37
Yeah, so it's basically in where the movement is hardest. So when you're using the 90 degree like GHD, but the hardest point is going to be when your torso is horizontal to the ground. So the hardest point is going to be at the top of rep, and because of that, you're going to lose a bunch of tension at the bottom. So when you're hanging off at the at the stretched position where all the muscle is lengthened. You're just not going to get a significant stretch when you're in one Another 90 degree ones. But when you're in the 45 degree, the hardest point of the movement is actually again, where your torso is parallel to the ground. And thus, the top of the movement is actually slightly easier. So it's more of a mid range overload. And you continue to get solid stretch in your hamstrings and glutes, even at the bottom of that rep. So in most cases, if people have the option, I would prefer to have them at the 45 degree.
Philip Pape 45:23
And then last thing, going back to quads if you have a landmine attachment, which is pretty simple thing to get. What do you think of trying to emulate Hack Squats there?
Bryan Boorstein 45:32
Yes, landmine Hack Squats are great. Most people have a problem once they get strong enough getting the bar up to their shoulder. So a couple hacks there is you can put a you can slide a bench, really close to the anchor point of the landmine and then prop the landmine up against the bench. And then that way, when you walk under it, it's basically already at shoulder height. So that works pretty well or rather not at shoulder height, because then you wouldn't be able to squat with it. But you basically go under it into the bottom of the squat and then stand up. So you kind of have to mess around with the where the bench is set. Another thing you can do is you can set your landmine to sorry, I just got a call, you can set your landmine up on a J clip. So that the so that you can just load it right there and then kind of take it off the J clip onto your shoulder from there.
Philip Pape 46:20
Yeah, make make sense that Yeah, I do mine on spotter arms. Same way, you know, to get it to work. Alright, cool, man. So we want to talk about cardio as well. Yoga. Yeah, sure. Okay. Yep. Cool. Yeah. Because I know listening to your show even your own thoughts on that have evolved a little bit over time. Let's let's just break it down. Right. Because when people, there's there's camps when it comes to cardio, and I don't think there should be like, I think cardio is great, to some extent. And it all depends on your priorities. And you've talked about this as well, depends on what your goals are. But there's a lot of misconceptions about the interference effect, losing gains, you know, how do you prioritize incorporate cardio, what's the point of cardio like all of those things, as well as fat loss versus when you're not in fat loss. So I know, I just threw a lot at you, but just I know, you can handle it. What are you know,
Bryan Boorstein 47:10
cart. So interference effect, I think is something that really has changed over time. And it was a number of studies, initially, maybe seven or eight years ago that made people scared of cardio, and I can't reference them specifically at this point. But they were showing that there was in fact, an interference effect. And then there were a series of studies. More recently, in the last, I want to say three years, four years. And they demonstrated that if the programming is done in such a manner where you have a Priority A and a Priority B and one of them is I want to say taking closer to failure. But like you wouldn't take cardio to failure, it's just this idea of one you're working harder on and one you're working not as hard on, they actually can be really helpful to each other. And in fact, now it seems like it's even gone further. And you have this, this view of the bodybuilder athlete that is so under recovered and are not under recovered, but under conditioned, that they're having to rest excessively between sets. And it's not just that they're doing less volume because of this excessive rest that they need to take. But it's then bleeding over into their body's inability to get parasympathetic after the workout. So they're finishing their workout, and they're so out of shape cardiovascularly that their body stays in this heightened sympathetic nervous system state for not just hours, but days like affects you while you're sleeping. The next day, your body is literally not recovering fast enough between weightlifting sessions, because your cardiovascular fitness is so poor. And so it seems intuitively that if you're able to increase your cardiovascular fitness, at least to like a decent base level, that this then improves your recovery adaptations allows you to do more volume in the gym, and thus, you know, elicit better gains across the board.
Philip Pape 49:03
Now that that is interesting, I have to admit I hadn't heard I don't know you talk about it. I just had it didn't sink in. You know, I listened to the podcast, a million podcasts and for some reason, that exact issue of the parasympathetic nervous system and recovery. Now I'm really interested and I'm interested for selfish purposes as well because I used to be in CrossFit like I said, high vo two Max super conditioned and I've done I do way less cardio today than back then. And I work from home. So like you know, there's no excuses. I'm just saying that that's the state of things right now. First of all, how do you measure that fitness level? So that you know what you need to incorporate? Like what are the objective measures whether it's vo two max or HRV or whatever else? And then what is kind of a reasonable you know, you've got life you've got so much time you still want to be training for five, six days a week, amount of cardio to fit in to get past that threshold. Yeah,
Bryan Boorstein 49:52
I'm not so convinced that vo two max is the best variable to use because you're never actually going to Your vo two max or needing your VO two max to recover between sets or even to get parasympathetic after sessions. I think the better metric is zone two, which I think that we can use as a general viewpoint of functioning of your mitochondria. And your mitochondria are the little things, your energy cells that are working on repairing reproduction all the time, like they're always in the background, just typing away, you know, writing new code for your body. And so what I tend to use with people and with myself is the amount of watts per kilo that you can generate while keeping your heart rate in zone two. And so zone two very generally, is going to be peaked like the high end of Zone Two for most people will be 180 minus your age. And that's very, very general, I usually start people at 180 Minus fifth minus their age plus 10. And then have them work up to 180 minus the age, but I'll generally have them work. So I'm 41, we'll just say I'm 40. For easy math. 180 minus 40 is 140. So that's the top of my zone two. So I tried to do my zone to between 130 and 140 beats a minute. If I'm above 140, I feel like I'm getting into zone three. If I'm below 130, I feel like it's pretty easy sledding, and I'm probably in the high end of zone one. And so I tried to do my zone to work in that range. And then I look at what are the watts per kilo that I'm able to generate during that exercise. Now, most people may not have access to watts, that's something you would have on an exercise bike or on a rower or something like that. So essentially, there are other metrics you can use, but you just want to see the output that you have improved over time, while your heart rate stays consistent. So if I could say generate 1.5 watts per kilo, when I started, this is actually my story. My peak, zone two was 1.5 watts per kilo that was like right at the high end, I was like pushing the boundary. So I weighed 90 kilos, I could do 135 Watts, and that was my zone to now, a year and a half later, maybe almost two years, I am up to two watts per kilo. So I'm doing about 180 to 190 watts. And my heart rate is still in the same range, right in that 130 to 140. So I've essentially improved by 33%, or something along those lines. And I've noticed along that same trend, significant improvements in recovery time, sleep quality, HRV resting heart rate, general sense of well being energy throughout the day, ability to focus, all of these kinds of subjective metrics that we feel on a day to day basis have improved as my zone two has improved. Got
Philip Pape 53:01
it? Okay, so no, you are you're actually I was not asking the right question. But you answered the question I was attending, which is how can you how can you measure it to see that the improvement is, you know, to go after the improvement during your activity? And then like you said, there are other measures after the fact like your HIV resting heart rate and so on that that are and biofeedback that are other indicators. Do you know if that the watts per kilo is it's not something we can measure on like a ring or watch, right? It's like one of those
Bryan Boorstein 53:26
show? No, no, but you know what, like, like, you just want to improve your n of one. And so if you have if you have a bike where you can monitor speed, like an indoor trainer bike, and it doesn't give you watts, some bikes do, but it gives you speed. And so you're like, okay, my zone too, right now is that 14.7 miles per hour, well, then you're just trying to increase from 14.7 miles per hour while keeping your heart rate consistent. So you just need to find some subject, something that's objective, some objective metric of performance that you can track on your preferred cardiovascular source modality. And then just try and look and see that go up over time. Perfect, man. Cool. Yeah.
Philip Pape 54:13
I know myself, I've been telling myself I do want to incorporate more cardio now especially get a head into a fat loss phase here after nine months of building which is, but but a lot of people ask this question all the time and my own clients, nutrition clients, it's like, no, we don't just want to walk but like, how much cardio do you do and how does it interfere or not? Now what about during fat loss when you know, recovery capacity is lower and intake is lower? How does that change if if at
Bryan Boorstein 54:41
all? Yeah, I mean, it definitely increases the interference. I mean, I so I do think that you, if if weight training or muscle mass or strength or any of those barbell pursuits, are of top priority to you, then you need to be very cognizant about where you put your cardio training. especially if it's more vo to max or interval style training, I generally consider zone to work to be somewhat cathartic, almost like a pseudo recovery modality. If you're pushing zone to work to the point that it's super fatiguing. I think you're doing it wrong, I think you're doing it too hard. So my general view is that if you're doing Zone Two, you should be able to put that more or less anywhere, although I would caution against putting it really, really close to leg training, certainly not like directly before leg training, but probably also not directly after leg training. But I think anytime like within a few hours, and having a meal in between should be fine or a separate day should be fine. Even like if your quads are sore, and you go do zone two, I don't think that's a problem. In many ways, it actually kind of helps flush some metabolites out of there and helps your recovery. So zone two, I don't think you need to be quite as specific with but any sort of interval work where your legs are really actually working against a resistance. That's not just fatiguing for your legs, it's fatiguing for your entire being like your whole body becomes fatigued, your mind comes to see there's psychological fatigue associated with it work. And that detracts from your ability to focus and put primary energy into your leg training. And then the same would apply if your cardio modality is something that works the upper body, like if you're rowing or you're doing the ski ERG or you're doing one of these other upper body dominant, not dominant, but where the upper body is a large part of the cardiovascular experience, you probably should be cognizant of that as well. Like, I probably wouldn't go row rowing intervals and then go do a back workout or something along those lines. So So yeah, I mean, there's a few things you need to be cognizant of. And then I didn't actually address one of your questions, which was what's the dose that you need to do for this? And so it's very gold dependent. You know, Peter Attia? Are you familiar with him? Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah. He often talks about for health and longevity, having for zone two sessions and one like zone four zone five hit type session each week. And I think that that's kind of a high end for people whose top priority is something involved with weightlifting. I think that's great. If your goal is longevity and wanting to live the longest, healthiest life that you can, that's that's where I tend to fall these days, I've sort of gradually moved away from optimizing physique and more to optimizing, longevity and lifestyle. So I do try to hit what Peter at TSS most weeks, I think for somebody that is really trying to prioritize physiques or, or strength sport, that getting to zone two sessions is a bare minimum, and maybe one hit zone five type session. So you'd have three cardio sessions a week at that point. Cool. Yeah,
Philip Pape 58:01
I like that. All right. Cool, man. I know, we're almost out of time here. Do you have time for like one or two more questions? Sure. Yeah, go for cool. Because you did want to talk specialization briefly. And where I was going with this is a lot of folks are running, we'll call it a template program or a standard program, or even if they have a custom program, and they're just not happy with a certain part of their physique. For guys, maybe it's biceps, right, it might be back might be shoulders, what's kind of a basic specialization approach in terms of like, adding on to your program or supplanting the existing part of your training, just to accelerate a specific body part? Sure,
Bryan Boorstein 58:39
because it's kind of becomes a runaway train at that point. So what we're what I'm actually doing, Jeff hain, who is our mutual friend, he's a client of mine, I'm working one on one with Him. And so he and I have been in deep nerdy talks as we do, about how to optimize physique. And over the last couple of years, the data driven guys have been doing a lot of, and I don't want to say it's research because I don't think there are specific research studies on the topic, but intuitive analysis of, of the topic. And they've kind of ascertain this idea, that rotating specialization cycles where you dial up volume for two or maybe three muscle groups, and then dial down volume for the other five or six muscle groups would be an extremely effective way of going about this. Because we know through research that maintenance volume or the amount of volume you need to maintain gains is so low like literally studies have shown it could be as low as 30% of what it takes to get there. So say it took you 15 sets to grow your legs, you might be able to maintain your legs on five sets. So if we harness that knowledge, and we say okay, well if volume is going to help us grow more and we know we can maintain on less volume, we can jack up the volume on a few muscle group groups, pull down the volume on the remaining muscle groups and do this in kind of a cyclical manner where we spend two to four months on a few different muscle groups, and then switch the rotation, spend two to four months on some different muscle groups, et cetera, et cetera, just kind of roll through like that. And so that's been the way that Jeff and I have been approaching it. Now for a number of months, we've done a lats and triceps specialization. We're currently in a chest, biceps and lateral delts specialization. And we'll probably just continue rolling through these every few months and following those parameters. And then so in that same vein, there's a number of different levers, you can pull, we talked about volume as one, but you can prioritize proximity to failure. So you could take some movements and work them closer to failure and other movements further from failure, you could prioritize exercise order. So you could have some exercises at the beginning of the workout and others at the end. And that's one of the things we're actually using right now with Jeff is, it almost seems taboo to put bicep work before back work. But because back work is no longer a priority for us. That is literally what one of our days looks like we have three bicep movements, then we have a lateral delt movement, I think, or something a tricep movement, and then we have a back movement. So back is literally like the last thing you're working. Whereas in most cases, you would always put back first and then finish with biceps. So you can prioritize exercise order, you can do volume, you can use frequency. So you could train muscle groups more often and put other muscle groups less often. So there's a number of kind of these different levers that you can pull, and just need to figure out kind of how you want to set it up and manipulate it. Yeah,
Philip Pape 1:01:43
that makes a lot of sense, right? Especially the exercise order. People don't often think of that they always think, Oh, do the big lift first or, you know, like, don't write, you don't want to pre exhaust this, but like you said, well, doesn't matter because this is our priority. And also the point that that maintenance doesn't take nearly as much. It's just like when we're in a fat loss phase. And we have to get reframed the mindset that you're not actually going to build new muscle, but you're going to maintain and guess what, it takes a lot less volume. So now you're trying to maximize recovery. Take advantage of that right for a while. Really, Colin? All right. I could talk with you for hours. I mean, it's why I love your show, you know, listening to just all these topics, and I knew I would learn a lot. And I'm hoping the listener learned a ton as well. Is there anything you wish I had asked? that I didn't cover today?
Bryan Boorstein 1:02:24
Yeah, you know, I knew this question was coming in. And I honestly think that we had a really great conversation. There isn't exactly anything that I think you'd ask. I feel like, you know, if we want to come back on we can. One topic that I think is been really interesting, and I've received a lot of questions about recently has been from new dads, and how they would change their training as a result of having a newborn or having a really busy schedule with kids sports practices, or like any other number of things that come along with, you know, being a dad and being busy and having kids and trying to balance everything. So maybe a topic for the next time we get to chat.
Philip Pape 1:03:02
I love it, man you are already inviting yourself on which is good, because I would have done it myself. No, no, that's good. And give me a topic too. So love it. All right, well, where do you want people to find out more about you and your work? Yeah, so
Bryan Boorstein 1:03:16
primarily, you can just find me on Instagram at Brian Borstein. Like you said in the intro, I have two group trading programs. Evolved training systems is kind of my original one. But I don't put a whole ton of time and effort into it at this point. It's more of like I call it my science lab because it's a much smaller population compared to my other programming group, which has Paragon training methods. And so evolved is cool because I get to kind of do what I want. I don't have a business partner. And the programming is what I want it to be. I can get really kind of intimate feedback from the members who have been there with me for a while. And then Paragon is my other larger company we have 15 different programs at this point, we have a full gym, a home gym, and a dumbbell only program for five day four day or three day programming. So literally whatever your equipment is, and whatever your desired training time per week is we have a program for you we have a great community with tons of coaches in the group to kind of help answer questions for you do form checks and and stuff like that. So awesome,
Philip Pape 1:04:19
man. Yeah, definitely include that in there and everyone listening I mean Brian, Brian knows a ton about this, definitely check out the podcast E train prosper as well. And um, check out his stuff because it's you're gonna learn, you know, 1010 things every time you're exposed to some of his content. So keep it up, man. This was a pleasure. It was awesome to have you on I appreciate the conversation today.
Bryan Boorstein 1:04:38
Yeah, I appreciate you having me. Thank you.
Philip Pape 1:04:42
Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Wits & Weights. If you found value in today's episode, and know someone else who's looking to level up their Wits & Weights. Please take a moment to share this episode with them. And make sure to hit the Follow button in your podcast platform right now to catch the next episode. Until then stay strong
