What does it mean to "train hard"? Is it training to failure, progressive overload, intensity, something else? Find out the answers in today's episode.

Today, Steve Hall, the founder of Revive Stronger, a seasoned natural bodybuilder and podcast host, shares his expertise on essential training principles. Philip (@witsandweights) invited him to the show to share his insights on what it means to "train hard" and how to apply scientific research to your training effectively. They discussed reps in reserve (RIR), proximity to failure, minimum effective volume for muscle growth, and more.

Steve's journey in the fitness world began after a near-death experience at the age of 20 where he suffered a severe head injury. During his recovery, he discovered bodybuilding, which helped him regain control of his life and ignited his passion for self-improvement.

With over a decade of gym experience and years of coaching experience, Steve has definitely made a name for himself in the world of natural bodybuilding, placing second at the WNBF World finals in 2021. Steve's approach to training and nutrition is grounded in the latest scientific research, which he combines with extensive practical knowledge to help his clients achieve outstanding results.

Today, you’ll learn all about:

3:19 The link between bodybuilding and personal values
8:16 "Training hard" for hypertrophy
13:56 RIR and proximity to failure vs. other hypertrophy principles
19:20 Assessing repetition ranges
28:42 Applying research findings to individual training
39:43 Assessing and optimizing individual response to training
44:52 Full Range of Motion (ROM) vs. partial reps
52:22 Developing personal heuristics for effective training
59:39 The question Steve wished Philip had asked
1:01:35 Where to find Steve
1:02:20 Outro

Episode resources:

• Steve’s coaching and podcast website: revivestronger.com

• IG: @revivestronger

• The Improvement Season Podcast

Episode summary:

Embarking on a journey through the realm of bodybuilding, the latest podcast episode with Steve Hall, the mastermind behind Revive Stronger, offers a treasure trove of insights for anyone looking to elevate their physical training. As a seasoned natural bodybuilder, Steve provides a unique perspective on optimizing workouts for muscle growth and overall physical excellence.

Throughout the episode, Steve dissects the fundamental principles that govern effective training. Emphasizing the importance of specificity, overload, and progressive overload, he shares his wisdom on creating fitness programs that are productive, rather than perfect. His insights underscore the significance of progression in training, offering listeners a pathway to achieving their fitness aspirations.

In a candid reflection, Steve recounts his personal journey in bodybuilding, which began in the aftermath of a severe head injury. This transformative experience instilled in him values of control and self-improvement, underscoring bodybuilding's potential to serve as a conduit for broader life progression. He also delves into the technical aspects of training, including reps in reserve (RIR), proximity to failure, and minimum effective volume (MEV), guiding listeners on how to balance scientific research with individual physiological responses to maximize gains while reducing injury risk.

Steve's discussion further explores the psychological aspects of pushing oneself to the brink of failure, an often underappreciated facet of muscle growth. By sharing actionable strategies, he enables listeners to break through psychological barriers and embrace a mindset conducive to productive workouts. This understanding is crucial, particularly for those new to resistance training who may underestimate their capabilities, leaving untapped potential on the gym floor.

As the episode progresses, Steve illuminates the delicate balance between training intensity and recovery. He highlights the concept of max recoverable stimulus versus fatigue, illustrating the necessity of customizing training regimens to one's unique body responses. Through his expert lens, we gain an insider's look at the complex process of optimizing muscle recovery and growth.

In an enlightening segment, Steve shares his experience with calf training techniques and the role of biofeedback in achieving growth. He emphasizes the importance of understanding individual nuances, such as equipment preferences and full range of motion, in crafting effective training strategies. Listeners are encouraged to consider additional metrics beyond lifts, such as hunger and irritability, to refine their fitness and nutrition plans further.

Finally, the episode underscores the continuous learning journey in fitness. It advocates for a productive program that evolves with one's personal experiences and body responses. This philosophy resonates deeply with listeners, empowering them to embrace dedication and knowledge as they ascend to new heights in their quest for physical excellence.

In summary, the podcast episode with Steve Hall offers a comprehensive guide to mastering physical excellence. By blending scientific insights with practical strategies, it serves as a catalyst for listeners to transform their physique and mindset. It is a testament to the power of bodybuilding as a platform for self-mastery and personal growth.

🚀 Apply for 1-on-1 coaching!

👩‍💻 Schedule a FREE nutrition/training audit with Philip

👥 Join our Facebook community for support, live Q&As, & challenges

✉️ Join the FREE email list with insider strategies, bonus content, and exclusive articles!

📱 Try MacroFactor for free with code WITSANDWEIGHTS. The only food logging app that adjusts to your metabolism!

🩷 Enjoyed this episode? Share it on social and follow/tag @witsandweights

🤩 Love the podcast? Leave a 5-star review

📞 Send a Q&A voicemail

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

Steve Hall  00:00

if people ever feel like lost and confused with these things, definitely pull it back to the principles especially when they get lost into program design. If they just pull it back to Okay, so specificity, overload, progressive overload, and what I need to achieve in my program, and then don't overthink it, don't try make the perfect most optimal program possible because we can't possibly know what that is. Get something together. Productive Do you feel like is hard and you're progressing overtime?

 

Philip Pape  00:29

Welcome to the wit's end waits 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 Whitson weights community Welcome to another episode of The Whitson weights Podcast. Today, I am thrilled to welcome Steve Hall founder of revived stronger hosts of the podcast of the same name and competitive natural bodybuilder. Now I invited Steve on the show I'm a big fan of his and a follower of his show, and I wanted him to share his insights on what it really means to train hard, and how to effectively apply scientific research to your own training. In that context, we'll get into the nuances of training principles like reps and reserve, IRI, our proximity to failure and minimum effective volume MeV and how these concepts relate to muscle growth. We'll discuss how to bridge the gap between research and practice based on your individual response to optimize your gains while minimizing injury risk. Now, Steve's journey in the fitness world began after a near death experience at the age of 20, where he suffered a severe head injury. And during his recovery, he discovered bodybuilding, he revived stronger where the name comes from, which helped him regain control of his life and ignited his passion for self improvement. With over a decade of experience in the gym, and years of coaching under his belt, Steve has definitely made a name for himself in the world of Natural Bodybuilding. He plays second at the WNBA of worlds. In 2021, Steve's approach to training and nutrition is grounded in the latest scientific research, which he combines with extensive practical knowledge to help his clients achieve outstanding results. And in my opinion, his show the revived stronger podcast is one of the best evidence based podcasts out there. So go follow it when you're done listening to this show, Steve. Oh, man, thank you so much for coming on.

 

Steve Hall  02:31

The thank you so much. As we were saying all fair, it's always nice to be on the other end. It's always an honor to be brought on. And yeah, have my thoughts brought to the floor a little bit more. Because I get to speak to some of the brightest minds in the industry. I'm very thankful of that. But yeah, there's a lot of thoughts going on. And as I'm sure as a podcast host, you know this when you're listening to the other person talk, so many thoughts go through your head, and you don't always get to say them. So it's quite nice to be here on the other end. And thank you for the very kind intro.

 

Philip Pape  02:56

Absolutely, yeah. And it is a challenge of trying to really listen and absorb the message while we're just having that conversation and bring out your expertise. And it's true. And I went back and looked at your feed because I listened to every episode of yours. You're almost always interviewing these big names. And sometimes I'm like, Man, I just want to hear from you, Steve, you know, and so wanted to bring you on the show, because people probably have the same thought. And so before we get into the topic itself, I'm not going to say hey, what's your story, per se, I don't want to go that generic. I want to link this to the idea of improvement of how bodybuilding itself and building muscle while it could seem to be this vain thing that certain people are just obsessed with, right. And there's definitely certain behaviors that go behind that with like, food and orthorexia, and all these other topics. You're very passionate about it. So am I we have podcasts that where we talk about this stuff all the time. And they seem to be linked to values like, you know, having control of improving yourself. Tell us about the link between those. Yeah, for

 

Steve Hall  03:53

sure. Yeah, I think on the surface level, bodybuilding probably looks like so superficial. And so just like egotistical and vain and just like weird, right, especially competitive bodybuilding, where you see the guys and just the tiny little thongs on stage and they're all tanned up and greased up. You're like, what are these guys doing? They're flexing. And it was actually hilarious. This is a slight side note, but I saw a real it was Arnold, like Arnold Schwarzenegger. And he was like posing in front of this woman. I think it's in a film or something that was like he was part of, but it was like a meme. It was like, when you're a bodybuilder and all you've got about you as the gym and you go on a first date for the first time. And she's just like, she just starts laughing at him. He's like, this is a front double bicep. This is our front load spread, like trying to impress her. She's just what the hell like laughing her head off. So I think from the outside, that's the way people view it. But to actually like the process behind it. It's kind of like that's the peak of the iceberg. But like underneath, it's like, well, that's the chunk of the iceberg and that's where all these other values and things can be found. And for me like bodybuilding has given me a route to better health, for sure. or it's give it gives me direction every single day in my life. And it's also given me essentially a business. And it gives me something to look forward to every day. So yeah, there's so much you could dive into with that question. But the quote I love, I don't know exactly where it's from, but it's like progress is happiness. And it's a quote I love and that's the way I feel about bodybuilding every day, I feel like I'm progressing towards something like I get out of bed. And I always feel like I have a purpose, it doesn't matter what's going on in my life, what stressors are going on, if things have been bad with the business or at dinner, or had an argument with my girlfriend, or whatever it might be, I know that day, I've got a workout to do. I've got some nutritional goals to achieve. And if I do that, I know I've put in another little penny into my like muscle growth deposit. And it feels so great to be able to have that. And it also gives you kind of direction with various questions that come out at you. So if you just sort of a lot of decision making can be hard if you have no direction in your life that I'm like, This is gonna make me a better bodybuilder. Like I can look at so many things that I make 10 have choices in my life. Like, shall I watch this extra episode of whatever show I'm watching? Or should I go to bed? What's gonna make me a better bodybuilder, let's get to bed, like these various things. So yeah, for me, it gives me such a sense of purpose and direction that I owe so much to the bodybuilding as a whole, it's not even miss the competitive side is something else. But the whole philosophy behind progressing yourself bettering yourself, having that purpose, the routines and habits that have to take place, and how you can put those into other aspects of life, like growing a business or into relationships. And even with us, you mentioned, like you've been in the evidence based space for like five or so years now. Like, understanding that there's the science and principles behind this. And you can be skeptical about other things that you hear in life where you just don't accept someone's word at face value in this, if something sounds too good to be true, or what have you. You can be like, I'm gonna look into that myself. So it's given me some skill sets for day to day too. So yeah, like I said, I want to bodybuilding.

 

Philip Pape  07:05

And there's so much there that I resonate so hard with and I'm sure a lot of people do, but the idea that the physical pursuits required by bodybuilding, even, even if you're not competitive, even if you're just trying to, you know, be a lifestyle enthusiast in this translate to everything else, right. And I often say the physical has to almost has to come before everything else, because it enables those things. But your idea of of incorporating passion and excitement and purpose and driving these all together, and then they translate to business and everything else is a great message. I got a text from a friend this morning, he was quoting, I think, The Four Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss, and he said, excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness. And it is precisely what you should chase it is the cure all and I get that from you have like, the passion and the excitement, you know, comes before the other things and then hey, you get to make a business out of this too, because you just love it so much. People want to hear and get your help. And it's a win win for everybody. There's no cognitive dissonance. So it's a great message, Steve. So then, like, let's segue into the topic as smoothly as you can, which is training hard. And honestly, a lot of this is, you know, how do we train hard? How do we progress in life and in bodybuilding? And so let's talk about the bodybuilding side and hypertrophy. Even when I go on shows, people say, Hey, you talk about lifting heavy what does that mean? Are you talking about training hard? What does that mean? Like just answered that that like super easy question, Steve. Right, super easy question to answer. And then we'll dive into details. Yeah,

 

Steve Hall  08:33

it's a good one. Because I think you have to specify training hard for the goal of muscle growth, because there's a lot of things I could do in the gym, that would be freaking hard, but they didn't grow me any muscle like squatting on a BOSU ball, or like a dyno sprint doing treadmill sprints. I've done those before. And that was hell. Class. You know, there's a lot of things you can go into the gym, and just like, I think most people think training hard is just like exhausting yourself. I know, I used to own a t shirt that said go hard or go home. So it was just, that's the kind of characteristic of, of bodybuilding, especially in the UK, with Dorian Yates and everything. It's like hard training, you know, but I think hard when I translate it to like a scientific term could look be looked at as overload maybe, like it has to be overloading for the body. So it has to be hard enough to cause a stress response for the body to have to respond to so as to be overloading and how do we make something overloading in regards to specifically for muscle growth? I look at there has to be overloading me and overload threshold for proximity to failure. In fact, some people may be able to grow very, very far from failure. I think there's studies on like, newbie cycling and they grow. Most of us who have been training for a few years are not growing from cycling. We won't maintain our muscle from cycling, we probably need to be quite close to muscle or sorry to failure as we're going to speak about a little bit more. So when I consider that for someone who's been training consistently for many years Like practically three or four reps from failure is about as far as you probably want to be going much further from that, you probably don't know where you are in terms of proximity, like, it's just too easy to really know that you're training hard enough reps need to have slowed down involuntary to you trying your hardest. And then you know, the body's actually trying like that's as simple as it gets, like, oh, a set actually got hard, it felt challenging when I was going through it. And then the other aspect of hard and a threshold for growth is you need to do enough of it, doing just one set of squats a week is I'm it wouldn't grow my quads or glutes, it would probably maintain them, I don't know, it might not to be honest, it's probably under my maintenance volume, probably maintain quite a lot of people's. And like I said it would someone new to the gym, I mean, that would grow them for sure. But after a while, it would no longer meet that hard slash overload threshold for growth. So we need to do enough of it to be able to grow. And that's that minimum effective volume you spoke of like that MeV, you need to do enough of that. And when I think of how low is that, as I've already kind of demonstrated, the newer you are to the gym, the less well adapted you are, the less of a stress, the less hard and hard is a lower threshold for you. But the longer you've been training and practically for anyone who's been training for a few years, like it needs to be a significant amount every week that you're doing there, the actual lower amounts, there probably depends on the muscle group, it will depend on the person, it would depend on the exercise selection or depend on how close you go to failure, there's so many things it depends on. Because there's a lot that goes into productive program design, I would view it as four to six direct sets for a muscle group is probably going to start growing you. So if you're at four to six, and you're anywhere from three, four RSR closer to failure, I think you're doing a good job to probably be growing. But I would test that assumption, see if there's progression. And I guess that segues into a slightly different discussion. But that's how I view heart is I would translate it into overload. And then I would think of overloading specifically for muscle growth, meeting thresholds for relative intensity. So it needs to be close enough to failure. And all add one actually, it needs to be sufficient volume, which I look at as sets of proximity to failure. And then actually the other layer there would be it has to be heavy enough. The reason I didn't introduce it is because there's such a wide range of kind of rep ranges, or loads that would grow you, I think you're all the way up to like 30% of your one rep max has been shown to grow at least over the studied time period. And so like five to 30 repetitions is probably a great range to be in with being that proximal to failure, you could go heavier and still meet growth thresholds is just inefficient. That's why I tend to have five is my kind of cap there. And above 30, we just don't have good data to suggest that you're growing particularly well at that point. And practically, even going above 20 reps isn't particularly fun. I think now, then it's a great thing to do, potentially, but it's not much fun. Yeah,

 

Philip Pape  13:00

yeah, I know, there's a lot of personal and practical aspects to these. And I want to get into that because you definitely let it laid out some boundaries. Like we can't, you know, we say it depends a lot, but it's not like it depends on anything. It depends on you certain principles and certain boundaries. So I like some of the metrics you gave us where you said, okay, there has to be a stress response. So we can adapt and grow. What does that mean? Okay, we have to push hard enough, okay, there's a certain number of reps from quote, unquote, failure, which again, is a could be a squishy thing for someone who's new, we can talk about that. And then Enough, enough of it with volume, because you can't just go you know, once a month or once a week and do two sets, and then heavy enough, and that's the other argument, I'm glad you gave a very wide rep range, you know, because there's definitely some dogmatic thinking, and especially old school, like strength versus hypertrophy rep range. And, and then you've got the effective reps model on the other side, which is like any rep range just has to eat 100 reps at the end. But let's drill into one of those, I want to talk about the psychological aspect of pushing that boundary when you're kind of a newer or even intermediate lifter, who may maybe it hasn't worked with the coach, and so they haven't really been pushed. What does it mean to feel like you are close to failure? Or even to have that heuristic of like, this is my failure point. What's a good way to get there?

 

Steve Hall  14:17

Yeah, it's a really good question. Because I effectively, I wouldn't, like it's hard to if you've never trained to failure, know what the reps before that unnecessarily feeling. Like, good example. I always use this put someone who hasn't really trained before and a leg extension. And they'll do like 10 reps. They'll start burning and they're like, man, that's that's I can't do any more. And then you'd be like, no, no, you're good. Nothing slow down. You're still producing really good concentric force. And then they maybe do another 10 And that's actually been examined within research when you get people to just like pick a load for how many reps they can do but then you push them and you give encouragement Hey, they get like a double the number of reps that they necessarily thought they were But if you're looking at people and even newbies who haven't used RL before, if you get them to rate it bike as they go, so you don't just get them to pick a load and then do 10 And dicho. Yeah, I thought that was my max, but You encouraged me to more, if you get them on there, you give them the load, and then they're like, or hammy, Jeff left, they realize they're better at writing IGI have more in me than I thought. And they can keep going. And they're actually much better at gauging it. The latest meta analysis, I think, essentially looked at saying that most people around a rep away from where they thought and I kind of they undershoot by a rep, so they probably had one more in them than they thought. So people are pretty good at gauging it. And when you go and you train it, but it's actually a quite nuanced discussion, because I think some people think it's like, hey, so three or four reps or reserve, you get a slow rep, the other ones before that, they all look about the same. So maybe it's a two second concentric, and it's dropped to one second. And then it's like, okay, then drops, like, again, 25% less than that, that's and that less than that, and then you hit failure. But for some lifts, and you're very know this to Philip, like, you can sometimes just hit a wall, like as soon as I hear. So Rob, that's one area, I got one more good rep in me. And then I'm done. I think that comes down to just different leverages on various exercises and things like this. So if we're talking about like a full range of motion lat pulldown, the lats themselves are strongest in the lengthen position at the top. But the exercise itself is hardest in the short position where your weakest. So suddenly, like you can't grind out reps maybe the same way, you could grind out some more partial reps up at the top. So it's a little bit different there. Versus pressing where if you're doing a dumbbell press, yeah, I mean, that's going to be a little bit more matched in terms of what's strongest, and where it's hardest in terms of that length and position, your strongest sort of hardest in that bottom position. And then some machines are just like a bit wacky Oh, no, I have this pendulum squat I'm using and even different pendulum squats can differ. I've got a Watson like old school pendulum squat I'm using. And I know as soon as I hit like a slow rep on there, I'm like, I am quickly toast, I watch a video of it. And I'm like, Ah, it looks like I had more in the tank. But I just know from having gone to failure that I don't. And I think that's the really cure all is maybe you start your training where you're like, Yeah, I'm getting some soil reps is feeling hard, it's feeling challenged, I have to really concentrate to get those repetitions. And they've slowed down, I've kind of finished that set. And I'm like, Yeah, my muscle felt challenged. But then you look to progress it over time. Progressive overload is a super important aspect of muscle growth, you look to add a rep, or add a small amount of load. And over the weeks maintaining good technique, you're eventually going to hit a point where like, I tried for a rep, I couldn't get it. And then you know where that is, you know how the reps have for it felt and you also have logbook data. So say you hit a benchpress 100 for 10 reps, the 11th rep you failed, you had a spotter, like you're you're still alive, you're fine. You know, if you start a new mesocycle, and you want to be three reps, reserve 100. For seven, you're pretty confident, all things being equal, you had a good night's sleep you ate well, you're not dieting, you can do that. And that'll be a good gauge of where your three Reo is hopefully over time, three REO now becomes like 102.5 for seven, and you'd like get stronger over time. That's that's obviously the goal is kind of marker for muscle growth, your strength increases. But essentially, I think that's probably the best way to go about it. I think some people just say, hey, like Pete newbies aren't good at training, in proximity to failure. So just train them all to failure all the time. Because they're not good at it. And I'm just like, it's a risky approach. First of all, because their technique often isn't great, especially as they approach failure, it's becomes very risky. Also, as we spoke about before, the people who can grow the easiest, are the newer people, and they can leave more in the tank, so you don't have to push them to that point. So I would say not even to take a bike, a barbell back squat, or even a bench press, maybe if you've spotted you can take it to failure. But do it on safer lifts generally, like do it on your maybe a smith machine squat is relatively safer, a hack squat would even be even better leg extension fine, like take it to the house, you know, nothing bad is going to happen if you do that. But yeah, for like your barbell free weight lifts, you probably don't want to do that so often. But I think you can learn enough from these other lifts, that you kind of get that experience. So hopefully that kind of answered the question.

 

Philip Pape  19:19

Definitely answered the question with as much you know, very comprehensively as I expected. So there's there's little pieces in here, I want to poke out pick out for what I know the listeners thinking. First kind of going backward. I know when I first started training, heavy or hard, you know, to actually using progressive overload and tracking sets across was also very helpful tool just because I didn't know my failure point, right? Where sets across, you know, progress each session, it starts to get into that failure regime. And then then you're like, Oh, now I know what failure is. So that's interesting, but a few things you mentioned. One is the slowing down. There's a lot of we want to get objective with some of these right? So when I think of slowing down, and I'm sure you've had this experience where You feel something's slowing down, you watch it back and it didn't slow down at all on video, right? And there's like this dis dilation effect almost. And in other cases, it's obvious like you said, with the lat pulldown, you just start to pull in, it literally just won't go. It slowed down. So what are your thoughts on that? Doesn't matter that much? If you're just progressing, or like, should people use video, we're not going to have velocity sensors or anything like that. But what do you think? Yeah,

 

Steve Hall  20:24

I was glad you brought velocity up, because I know that that's something that's being looked into our volume velocity trackers, but it just spoke to Jake, from data driven, driven strength, who they're part of Mike Zardoz, his lab, and they've been looking at the lacI trackers and trying to use them in practice as maybe a way of like, hey, it's a small investment for someone who maybe like ourselves, who uses Rei, we want to be more objective about it. It's not a crazy investment to do. I think it's practically might be hard in the gym. I've never used one. But he was just like, actually, it doesn't seem to be panning out how we thought it might, it doesn't seem to be that objective. So it is hard. And I think it therefore relies more on that personal experience with failure on various lifts and various muscles where it might be slightly different. I'm sure you've had it, Philip, Where I know, I've had clients where they hit a grinder and I'm like, Okay, you're done. And then they get like three more. And I'm like, okay, so they knew they had more in the tank. So actually, I can't look at the video and tell them that RSR. And this is something I think so many people get messed up is because they think there's just this one, like, Hey, you hit three is that slow to one, zero, it should look like this every person under every circumstance, but it is simply it just doesn't look that way. And so I always say to clients, I I never can tell objectively what your area is, like, just say if I think you had more or less. And then sometimes they come back to me like Steve, you know, you're right. Or they might come back with a suit. There's no way and I'm like, Okay, we're test that maybe, and see how it goes. But yeah, then on the same kind of line of thought you have the grinders, but then you have that person who just whatever about them, if they're fast, which dominant. And so they just fatigue very quickly, they just suddenly hit a wall and you're like, Oh, I didn't know expect that to happen. And I actually really had this was very cool. I got to train at das gym in Vienna, which if you haven't heard of it, or you haven't seen it, Google it, anyone listening, it's one of the coolest gyms in the world. And we managed to go there is a team. So myself, Pascal, and Mike Chalice, they're all coaches on the team and we train together. And it's just funny, because we're all so different. And how will you respond to things? Like I think I'm fairly average in terms of my grindability. And what our ER looks like Mike, on the other hand, he can just keep going, you're like, he's been like grinding for like five reps, hear what's going on. And then I would say Pascal slightly towards the other end where he he fails a little bit quicker than I do. And it's like, we're all very similar age, very similar number of years of training, muscular development, isn't that different between us yet, our AR can look quite different. So I think it really has to come down to personal experience with this. And the better you use it just like any tool, the sharper it comes like, the better you are at using it. And I think you mentioned something really important here is like, how important is it? If you're progressing over time, like I'll put up a squat video. And I'll say, Hey, I thought this was like zero RL and some will, Mike, I have a bunch of comments. Now you had more than a tank Steve, like Come on, push harder. And like, as you don't mind, if I did or didn't, I knew I was very close. And I knew that was a PR based off previous performance. And so if I keep PR and I keep seeing new numbers, new strength numbers, I'm fairly confident whatever I'm doing is mean those thresholds, that it's hard enough, and it's progressive enough. And I know I don't have to train, even to zero or one or, like, I don't have to train that hard, I can probably make up for a few of the volume. Now I don't want to. And I'm very confident in my area assessments. But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. Because maybe I met hard and sufficiently overloading through a different variable I pulled on that volume lever a bit more. Whatever has happening. If I'm progressively overloading I know something good is happening. Yeah, yeah. And

 

Philip Pape  24:07

the converse of that is fatigue, right? Where if you were going to zero are constantly, it could have a negative long term impact on your ability to come back and the gym and hit that again, which is important, especially as we get older and recovery and joint issues start to become an issue or whatnot. Maybe we can get into that. One other thing comes to mind, I think you alluded to it was kind of in the lower rep regime, maybe testing one RMS or, I don't know using ascending sets or something like that to find your RPE like Do you have a favored one or two?

 

Steve Hall  24:47

Yeah, so normally I get it, get there through an accumulation. So I normally am like, hey, let's start out hard week one where you think you're anywhere from one to three reoriented to try and be a bit closer to three on those big compound heavy lifts, try and be closer to one on like an isolation base lift where it should have at cost, like you said, it's just much lower, whereas going to 01 RA on like a leg press week one or x, well, it's quite fatiguing, it might not be worth the trade off. And so you can get a better stimulus to fatigue trade off saying a bit further from failure, then next week, I want you to match or beat it and keep going match your beating, maintaining good technique, like you had in week one until you can't and then you have that objective number. And if you found that like your week, one numbers to your however long you're able to go for, say you were able to go for eight weeks, and you managed to add a lot of reps and load, you went to easy week one, but maybe you didn't Maybe it worked out like like, oh, I managed to add sort of 10% to my lift and match reps the whole way through it was five, six weeks. Sounds like you're a pretty spot on. So you quickly learn via that kind of just accumulation of going there. Other options would be and I think you kind of alluded to this, maybe take the last set to failure, it kind of then indicate where everything else was. And it's a quicker feedback tool than necessarily going weeks and weeks and weeks without going there. I with my clients will get formed videos week one. So I'm very making sure like, are they training hard enough in that week, because if they've leaving loads of reps in the tank, there's a real issue that can happen there is that they are not going to be generating that much stimulus, they might not meet that threshold. And they will feel very recovered because they're not training that hard. And suddenly, they want to add loads of volume. But if you add loads of quantity of work, the quality inherently goes down. And that can be a real issue, especially when you're already training maybe too far from failure. Now, it's hard to train harder, because you've got so much other things to be doing. So I'm very careful about making sure hey, we've definitely trade hard enough that first week because otherwise you can get into this kind of volume trap, I would call it which I've definitely been in by the way, which is why I kind of feel it. And I've worked with a lot of clients who have been there to where they're doing way more volume than necessarily need to because the quality wasn't there in week one.

 

Philip Pape  27:06

Yeah, I imagine you're asking them to self report on our IR RP or something that kind of comparing, like, maybe not right? You said you're a nine, maybe it's a seven, maybe it's a six. And the accumulation approach is is really smart. Because even when we get more experience, you're gonna cycle through and you're gonna introduce new movements at a certain point and you kind of get that minor reset of, okay, where should I be, you know, on these movements, I last did it you know, three months ago. So it's kind of a good approach. It's also in line with the idea that we shouldn't be going to the gym and just randomly doing whatever every day we need to progress on something so that we get past, you know, the neuromuscular aspect, as well as the self puristic kind of learning aspect. Other important principles.

 

27:50

Hi, my name is Alan. And I just want to give a shout out to Philip Pape of Whitson weights for being a huge part of the foundation for my continued health and wellbeing. Philip exemplifies a nutrition coach who demonstrates how much he cares. Philip works tirelessly, and with dedication to provide coaching support and major content for us to use. He creates a practical approach from research. And Phillip empowers all of us to use food as quality for our health. He is skilled in how to assess and direct nutrition, Phillip creates a community full of wisdom, support and camaraderie. In summary, PhilPapers, the real deal, he knows how to assess and direct nutrition. And he continues to steer me in the right direction. Thank you, Phil.

 

Philip Pape  28:42

So let's get into a little bit of some of the underlying principles. Besides you mentioned, proximity failure mentioned progressive overload. And you mentioned minimum effective volume. Let's talk about the training variables. So we've got volume intensity frequency, you mentioned, you know, five to 30 reps could work. Now we're talking muscle growth hypertrophy, maybe not so much Max force production and powerlifting type training. But there are some camps like intensity versus frequency camps. What are your thoughts on all of that? Because I especially let's start with intensity. Let's start with load. Like, is there a time when someone should focus on the lower rep range? And why?

 

Steve Hall  29:24

Yeah, it's a good question. I can't say that there's any data suggesting that you need to focus on like a given rep range, and somehow that's going to lead to better growth in future, I wouldn't be against rep range being somewhat preference driven. Because of the fact that we don't have any, like, no real reason to say if you push that set close enough to failure, you're gonna grow just as well as different rep range. Again, we don't have long term data of using those higher rep ranges. But I think bodybuilders like have been doing this for so long, where they've been using such a wide swath of rep ranges, where it's kind of Like the anecdotal evidence, which is super weak, like it's not great evidence to draw upon, but it's kind of helped by the fact it's been done for so long. And it's actually like you mentioned with the camps, you have like your mike mentor, you have your Dorian Yates but then you have like your Arnold Schwarzenegger, your Jay Cutler, these guys who your Phil Heath, like, they had very different methods of how they trained. But I bet one not I bet, you know, all of them, did, they train hard. And if they met their overload thresholds, whether or not they pulled more on one lever versus another, it does seem to be that way a little bit, where there are things that you can do to generate a stimulus within the gym. Inherently, when you generate a stimulus in the gym, fatigue comes along with it, it has to, but if you so I don't know if there's always proportional fatigue. So for example, like a hack squat, one set of that produces you 10, stimulus, 10 fatigue, by leg extension, maybe produces, you know, five, so you have to do more volume on that leg extension to get the same from the hack squat. But it's like, you can both get to the same destination, like neither your SFR overall was the same. I don't know if that's the same for say, Hey, you train close to failure, you do less volume, to kind of get to the same destination as someone else who trades further from failure, and does more volume to get to the same destination, I can see an argument for that, especially if you keep them within these kind of, like you said, those parameters that it's like, Hey, pick your poison, any road to Rome, you're gonna eventually get there. Now, my kind of scientific and analytical mindset, likes to think and coaching mindset likes to think there's an optimal route somewhat, and it might be individual dependent, to some extent. And I do think it can morph and change over time, because I think fatigue dynamics do to, like out of a D load, when you're essentially the freshest you can be your stimulus to fatigue ratio, and how to get the best of that might be different to four weeks into the program. When you've adapted and you've accumulated fatigue, I can't say for sure that these are kind of some theories that I have in mind. So I generally, I don't know if this answers your question, but for my clients, what I like to do programming wise, is assuming they're coming in fresh that first week, we're at least meeting those minimum thresholds for growth, as I suggested, so I generally start people on those kind of isolation base lifts, higher rep ranges, lower fatigue cost lifts, two to one, Ari are not take them nicely close to failure, you're bigger compound lifts, maybe there are three to two, like a leg press more to three, like a lat pulldown, and then overall, maybe you got closer to two. And you could also individualize that on like, how, what's the volume tolerance of that muscle, if they're very volume tolerant muscle, and you don't want to have to do so much volume together, stimulus, pull boron intensity. So that's something I do for like ABS carves, I'm just like, hey, train those very close to failure, because not many people want to do a ton of sets of those, and they're very, very volume tolerant, raise your quads, most people's quads can't handle that much volume, so and they get fatigued very easily. So we pull back on the, on the intensity lever and put more onto the volume, because it's not that much anyway. So regardless, I meet that kind of minimum threshold week one, and then I'm just monitoring their performance, their feedback, and trying to get to to a point where I call it like maximum adaptive stimulus, Mike is retail obviously use the terms mineral effects volume, maximum adaptive volume, and maximum recoverable volume. I like to rephrase it into stimulus, because I think that encompasses more of training, because there's a lot of things that contribute to stimulus like intensity, volume, exercise, selection, rest times, maybe frequency, there's a lot of things that go into it. So I like to get someone to this point where I'm like, Hey, you're running an amount of volume, and amount of intensity that's really challenging you, you feel like you end every session where you're not completely destroyed. But you're like, Damn, that was a really good workout. And you kind of try and match and beat performance in that position progressively overload for as long as you can, until fatigue catches up to you. So for a lot of my intermediate to advanced trainees, that's anywhere from five weeks, up to like 10 weeks, depending on the person, their lifestyle, if they sleep really well, they eat super well, they're in a surplus, maybe less advanced, maybe they're closer to 10 weeks. Whereas for that more advanced person in a diet, they're sleeping poorly, they have lots of stress, that fatigue is catching up to them sooner, then back off and go again. So I'm just careful not to push too hard in any one direction and try and kind of find this theoretical sweet spot between volume and intensity. Because when we look at the literature, it's like, it's quite funny because we had the meta regression from Zack Robinson that came out where for the listeners like a meta regression, looked at lots of the studies, and then like, compared where on average is the best outcomes, and he was looking at our AR and muscle growth. And it seemed like there was this exponential exponential relationship between training closer to failure, the more muscle growth you got. So three to one, zero and to failure. There's exponential muscle growth. So People like well answered our question like surely best outcomes, trends failure all the time. But the studies that were looked at were frequencies of mostly two times a week. And volumes very low, not typical to what we would do. And then we have the other body of research, where the recommendations from the meta analyses that they've been doing, which is very similar to meta regression, I can't speak to the nuance differences between the two, I just know those terms. But again, a whole host of studies, and they find up between like 10 to 20, I think it's like 12 to 20 to the latest systematic review found. So that's quite high volume versus the what was found within the meta regression. It's like, Ah, how do we piece those together? And we're still trying to like unfoldings, and work through that puzzle. And I think, Martin Cephalo, who I know you're, you're aware of who I've interviewed a few times on a podcast, he's doing his PhD, literally in this subject of like, proximity to failure and muscle growth outcomes. ABC had like the the best study that's ever been done on this subject, where I think a lot of people thought the studies that had come out, but it looked at proximities to failure, were like, they were in the gym and doing Rei, just like we would, but most of them weren't, they'll just either not failure or failure. Or they're using velocity. And we're trying to estimate based off that, whereas his was the first study to actually have subjects who were very good at calling our ers in a gym, tutorial, one REO versus failure. And so he had subjects go through the same protocol, one leg doing one or the other leg doing the other protocol, what was the difference, and like there was there was basically no difference. In the end, there was some nuance differences, which were cool. But yet, it's still that that's I think study is just a great framework for other people coming up through the field to look and be like, Oh, maybe we can replicate that. But through different means, and have a different protocol to try and kind of work this out a little bit. But I am to not get too stuck in the weeds. And I think a lot of people like science man, it's so confusing. Like one time, it's saying this, the other thing saying this, like screw science, and I'm just like, I like to boil it down to, to maximize muscle growth, you basically want to train as hard as you can, for as long as you can, as often as you can do, there's a lot of ways to get to that kind of situation. And I can't tell you what the optimal route is. But so long as you know, you're working your muscles hard in the gym, often, you're making sure to most of the time recover, when you aren't recovering you back off, and then you go in again, and you're progressing over time, you're probably in a damn good job. And I think that's why there's so many jacked bodybuilders in the world who weren't aware of the scientific terms and things like this and their different approaches because I didn't fit their personality or their their own N equals one study, and they just found man, this worked for me, why would I do something different? The struggle is you can't copy a mike mentor and expect to respond the same way. You can't say, oh, look, Dorian did this. So everyone should be doing this. Because that's the beauty of science, you actually get a swath of people, you get them on isolated conditions. And then you actually get to report like averages and get a better idea of what the general population should be doing. And science will never give us the perfect prescription. I think a lot of people hope it will. But it gives you those guidelines, which we've spoken about a few times. So I don't know if I asked that question again. I kind of forgot what it was.

 

Philip Pape  38:18

This is why I brought you on man, I love the way you answered. And if anybody who doesn't like and listen to the show, they can unfollow and you know, we self self select our audience, but man, the I'm a perfectionist, right? Like in certain ways in that I used to, especially when I got into this world, I'd want to know the exact answer. And then I would do that right. And of course, you would glom on to certain experts, or people who are in that camp, and then you, you know, to the exclusion of everything else. And like you suggested, there's such a wide window. And if we just try to pick out certain studies, and then the latest and greatest that gets pushed on, you know, Instagram or whatever, we're just going to be bouncing around, I think, and it's maybe a better approach to just pick the things that, like you said, are preference driven. And to some extent, I mean, I've gone through cycles of programming with my coach, where I might be doing like an 852 rep cycle. And I'm like, I don't like the eight, let's do the 531. And it's like, you get the same result. It's just a little bit different rep scheme that I enjoy more, right. And that's part of consistency. And then like you said, everybody has different levels of fatigue, that can build up. So it's not, it's not in a vacuum, like the study that that showed, you should always train to failure, right? You're not just doing it once you're doing it over and over and over again. And then I'll tell you that certain parts of my body and others know like their low back or whatever, where the fatigue just, you get to the point where you almost dread doing a certain movement because of it. That's maybe your body telling you something. Either you need to eat more sleep or change it up whatever. One thing I did want to ask you about is when you program for clients, and you get past those first, the first week or two, do you program their loads, or do you continue to program our IR so

 

Steve Hall  39:53

what the way I prescribe it is that week one, that's the only week I really get them to focus on reps reserve after that, like it's in a good place, you don't need to worry about it anymore, match and be. Now, more my more advanced clients, I do want them to have a little bit of semblance of understanding of it, because if they're already like zero on, say something very fatiguing, and it's like or week two, then I'm like a match for like more so much performance because you're going to run out of runway or progression over time otherwise. But generally, I don't like people to worry about it too much. Have an idea that you're in a zone that you want to be in. Obviously, if you're hitting failure week to like, you probably shot your load alert too soon, or you've had a bad night's sleep or, you know, you've had an argument with someone and your fatigue is just shot through the roof, and then we can regulate that as we move forward. But yeah, past that point, I actually don't like too much focus on the reps or reserve, just knowing that they're within that range is is good enough for me. I don't need to know that they've hit a bull's eye. I just need to know they're on the dartboard. That's kind of the way I think about that.

 

Philip Pape  40:56

Yeah, I like that approach too. Because I think a perpetual focus on just RPE like maybe gives too much subjectivity there versus Hey, you've got a baseline, why don't we build off that baseline and know for a fact that you're exceeding it going forward? You also mentioned maximum recoverable stimulus as opposed to fatigue I like that concept to recently spoke to was it might have been Jordan Lipsyte or somebody who was talking about, like, the vast majority of people fatigue isn't so much the issue is they're not training hard enough. And I think it goes back to this discussion. Like, if you get to the point where fatigue is an issue, maybe that's telling you, maybe you've been training hard enough, and now we got to learn how to manage it. But there are a lot of I see it all the time, you know, especially beginners who are like, there's zero fatigue, that could be an indication you're not training harder, you know what I mean? That it's kind of they play off each other. So it's great that you're focusing on the let's get the stimulus as high as we can and then start to balance things out. Yeah, go ahead.

 

Steve Hall  41:51

Yeah, I was just gonna say, I think it's very true. I think when you look, your average person in the gym, I look at the average person in my gym, and I'm like, Man, people must look at me like I'm a bit of a weirdo, because, like, I make noises, like really challenging myself. And like, I've my sleeve like a bit of a crazy man. Because most people in the gym just aren't pushing themselves to that point of discomfort. Actually, that's part of it, too. It should feel like uncomfortable when you're getting into like it in a positive way. It's kind of hard. It obviously shouldn't be injury provoking. But the muscle should feel challenged, and it should feel uncomfortable in that muscle to some extent, then that's like an element of you know, you're going hard enough. But yeah, a lot of people will just go through the motions. And that's where that inbuilt progressive overload where I'm like, match or beat, match or beat natural beat. Because if you aren't doing that, you can definitely spin your wheels. If you don't log book and have data to pull up on, like you said, if you're changing movements all the time, you're relearning everything. I mean, you could be training hard enough and you could be progressing. You certainly can't be certain of it, especially as naturals we grow so slowly, we can't like reliably be like, oh, yeah, look bigger in the mirror. You probably really can't use that as a metric unless maybe in the first few months of training. I know you actually asked the question. I don't know if you want me to revisit it. rep ranges. He said, any time to do low reps versus high reps and differentiating between those. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I just felt like because you asked that question, like the audience probably

 

Philip Pape  43:15

notes here, man. We could talk for four hours. So it's really

 

Steve Hall  43:20

short. So just one thing practically, with rep ranges, something I like to think about is just some lifts are more suitable to certain rep ranges is just part of matter of fact, like a hack squat, plus 15 reps. It's not super practical, any sort of squat pattern above 50 reps, it tends to become quite a cardiovascular challenge. Whereas leg extensions, they're very suitable for like 10 Plus reps, 15 plus reps into that 20 plus rep range, below 10 reps on a lay extension, it just starts to become a challenge to stand the sea and you just feel it in your joints and like your knees and things, it just isn't very practical. So quite a lot of the time rep ranges can kind of sort themselves out via what's actually practical for this lift for that person, like a lat pulldown, again, doing less than 10 reps or a lat pulldown, it's hard to stand the seat and have stability because if you're any kind of strong, you know, so even like I've done it in like the 10 to 12 rep range and I'm like this is hard for me to stay down I'll do a single arm, maybe I can do it then where's the pull up perfect in that rep range, because it's already challenging to go much higher than that. Anyway, and so yeah, kind of rep ranges to some extent I think can be within ranges can be self selected via what's practical for the person to be able to do Yeah,

 

Philip Pape  44:35

yeah, totally. And it's again individual right, like some people may thrive on you know, doing sets of 10 or 12 squats and others are like This is torture. You know, I'm great with five so yeah, my adductors are starting to give or some weird muscle starts to pop, you know. So is it okay, so speaking of reps or rain, actually range of motion is what I was thinking of next, because partial reps and lengthen. partials have been all the rage lately as well. What are your thoughts on that? Both in the context of like intensity techniques and kind of add on work versus like your primary type of training?

 

Steve Hall  45:13

Yeah, I think it's, it's really, that's probably been the most exciting area of research because nothing too much else has changed. This is the thing where it's like, everyone's just like full ROM, right? Like, that's the thing, everyone should be training full ROM. And, again, the bodybuilders haven't been doing that they've been doing partials for quite a long time. And they certainly didn't have in controlling all their lifts. Either you're looking at some barbell bent over rows, or you're like on his cable rows, like he would just swing that thing back to get it short, you know. And so it's very interesting seeing that, and then see the research come out to look at these things. And in the past, I think forum was the thing that was promoted in, in the past meta analyses, as well as the conclusion of forums the way to go. Because the partial research look to short muscle answers virtually all the time. I don't think there really any long muscle and versus fall versus short. But when they do start looking at the long muscle and training versus full run, it seems that the long muscle length training seems to do pretty well. And I think I'm not the expert on this. Milo Wolff would be the guy who knows this. Because this is where his PhD has been. He did the letter latest meta analyses. And I think there's over five studies now that have come out that have compared like long muscle lengths to either forearm or some other muscle length among muscle lengths, they're even neutral to positive. So haven't seen an outcome where people have grown worse from focusing on that long stretch position. Do we know the mechanism yet? No. People will debate this is it stretch mediated hypertrophy done or added sarcomeres? We just we don't know what the mechanism is yet. For me, I don't particularly care unless it has practical implications. Because, yeah, I mean, I like the science, I get into the weeds. But I'm a coach. I'm a practitioner, and I'm a bodybuilder, I want to know what's growing my muscles. And I want to know how I can make my clients grow more muscle. So it does appear that spending a little bit more time focusing on that length and position is a good idea. So there's many layers to this. So you could take it as far as hey, I'm going to make the only modification I'm going to make by training is I'm going to buy a more long muscle and training. So I'm going to do maybe less leg extensions. And I'm going to do more squats, and sissy squats and reverse Nordics. And I'm going to do less spider curls. And I'm going to do more like Bayesian curls where the cables behind me and I'm getting a stretch in this length and position on my bicep, and that'd be cool. That's definitely one way you could take the research and I'm definitely going to do forearm, I'm going to squat deep, I'm gonna get a big stretch on my lats when I'm coming up for a pull down or a pull up. Then you mentioned other ways you can incorporate and there's a number of ways. So as we mentioned, lat pull downs before, because of the kind of opposite resistance to strength profile of that, you could fail with many reps, where you could have got partials, so you could extend your set. Once I can't get to my chest, I'm gonna go and just get as low as I can as low as I can of low as I can until maybe I aligned, you could call it, hey, I'm gonna keep doing my kind of forearm is arranged now for me on that pull downs. It's from like, clavicle to eyes. Once I can't get to my eyes, hey, I'm done. Because I think there has to be some sort of heuristic or standardization of where is your color? Otherwise, you're gonna be like, Hey, I'm getting a centimeter length. And maybe this is growing. And actually, at the moment, we don't know how. So a lot of the researchers looked at about a 50% range of motion, so they just cut off the last 50%. So you're not coming, like from it's coming to about eyeline for like a lat pulldown saying you're not doing all the way down the laptop and actually specifically been looked at. And that's some limitations within the research. They've looked at the curves a lot, which has been pretty cool. I've done a lot of Lendon partials for my cars, because the the research that's come out is pretty convincing, that we tend to grow more in that stretch position. So I've like, not been doing that last little like up off the calf raise. And so that's been quite fun. And I think they've grown and responded quite well to that considering how stubborn calves can be. I've been quite impressed by

 

Philip Pape  49:11

the progress. What's your favorite movement to do that?

 

Steve Hall  49:14

Good question. So I don't like bent knee variants generally, I don't think they make the most sense. Are they tend to bias the bias in the soleus? Because of like the CD? Yeah, yeah. So the soleus is not the chunk of the muscle, the gastroc is like the chunk that's visually aesthetic, and the soleus just sits behind. So I'm like, why would I want a thicker soleus? That might look a bit I already have like thick ankles, like why do I want to like it just a thick muscle there. So the straight leg variants hit both pretty well and they bias the gastroc a little bit more. The gastroc gets the most of the brunt of the work. So I like straight leg variants. And honestly, people should experiment I think to find what suits them. Some people recommend doing in like a leg press because then you don't axial loading which I think gives a cool idea, like it's not loading the spine, so theoretically less fatiguing. But I have this one machine, actually too, but there's one in my gym, that doesn't load the spine. And it's just I think it's normally like a V squat or something like that. I don't use it for that purpose. I just do calf raises in it. And it just hits me like nothing else. I know because I train other gyms and I tried to like, I did like a smith machine calf raise in a gym and I was like, I'm just not getting that stimulus I can get from at home, however, like that machines set up with the load and with the footplate, it just hits them perfectly. So I do think, experimented a little bit with straight leg variants as your primary if you want to do some bend nice stuff. Hey, how about it, I'm not going to stop someone. But I think the straight leg variant is probably the route to best growth, especially for like aesthetic carves. Yeah.

 

Philip Pape  50:45

And you just mentioned like, you know, let's see how you feel and try different movements. I mean, I think for me, the pitch shark, which I don't have one, but you can kind of rig up a similar idea of like a belt squat seemed to work for the calves. You know, I was just doing squats one day, and I said, let me just add some calves in here. Like, whoa, you know, gotta burn so yeah, yeah, calves are chicken when, especially when you have a home gym to try to rig things up just the right way to get it to work.

 

Steve Hall  51:09

Yeah, yeah, when I was, that throws me back to when we had the lock downs and all of that. And I was just doing stair carbs or like off like a stair. I was just doing single leg calves. I was using my dipping belt to like, way down harder and everything and mad. Yeah, the reps just got a little bit too, like high on that. And I ended up feeling a lot of my Achilles tendon, which is unfortunate that can happen with calf training quite a lot. Yeah.

 

Philip Pape  51:34

Cool, man. So all right, that we talked about the lengthen partials. Yeah, I know that's getting a lot of play now. So I like the idea of doing movements full ROM that just happened to have a lengthened and extended lengthened position. kind of took me back to the days of like, the 777 with the bar with the dumbbell curls, which, you know, you were trying to get the different ranges go in there. What about ones? Yeah, you know, or 20 ones? Yeah, right. Right. Exactly. Right. As far as all the so we've mentioned individual response. You've mentioned heuristics and like applying research to training hard. We've also talked about not like over relying on too many of these studies, I guess, I don't know if we missed anything in terms of somebody who wants to keep pushing it and train hard and get feedback from themselves later on. So you talked about the ascension and the fatigue and all that. Is there something people should be tracking specifically? Obviously, their lifts, but any other biofeedback, anything, even nutrition wise, or kind of correlating data that would tell them that they're training hard or not training hard enough or need to change up the programming?

 

Steve Hall  52:40

Yeah, it's a great question. I think there is divergent views on this in the evidence based space, because it's not something that's been researched very well, in terms of this biofeedback. But I think everyone can relate to the biofeedback that we'll discuss. And I think I see value in tracking some of these variants, because part of me is like, hey, there are at all and we don't have anything better to go off. Actually, in a funny way. I view them similar to a diet, and we're trying to lose weight, we tracked the scale, and someone is tracking their macros and what have you, they're trying to hit certain calorie protein fat carb goal. Some heuristics you might also track alongside is like, Hey, how's your app? Like, how's your hunger? How's your like irritability? Like how's hanger? Basically? Do we just ignore all of that? Or that can those be useful feedback tools, because hunger doesn't actually matter for fat loss? Well, not really. Like if you boil it down to calorie deficit, but someone might not adhere to the diet, they might binge, it might give you some feedback of hey, they're hungry today. So or this week, they said they're hungry, or look at their food plan. Or maybe we can put some boiled potatoes in a secret weapon, they stuff everyone, right? You're having too many Coco Pops have some more oats, these are the things that are going to satiate you more. Whereas if you ignored hunger feedback from a client, suddenly they're binging on the weekend, because I coach them and I can't stick these calories, it's way too hard. Whereas if you had that feedback, you can now make an appropriate adjustment to one of their meals and similar here to some of this biofeedback or make it make sense. So like the pump is something that everyone knows about, and it's heard about, you think about a balloon filling up and again to burst some muscles really get a very good pump, or they respond better to the pump than others. For me, like my quads, some of my quad pumps are just horrendous. I'm like, wow, like, This is the craziest thing ever. Calves my carbs would never get a pump until I started actually introducing Moreland and partial work, really pushing the relative intensity closer to failure as are now something's happening. And so the pump tends to correlate with some positive things. I think, whether or not that even could be Hey, Coach, I'm not getting a pump in my quads off to lay extensions. You look at them doing leg extensions, they're just flinging the weight around. They're not bringing it down deep. You're like, hey, control the eccentric, bring it down as deep as you can, like, do all of these things. And you'll get the feedback that either the pumps better, or it could just be like a foot placement difference on a leg press, hey, when I have my feet here, nothing too much here all. And obviously part of the pump is blood flow, I think blood flow go into muscles are a good idea, if you're getting a pump that muscles clearly working. So as a feedback tool, as a coach and practitioner, I find that feedback really helpful. And then some other indicators be like soreness is something you can can pay attention to. Now, and regarding the pump, the reason I say like it's divergent views is because we just don't have evidence either way, there's not really strong evidence suggesting you can use the pump is like, and then it even indicates cell swelling. And we don't know if that is a mechanism for growth. And the same for like whether or not it does. So there's some like interesting, it's an area that we need more research and study on basically. But obviously, bring it back to anecdote again, how many bodybuilders tip pay attention to the pump, I think virtually all. So as a coach, it's been useful for me and with my own training. And then soreness is another key thing that you can look at. Actually, before soreness, I'll come on to another element that I named stimulus. So it's something I get my clients to track within their spreadsheets. In fact, I used to have pump and disruption. So pump is as I described, disruption is more so the muscle feeling tight, lots of local fatigue. And maybe it's like quivering if you've ever done like leg curls, and many sets and then you come off, you're like my hamstrings feel like they're going to cramp like it's, it's kind of that disruptive feeling. Hamstrings don't really feel pumped and full, they kind of feel tight and heavy. Same with like the back muscles like this. So I kind of named that disruption, like, I now combine the two. So I kind of combined them as as pumping disruption rather than having my clients have to fill out all these different things. So how's the stimulus, think of pumping disruption is it's like nothing low, minimal high. And that gives me some useful feedback. And then the other thing I get them to think about is soreness. But I only get it if it's more after the session than than expected. So I don't particularly care if someone gets sore or not. In terms of dope growing, I don't think soreness you, I don't think you have to get sore to be growing, we have data, we don't have data to suggest that it's necessary. And in fact, it could be harmful. The thing I like about soreness is it tells me how far someone's recovering. And it also, sometimes you might finish training a muscle in a session and think not much happened. But the next day, suddenly you get sore that sometimes can happen. So I like it to kind of come in as like an afterthought. Did you get sore than you expected? If you did, okay, then your stimulus was more than you thought you were getting. So it can be useful there. And then how fast that muscle recovering you recovering way ahead of a session, or you're recovering just on time, or you actually saw when you're looking to train that muscle again. And that allows me to know about how are they dealing with the level of volume they've got through the week? How are they dealing with their frequency that they've got right now? Do I need to make a modification there? It might be that hey, my side delts are feeling recovered, like way ahead of time, they're doing two times a week, I'm okay, maybe we can go three times a week. And we can get more growth or maybe again, they're sore and overlapping. We need to back off on volume here. So that we're not creating such an amount of damage, muscle damage and stimulus that you're now that's excess fatigue, essentially, that's now leading to worse performance worse outcome. So there's some of yeah, like I said, stimulus pump disruption. And then soreness is something I like and then it says using soreness is also like a readiness tool. Are you feeling sore or not leading into a training session? There's some of the biofeedback measures that I think can be really valuable, like little toolkits, that similar to like hunger and appetite during a diet phase. Like they're not objective things that you use to program with, but they can give you little insights into small adjustments you could make to make things even better. Yeah,

 

Philip Pape  58:50

yeah, no, I love those. That was one of the best explanations of those that I've heard, because I know a lot of people disparage these sometimes, because like you said, you know, you don't need to be sore on the pump isn't necessarily an indicator of this or that. But it is almost objective. I know it's subjective, but just like biofeedback, hunger and whatnot, it may be subjective. In the moment, the trend over time tells you something because it's your body and you're listening to it, and in tune with it. And the idea that the soreness tells you your individual volume response, not only systemically but per muscle group. I think it's great for individuals, you know, who are listening, who even want to do that themselves, just start marking that in their training log, and really toning in on the different muscle groups and where you can add more volume and takeaway volume. So super practical, man. All right. So we're kind of we're at the top of the hour again here. So I'm going to go to that magic question. Because we talked about a lot today, but is there anything you wish I had asked and what is your answer? Yeah,

 

Steve Hall  59:45

great question. And I appreciate that. You thought that answer was a good one. It's always nice to hear so yeah, actually, he told me this question was coming and I'm still like, I should have saved something in my back pocket that I wish you'd asked about it I wonder some people just like no, you asked all good questions. And honestly, you did ask good questions. Yeah, I can't necessarily think of anything in particular that we haven't covered. I wanted to cover I just think if people ever feel like lost and confused with these things, definitely put it back to the principles, especially when they get lost into program design, if they just put it back to Okay, so specificity, overload, progressive overload, and what I need to achieve in my program, and then don't overthink it, don't try make the perfect most optimal program possible, because we can't possibly know what that is, get something together, productive, do you feel like is hard and you're progressing over time, then little tweaks. And that's all we're doing with our clients. It's like, we're making our kind of best guess, which is a pretty good guess, right? Because we're educated coaches who kind of work with a lot of people and have a good amount of experience, we make our best guess at first. And then I'm getting all this feedback, objective and subjective, to make the best cause to lead to the best responses for them, and learn your body over time and is a constant learning process. I've been doing this for like, I've been trading personally for over 15 years. And I always feel like I'm learning something. Like I said, for my calves, they've probably grown the most they have over the last year versus like, 10 years before that, because I just simply wasn't training them as effectively as I could have. You learn things all the time. So yeah, never stop learning. Man, you took

 

Philip Pape  1:01:19

it right back to the whole foundation of this discussion of personal growth and always getting stronger. And I love that going back to principles. Don't overthink it, especially as perfectionists out there. Don't overthink it. Train hard match or beat, collect feedback and tweak and you'll be fine. So awesome. All right. Where can listeners learn more about you, Steve? For

 

Steve Hall  1:01:38

sure. Yeah, thank you again for having me, Philip. It's been a really fun chat. People can find me at revive stronger. So revived stronger.com is our website, you'll be able to find our coaching. The podcasts will be linked there too. I'm also most active on Instagram as just the social media platform I enjoy the most at revive stronger over there. And you can find like, if you like podcasts, definitely check out the revived stronger podcast where I get to interview really smart individuals. And we also have the improvement season podcast which is a separate podcast that I do with Pascal, my business partner and coach on the team where it's a much more chitchat podcast, still somewhat bodybuilding related, we talk about our journeys, but yeah, we got off piste quite a bit on that,

 

Philip Pape  1:02:19

ya know, for sure, man, and I love it. I can't have enough of these in my feed, but then you got to figure out what to listen to. So revive stronger.com and iG at revive stronger and also the improvement season podcast. I'll throw that in. It's been a lot of fun. We covered a lot of topics, but I think it's all practical stuff people need to hear and want to hear. So thanks. Thanks again for coming on, Steve.

 

Steve Hall  1:02:38

Thank you for having me.

 

Philip Pape  1:02:41

Thank you for tuning in to another episode of wit's end weights. If you found value in today's episode, and know someone else who's looking to level up their wits or 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.