-: Now let's look at going even beyond
a superset into things like trisets and giant sets.
So really these are mostly going to be used
when we're focusing on the oxidative stress.
We're trying to stimulate inflammation.
If you were to use really low reps for trisets
and keep in mind we're talking same muscle
back to back to back to back here, right?
You could use low enough reps that you could kind
of get out of the oxidative thing, if you wanted to.
But you have to be extremely neurologically efficient.
You could do a four four four
or a four four eight or something
in a very well conditioned athlete
and then it wouldn't be an oxidative stress response
per se for them.
You might be able to get just a lot of volume
based work there.
This system is very effective if it's trainable.
So you one, if you're trying this for hypertrophy,
you need to have a certain amount of mitochondrial health
and a certain tolerance to inflammation
and oxidative stress.
If you're already inflamed or you already have
oxidative stress or your mitochondria are beat up,
what's gonna happen is this is gonna push you
in a state of over-training and under-recovering.
You're gonna create way too much inflammation,
it's gonna shut off nutrient delivery to that muscle,
you're gonna get way more breakdown
and damage than you're able to adequately recover from,
and so instead of getting a lot
of hypertrophy in this phase,
you're gonna get a lot of soreness
but not a lot of progress.
And what happens when people train this system
and it's untrainable is they'll be sore,
they'll be bloated.
Instead of their muscles looking full
and their body comps tending to improve,
which it should if you're on a metabolic type
program like this, is their body content's not to move,
their weight tends to really fluctuate up and down,
you'll see that their sleep gets disrupted,
all sorts of things tart going wrong
if this isn't a trainable system for people.
And for a lot of people, trisets and giant sets
are not a trainable system for them yet.
They need a lot of adaptations before they can do
this effectively.
And a lot of people are jumping into this stuff
right off the bat, and what they're doing
is the only thing that may be going for them
is their execution is so bad
or their neurological efficiency is so bad
that the exercise isn't that stressful
because they're so bad at exercising.
So I guess, it's a good thing in that situation.
So we can't use this for high volume or
for long phases because of the inflammation aspect
and remember, it takes longer to get that
mononuclear adaptation for that whole thing to run
and then to be able to stimulate it again.
So it's like you get that stress,
you can't jump right back into it,
you've got to wait for that inflammatory process
to run and then the mononuclei to proliferate,
differentiate, donate themselves to the satellite cells,
come in, the muscle cells then
gotta redistribute everything,
get it all nice and organized.
And then you're ready to do that stimulus again.
And that's not an adaptation that you can just get
again and again and again and again and again
because as you get those new nuclei
the potential that you need to stress that
is going to be higher if you try
and do it right again, so you get to a point
where the volume that you need
becomes too much inflammation for the benefit
that you're going to get.
If you do this, I prefer most of the time,
that it's like an ascending triset or giant set
in terms of reps, so the number
of reps that you're doing goes higher.
So you start with your heaviest exercise,
highest intensity exercise,
and then a little bit lower intensity,
little bit lower intensity,
so higher rep, higher rep.
So this is gonna be everything from like
four four eight
to six 12 25 at the most type of extreme,
but you can still do things like 10 10 10, right?
But for most people, if they're going full oxidative,
they'll need a little bit more drop in intensity.
So the more efficient you are,
the less drop there needs to be,
the less efficient you are, the more of a drop
that there's gonna need to be in terms of those reps.
But if you drop in reps too much in a very
efficient person, the end exercises
become not significant tension anymore.
So if you take someone that's very neurologically efficient,
six, 12, 25 might not be very effective for them
in terms of the amount of volume.
So you'll be doing more volume than you need
in terms of reps and how long the sets are
and you probably could have accomplished it
with something more like eight eight 15
or six six 12 or something like that.
But a person that's very inefficient,
they might need those big drops
so that they can continue to perform, right?
Otherwise, what will happen is they'll get,
they'll do the same weight for 10 reps
that they could have done for 20,
they just can't do any more weight than that
because they're not that
neurologically efficient, right?
So they need those longer drops,
those higher rep drops in order
to actually push that fatigue.
When you're doing this and we're periodizing,
I like this method when we're going into
a super compensation phase.
So doing this system with a planned break
at the end is ideal, because this system
doesn't lead well directly into anything else
because of the inflammation.
The only thing this leads well into is a de-load
and a pretty hefty de-load.
So I like using this when you want to use it
and then super compensate with it
and then let all those long, slow adaptations
take effect and then take advantage of them
but if you do this and then try to jump
right into a neurological workout afterwards,
the inflammation that's maybe still around
is gonna effect your neurological output, right?
And so what's gonna happen is you're just gonna
mess with the adaptations that you're getting
while performing really poorly in your next phase.
So I prefer to always make sure,
if I'm gonna stress this system,
that I am going to have some sort of de-load
afterwords where I'm allowing my body
to sort of super compensate and over recover.
When we look at hypertrophy, the most common mistakes
you're gonna make are exchanging execution for effort.
So it doesn't matter how much tension you're making
if that tension isn't going on the muscles
that we want it to go.
So the second we start shifting that,
we're getting a systemic effect.
You don't have any systemic muscles,
so there's nothing that I can do
where it's like well, I went from biceps
and then I went to quad and you know,
somehow that made my bicep get bigger or whatever.
And I'm not getting into the whole growth hormone
overlap thing, but you guys get my point.
We need this stimulus to stay in the cells
that we're trying to work.
So if I'm trying to work medial delt,
all of my reps have to be focused on the medial delt.
I can't switch over and start using front delts
halfway through the set
because now I'm not gonna have significant tension
and the whole point of this is
time under significant tension.
Insufficient load.
So I can't have significant tension
if I don't have enough load,
and so a lot of people when they're going after muscle,
they think okay I'm not a power lifter or whatnot,
or I don't like to squat heavy
'cause it hurts my knees or whatever.
In reality they're probably just exercising poorly,
but people get afraid of heavy weights
and think well I'll just use more.
And so you have a lot of people who are advocating
well you don't necessarily need heavy weights
for this or that.
At a certain point you do,
you need an appropriate load for the intensity,
for the amount of tension that you need.
If you're just starting out,
can you get hypertrophy with lighter loads,
absolutely, you can get everything with less.
But once you start becoming trained,
you have to actually start challenging
the amount of tension you're making
and your ability to make that tension.
Like I said, there's tons of people that make
progress on biochemical and metabolic
stimulus alone, right?
Most of those people are using substances
that are basically allowing that process
to continue being effective.
So if you don't have an artificial enhancement
working for you, you need to make sure
you're getting significant tension
in order to get that stimulus,
even the sarcoplasmic benefits
will start to taper off from your metabolic work
or metabolic stimuli that you're getting
if you're not getting enough actual tension to those
muscles and enough intensity.
Not choosing the right volume for your recovery.
So if a little is good,
more is not necessarily better.
We talked about hypertrophy being the least
favorable adaptation for your body, right?
It's the poorest investment your body can make
in terms of conserving its metabolism
and saving its energy which is what it wants to do.
So everything extra I do makes it way harder
to argue for more muscle.
Makes it so it's like if you just hit that stimulus,
like okay, it's like having more money in the bank
and then making a small investment.
But if you deplete all the money in the bank
and then you want to make a big investment,
it's like eh, I'm gonna be really stingy right now.
I don't have a lot of resources.
So you want to make sure that you don't
overdo the volume.
It needs to be enough for you to get the stimulus.
But more is not better and that tends to be the thing.
Instead of working smarter and harder
and having better programming, better diet,
people just tend to go on the volume approach.
I'm either gonna train more often
or I'm gonna train longer, I'm gonna do more exercises,
more of everything except quality, right?
But in reality the thing that should be
going up is quality, right?
Not the amount of time that you spend in the gym
or the amount of reps that you're doing to accomplish it.
Being too broad with your stimulus.
So if your goal for this is mechanical damage
or it's volume or it's oxidative,
and you start branching over to the other things,
remember the inflammation is going to mess
with the protein synthesis.
So you kind of got to pick between those two, right?
If I'm doing some high intensity work
and I'm trying to also get high volume,
I might get to a neurological fatigue
that prevents me from getting enough
significant tension in the rest of my volume work
like in the middle of my workout, right?
If I fatigue my nervous system too early,
then the quality of the volume in the middle
might not be enough significant tension,
it's just time under tension,
not significant tension at that point.
So you need to be clear on what your goal is, right?
So it's not just functional, it's not just aesthetic
it's like, what am I trying to do?
What is the ratio of intensity
and volume that I'm trying to get,
or am I trying to focus on that oxidative thing,
what things am I gonna focus on there?
How am I gonna take advantage of either
eccentrics or using exercises where I
can get a lot of tension?
And what exercises am I gonna spend the most time on?
If I spend a lot of time on a short range position
where I'm not getting a lot of mechanical trauma,
well then guess what?
I've expended a lot of resources,
expended a lot of neurological and metabolic energy
and it's gonna take away from my ability
to stimulate mechanical damage from volume
because I'm not gonna be able to perform well.
It'll perform to the same intensity,
the same degree, the same capacity
in my other exercises that may be reloading
the length in position or the mid position
which would have been more optimal for mechanical damage.
Not prioritizing recovery.
That's probably the single most important one,
'cause with hypertrophy, it's all about
not going over with the volume,
and allowing adequate recovery.
We don't grow muscle in the gym,
we grow muscle when we're recovering,
when we're repairing, when we're doing everything
that the gym was supposed to stimulate.
That's when we're actually growing the muscle.
Technically when you're in the gym,
you're breaking stuff down
with the purpose of hopefully stimulating
the ability to bring it back up
better than it was before.
But if you break it down more than it needs to be,
then you have to build up that much more
which means recovery has got to be to
even greater degree.
And what most people are doing
is they're overdoing the workout
and underdoing the recovery.
Everybody would take an extra workout
over an extra hour of sleep.
Everybody would, the most important supplement
they never forget is their pre-workout,
but they might forget a few things
to help them recover optimally,
because it's just not as sexy, right?
Going to the gym and training and performing,
yes, we all love that right?
But in order to do that long term hypertrophy
and to make continual progress,
you have to respect your boundaries
and your abilities and maximize your recovery.
You have to put the same focus on recover if not more
than what you do to every rep in the gym.
In the last one here,
lack of focus and intensity of contraction every rep.
So the currency for this hypertrophy stimulus,
right, whether it's volume, whether it's intensity,
whether it's oxidative, it's time under significant tension.
So significant tension which means
no reps off.
Because every rep that is at insignificant tension
is not stimulating those z-lines,
is not creating mechanical damage,
is not expending energy enough to make oxidative stress.
All you're doing is depleting the resources
that you need to recover and grow.
So if you're gonna do a hypertrophy program,
there are no reps off mentally
or physically, right?
So don't worry about doing 20 reps
if you only need to do eight,
but do those fricken' eight well,
do all eight, don't do seven and a half
or seven and a quarter or six.
If you're gonna do eight, do eight, right.
And don't do reps that you don't need to do, right?
Don't do an eight rep set and six of them are good
and then do like a bunch of partials
or forced reps or something with your buddy afterwards
or do an extra set because you missed out
on a couple reps or whatever.
Do what you're supposed to do every single rep
of every single set rather than tacking more
on the end and then you're gonna get
a better stimulus with less volume
and be able to recover faster
and that's how you're gonna make the most progress
in any of these hypertrophy phases.