-: So, let's move on and talk
about a little details with frequency.
So, when we look at frequency, returning most underrated
in terms of the mechanisms that you could use
to get somebody to make progress faster.
Everybody jumps to more volume, and again,
that's because program design is so poor that they need
that extra volume to get any sort of stimulus.
So, as soon as you guys get that program design stuff
really wired in and you have the execution stuff
from this course wired in, those two things together
are gonna allow you to get a lot more out of frequency,
because you won't need as much volume
to get results with people.
Beginners and detrained people definitely need the highest
frequency, because they also need the lowest volume.
And oftentimes, for then, it's this learning thing.
So, their body is trying to learn the movement patterns,
either for the first time or because they're,
they haven't been training for a while
and they're coming back in, and they're gonna make
relatively fast progress with minimal stimulus.
So doing extra is just gonna take away recovery,
whereas if you could be doing it more often,
they would be making progress faster,
because the flipping of the switch takes very little.
The more often you can flip the switch,
the faster that they would make progress,
both from a body composition standpoint,
a strength standpoint, and an execution standpoint.
The best way to learn how to get better at exercises,
to be better at neurological efficiency,
is to repeat that task.
If you think about the brain,
the brain works really well having small doses
repeated in all learning tasks.
So we're not even talking about exercise now.
We're talking about learning a language,
getting better at math, memorizing things,
spatial awareness.
Frequency is the best stimulus for learning.
Now, think about this.
When you go and you exercise,
what are you adapting to in terms of your nervous system?
Your nervous system is learning.
So, me learning a new language
is simply my brain learning all of the stuff.
It's storing things and learning
how to get access to that information.
Well, guess what?
When I go do an exercise, it's learning things.
It's storing those movement patterns
and learning how to get access to that information
and learning the, basically the code to unlock
more and more potential from that tissue.
So, frequency in training results in faster learning,
just like it does in every other
aspect of human intelligence.
Frequency is also gonna be the best variable
for nutrient partitioning.
And so, if, when we say nutrient partitioning
in this context, it's like,
towards lean tissue away from fat tissue.
So if we changed your workout, the muscle tissue
that you train, you have the opportunity,
if you train it correctly, to say, hey, you are now going
to be a sponge for carbohydrates.
You're gonna use more fatty acids.
You're gonna take up amino acids for protein.
Whatever stimulus you happen to be doing,
it's gonna be some ratio of all of those things
for a certain period of time.
Now, the more tissue that I can say,
let's take up nutrients, the more lean tissue,
then the less nutrients that can go to fat tissue,
and the more often I can do that, well, then,
the more I can be biasing towards the lean
and starving off the fat tissue.
If I only train a muscle group once a week,
well, maybe I'm partitioning nutrients to that
for 24 to maybe at max 72 hours, so at least four
out of the seven days, I'm not partitioning nutrients
to that lean tissue that could be hogging
the nutrients away from the fat tissue.
So if I really wanna focus on improving body composition,
simply telling as much muscle tissue as you possibly can
to take up nutrients as often as I possibly can
is the single best thing you can do
from a training perspective in terms of biasing what
you're eating to go to lean tissue instead of fat tissue.
Now, there's a whole physiological thing
where we gotta look at hormones and all that stuff,
but from a cellular level, from the muscles
outside of the context of the rest of the body,
if you, if you focus on high frequency,
they will, they will, you know,
provide a shift in a lot of those hormones,
and they will definitely essentially, you know,
serve as sponges, and in that context,
whatever they're soaking up, the fat is not getting.
So when you look at body composition,
the reason that most people, as soon as they start training,
they tend to lose body fat but may or may
not lose a lot of scale weight.
It really depends a lot on how much bloat
and fluid they lose from the change in diet.
But you'll have a lot of people,
especially former competitors, former athletes,
former gym goers that come in.
They haven't trained in a while.
Boom, they start training again, and their body comp
improves really fast, but the scale may even go up.
They're like, oh, wow, you've gained like, you know,
you've gained six kilos of lean body mass.
Why?
Nutrient partitioning, right.
They didn't gain six pounds of new protein,
but what they did is they hydrated
and they increased glycogen levels and started
revving up the metabolism of that lean tissue
that they have, because that lean tissue that they had
that hasn't been training had become dried out and sad
and low in glycogen, so all of that nutrients
has just been kind of going to fat for so long.
All of the sudden, we created that shift, right?
So now, maybe they didn't change in weight much,
because all of the sudden,
their muscles are soaking up all of those nutrients,
but they are losing some body fat.
It's more of an exchange process going on.
And that's why we see that,
is that nutrients partitioning effect.
As you adjust the diet and continue on,
once that initial like, phase is where your body
just soaks up and hydrates all that tissue,
you will then start to see the scale go down
if you're focusing on fat loss
while still using that frequency method.
The other thing is is that when you're looking
at this type of method, when you can stimulate
nutrient partitioning, the diet can be more lax,
especially in terms of like carbohydrates,
because you're creating a situation where those
carbohydrates can go somewhere other than the fat tissue.
So, in terms of what we could call improving insulin
sensitivity, although when we get to the next course,
I'll argue that that's not a very good way of describing it,
this is the way that we can massively shift
how much insulin you need.
'Cause if my muscles are gonna take up the carbohydrates
because I trained them, they don't need insulin to do it.
So therefore, the amount of insulin I need goes down,
blood glucose does down.
The need for cortisol goes down.
So without doing some fancy supplement protocol,
by simply just creating a shift,
turning my muscle tissue into sponges,
I can have effect on my hormone balance systemically.
Okay.
So, moving on.
We look at neurologically efficiency here, right?
The less neurologically efficient that you are,
the more you should focus on frequency,
because you need to improve that execution.
You need to get better at those motor patterns,
and what did we just talk about with learning?
The best way to learn is to use frequency.
So, if you're not very good at the exercise,
or you're very, very weak, well, guess what?
If you're very, very weak because you're
neurologically inefficient, doing more low-quality sets
isn't going to do you a lot of good.
What's gonna be better is if you progress the quality
of those sets as fast as possible by training your brain
and your muscles to learn
to do them better often with frequency.
The most benefit that you're gonna get
from learning and movement patterns, hands down, frequency.
Been hitting that home.
Volume is necessary for being able
to then increase the intensity.
So you get what we call efficiency,
which is the ability to control all of those muscles
around the joint and figure out when to use what,
which, basically, that's the first baseline
you need to be proficient at any exercise.
After that point, you need to get to the point where you
can contract more of that muscle, like more fibers,
simultaneously, which is what increases your peak power
or what you can do for one RM or just the amount of weight
you can use for fairly low reps and high intensity.
You need to then integrate volume.
So frequency is the first thing that you focus on
until you become competent in terms of execution
and neurological efficiency, those motor patterns are good.
So, you should be good at squatting from frequency
before you worry about doing
high volume squat workouts, right?
You should understand that motor pattern,
your execution should be good.
You should be able to control what tissues work
and what your from is and all of the aspects of the rep,
tempo and you name it.
Then, you can add volume.
Then we can do higher sets and higher intensity
work in that particular motor pattern.
Intensity, or I should say the efficiency of intensity,
can be maintained.
So you don't need volume to maintain those adaptations,
but with, if you train them frequently,
you do some intense work, so, say you're in season
or you're taking some time off from serious training,
which happens to general population people.
Like, these people do not necessarily
train for a goal 52 weeks a year.
In fact, I think it's unhealthy
to be focused on training for a goal 52 weeks a year.
There are points in time where you just wanna
bring the training down to be something
that is supporting your lifestyle
instead of having your lifestyle be about training.
You do need those periods.
Maybe it's a week here and there.
Maybe it's a month here and there
where you need to train for maintenance.
You need to keep what you have but be able to turn
your focus onto a different goal outside of training,
and now the training is just something
to support your lifestyle.
And in that case, you can maintain your strength.
You can maintain your efficiency and your motor patterns
with very little volume and just enough enough frequency.
It doesn't have to be super high frequency,
but there is a period where, if you take too much time off
of not training at all or not training any qualities at all,
then you will kind of lose that.
So, in terms of like, intensity-based stuff,
especially the most intense, which we would call speed work,
it's like, you should not go more than six weeks
without doing something that is at least going to look
like an intensity-based stimulus.
It doesn't have to be a full-out workout,
but we do need to tax that tissue in an intense way
at least, you know, at least once in a six-week period.
Ideally, it's not like, well, if I do this once,
take six weeks off, then I can take another six weeks off.
That's not what I'm saying.
What I'm saying is, don't go more than six weeks
without paying some homage back to that.
In terms of efficiency and coordination,
stuff like that, depending on what your other activities
are doing or lack of activity, for that matter,
will affect how fast you lose those motor patterns,
but once you develop them, they come back really fast,
where as the speed stuff, if you do lose that,
so if you stop training for a year,
if you weren't genetically gifted for those
particular qualities, it will take you quite
a bit of time to get those back,
whereas the efficiency and the motor pattern stuff,
those come back relatively quick.
All right, when we look at frequency,
it's gonna be directly correlated to the quality
of program design, so the better you are at designing
program, the more you can use frequency as a tool,
because volume can be lower.
So you can train more frequently when you are more specific
with your training stimulus, because otherwise,
there's always some overflow, right?
So you're doing excess volume,
and some of it's not related,
and it's digging into your recovery,
which means you can't train as frequently.
As you start training better
because you have good program design, better execution,
you're isolating the workouts to the tissue
and the stimulus that you want.
Then the frequencies can go back up,
because there's no overflow, there's no, you know,
vacuum sucking, you know, some of your nutrients
away from recovery, because you're not very specific.
For metabolic adaptations, if we look at how frequently
you can do those, about every 48 hours.
When we look at hypertrophy, you'd have to bump that up
to about 72 hours.
Now, these are as often.
So that's every other day, from a metabolic perspective
and every third day from hypertrophy.
Those are the fastest or I would say the highest frequent
thing that you can do for the same body part.
So obviously, if you do metabolic for something,
then you could train 24 hours later
and do a different body part, same thing for hypertrophy.
But this is about hitting that same body part
over and over again.
How fast could it theoretically be ready to go
if my program design was set and my recovery was good.
I could potentially do that every 48 hours,
and we're gonna do some practical examples to show
how you can take advantage of that very fast recovery
when your program design is spot-on.
When we look at the systemic demand of the program,
you do need to take that into account,
because that could be the limiting factor in the frequency.
So this is specific to the muscle tissue,
but if you do have a workout that is significantly taxing,
either systemically or neurologically,
that may affect you going into the next one,
even if the local tissue is recovered,
because you won't be able to support that local tissue
from a whole body perspective.
So you will have to decrease
the frequency in that particular case.
Any mechanical damage or inflammation
is drastically gonna decrease frequency.
These are the two things that take
the longest to recover from.
So, there are inflammatory things
that come from metabolic or from mechanical damage
and also from metabolic stress.
So the one thing that doesn't produce a lot
of inflammation tends to be neurological training,
and then neurological training may or may not produce
mechanical damage, depending on the exercises
you're choosing, the tempos that you're choosing,
and the, you know, the rep ranges and whatnot
that you're working with, or I should say the intensity
at which you are working.
So, if you, if you do neurological stuff
at a high enough volume, you will get some mechanical
damage, but not as much as you would hypertrophy training.
So this then really comes to how versed
is your recovery in this?
Have I been training methods that are improving my ability
to do protein synthesis and to recover from mechanical
damage, 'cause I've been doing some hypertrophy training?
That being said, if I do neurological training,
likely, the mechanical damage will be minimal
compared to what my body can deal with, right.
So inflammation tends to be the one that's most often
overly expressed and hard for people to get away from
if they're not programming well.
But both of those, like, if you do program,
'cause there will be times where you want
a certain amount of inflammation
or you're purposely trying to get mechanical damage.
Understand that you can't train as frequently,
'cause it just simply takes more time to recover
from a local tissue perspective.
The inflammation one, if it goes,
if it gets high enough,
can also affect systemic recovery,
hormone balance, nutrient partitioning, all of those things.
Certain adaptations, period, take longer to recover,
so when we get into the stimulus and program design,
we'll kind of talk about those so there's different recovery
windows just like there's different adaptation periods
for how long you can do a certain stimuli.
So therefore, there will be some stimuli where it's like,
this is a good one if I wanna do high frequency.
This is not such a good one.
And the last one here, frequency is often the safest way
to do a super compensation program where you're basically,
you push somebody to the point where they're
a little bit overtrained, and then you back off.
'Cause if you do that by frequency,
you don't necessarily just have one or two workouts
to really figure out if you're overloading somebody.
You can kind of go for a period of time,
and it's this gradual overload,
and then you get to recover, whereas with volume,
a lot of times what happens is you get excessive
inflammation and stuff to the point
where you could actually make it so like,
now, when you go to do that super compensation,
which usually involves a huge excess of nutrient intake,
they may not be in a position to handle those nutrients,
'cause they're too inflamed or their digestive system
is really beat up from the high volume workouts,
whereas the high frequency,
they tend to be in a better position hormonally.
We know frequency is very good for nutrient partitioning
so they should be really ripe
to take in all of those extra nutrients
after a, for a super compensation.