(upbeat music)
-: So one of the things that we're gonna do,
is we're gonna use percentage
as an exercise equalizer.
So that means,
instead of looking at the amount of pounds
something increases in,
we're gonna look at
what percentage of say, tonnage,
did I progress in by doing another set,
by doing another rep
or by doing another weight?
And how do those compare
to each other?
So, what we have here in this example, right?
Is we're looking at leg extension, squat, leg press,
and I just threw in some variables in there, okay?
And so what I wanna show you
is that all right, well,
if we look at adding, you know,
5% load,
versus adding one rep,
versus adding one set,
how equivalent are they going to be?
And what you're gonna see
is for the leg extension, right?
Which is kind of our,
our lighter exercise here,
is that it's relatively the same.
So we have,
if we add a set,
we go up to 5700 pounds,
if we add a rep,
it goes to 5400 pounds.
If we add 5% load,
it goes up to 5000 pounds.
And that is in the conditions,
where we are doing,
if you follow my clicks here,
we're doing five sets
of eight at 120 pounds,
which would give us 4800 pounds of tonnage, right?
And so what you're seeing up here,
in this blue, is the relative increase
by increasing 5%.
Now, what if we take a squat?
Which is an exercise,
where we're going to be using more load,
but if we were doing the same sets
and reps for that,
what we're gonna start to see is that,
well, the difference between adding a set here,
starts to climb a lot more, right?
The difference is a lot more.
And the only thing that's different
is that I had a higher load,
so I'm doing 225 pounds.
But now, well if I increase 5% of that load, it's more,
if I increase the set, it's more,
if I increase it rep, it's more.
It's a lot more tonnage going up, okay?
What about a leg press?
Now I'm using 1000 pounds,
we'll say five sets of eight of 1000 pounds, okay?
Now, look at these numbers.
I'm doing 40,000 pounds of tonnage, right?
So now if I increase a set,
it's an extra 8000 pounds,
it's more tonnage than the entire gross tonnage
of the leg extension
by just adding a set, right?
Same, adding a rep is almost the same.
It's an additional 5000 pounds of tonnage.
So adding one rep,
so doing five sets of nine over five sets of eight,
with a leg press is equivalent to my whole series
of leg extensions.
Does that sound right?
Well, if I just went from five sets of eight
to five sets of nine,
imagine you were doing this leg extension
and this leg press in the same workout.
Do you think it would be equivalent?
That if well, if I added the one rep
to my leg press for my five sets,
I did five sets of nine,
then I could just not do five sets of leg extensions,
and that would be the same amount of work
of the same amount of stimulus?
If we're going by total tonnage,
this gonna seem that way.
It's gonna be like,
well, either one of those cases.
So like, if I took this 40,000 pounds
and I added it to this, and it's like,
Okay, that total workouts tonnage would have been 4400
or 44,800 pounds,
versus if I were to just do leg press only for an extra rep.
It's now 45,000 pounds.
So which one of those is more volume?
I bet most of you guys are thinking,
Well, obviously if I did five sets of leg extensions
and five sets of eight of leg presses,
that should be more volume.
This is where that total tonnage thing
really starts to fail us.
Cause one, I can't really compare muscular work like,
and according to this,
the leg presses nearly 10 times the volume
of a leg extension.
And that's just simply not how that would work for my quads.
So I can't compare those two to each other.
And I can add them to each other
to get an appropriate progression of the workout.
Cause if I progress in the exercise that does more load,
versus an extra small load,
it's gonna seem like a small progression
versus a large progression.
So I have to simply micromanage all these things.
So, what we're gonna do
is we're gonna look at using the percentage change
rather than the actual total tonnage thing,
and see if that doesn't balance out
progressing in these different fashions.
So, if we look at this case, right?
And in my chart here,
I've just relabeled the,
the exercises to light, moderate and high.
Cause it really doesn't matter what the exercises are,
but just so that I could put
a little bit different weights in here
cause we got 20 pounds for the light exercise
to really illustrate it.
So, here's the thing,
is if I keep sets and reps the same,
and I look at the percentage increase
of adding a set, or a rep or a load,
once I switch to percentage,
what you will notice is now these are the same, right?
Versus tonnage, these were in comparable,
completely in comparable, right?
You can't even really see that there is a blue line
over here for the leg press, right?
It's incredibly hard to compare those things.
But once I use a percentage of increase,
then all of a sudden,
I have something I can work with.
Cause now I can be like,
Alright, well this is cool now,
now if I measure that,
okay, in this light exercise, I went up a rep,
and in this heavy exercise, I also went up a rep
and I just track how much percentage I improved
from baseline in my previous session
or whichever fashion that you happen to see,
and we'll go through multiple fashions,
is now I'll be able to say,
this was my progression for that workout, right?
And I can compare what's going on.
Like, this is the progression and work for quads, right?
Because if these numbers
are not gonna help me understand progression
and quads if I have more than one exercise that I do, right?
Basically, for this to work,
you would have to only do one exercise per body part
and just stick with that
and progress only that.
And most of you guys are probably using two, three,
maybe even four exercises per body part.
And so over the course of a week,
over the course of a workout,
however you happen to have things arranged,
doesn't matter if you're high frequency, low frequency,
high volume, low volume,
high intensity, low intensity, whatever.
This is still gonna bring that stuff back
into a scenario where we can start comparing things,
we can start utilizing these things.
And now, if we can compare these things,
and we can make these numbers tangible,
now we can start to use them.
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