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-: If that doesn't make things confusing enough,
almost everything can be either or both.
So, poor sleep, that can be too much volume,
not enough food, too much failure too much set volume,
could be other things.
Increased carbohydrate cravings, too much volume,
not enough food.
Energy mood swings, too much volume, not enough food.
Disrupted heart rate markers,
you guys are getting the pattern, right?
So, essentially that's the problem with hypertrophy
is 'cause volume can literally stress any system,
it can, it can be either.
So what you need to do is you,
this is where you really need to critically think
and just kinda look and be like, okay,
what likely is gonna be the solution here?
Is it add food or decreased failure
or decrease stimulus or set volume?
Which one of those seems to make the most sense?
And so then you gotta kinda look at the whole picture
and figure out, all right,
is weight moving in the right direction?
Because if we're not gaining weight
then it's probably a food issue,
it's not a training issue, right?
Unless you're training them so much, like that
you're actually, I mean, with this type of training
over training, shouldn't be driving a calorie deficit.
You know, that shouldn't be the case.
Like you'd have be a ridiculously bad program, at that case.
So you're kinda looking at all right between performance
and maybe my biometrics of sleep and how my weight's moving
and my body calms changing and stuff like that.
That's where you're gonna be able
to teeter between these things, right?
So we'll get to that,
when we get to our little pendulum scale, comparison thing.
Under stimulating, same thing as like, you know
most of them not improving performance
with no biomarkers or negative performance markers.
You could potentially be staying weight stable,
like if you're really, really under stimulating,
could you maybe stay weight stable and like have negative
like bad re-composition?
Potentially, but again,
your program would have to be atrociously bad.
So let's look down our little thought process here, okay.
Too much stress and stimuli to the recovery ratio.
How are we gonna choose training versus recovery?
Right?
The first two on each, the same ones
that we've been coming over, right?
Like is the workout difficulty higher or low?
Is exhaustion post-workout higher, or low?
Right.
Automatically we have those two things that have
just kinda been in there.
Now on the training side, when it comes to appetite, right?
If appetite is low after training
that training system could be a little too stressful,
likely on the neurological side, meaning
too many sets to failure, right?
So that will typically happen is like
you'll get like this post-workout loss of appetite.
You'll see, that also happens when we do like very
metabolic programs or stuff like that,
from that like, you know, you're creating a lot
of lack gases, systemic, stuff like that.
So that could be an issue on the training side.
On the recovery side, is really simple,
not gaining any weight, not accumulating any new tissue.
Now, obviously this is hard to judge on a very
short time scale, but you should be able to track trends
over time and see that we are gaining mass
of some sorts, right?
Then you look at body composition, you know
whether that's good or bad masses.
If you're gaining mass and it's all fat mass
then likely we got some work to do
on the programming side of things, on that side.
We're likely under stimulating on that side of thing.
Excessive soreness, that's gonna be more
on the training side, more so than food
because when we tend to under recover
from hypertrophy, the food state our performance tends
to go down so much that we don't have excessive soreness.
What you may see is that like,
if I were to give you a nuance here,
when we're looking at over-training
you get like, you get more sore when,
like in terms of the magnitude of soreness,
but when it's a nutritional issue,
your soreness may linger longer.
That's a small nuance in there for you guys.
More non-specific soreness likely means we're pushing
into more compensation, stuff like that,
so that would be more towards the too many too close
to failure side of things, or just bad technique.
But hopefully that's not an issue for you guys.
Energy only during training.
That's a sign that we aren't getting enough food.
If you see a very wide variety of biomarkers showing up,
that's another sign that likely you are underfeeding,
like biomarkers all over and random places with no pattern,
almost always is gonna be a food issue
and doing hypertrophy training.
And then we have the early workout performance,
is gonna say, this is likely more of a training thing,
whereas late workout performance, maybe a set volume thing
or maybe a food based thing.
And then we have basically, you know,
where's this volume and comparison,
has the diet, you know already maxed out, are we,
you know, where are we in terms of what should be
the threshold we need to hit for stimulus?
Just kinda looking at those borders or those constraints.
So then we move into what if we're doing too little stimuli
or we got too much stuff in there
and buy too much stuff, I mean, pizza.
So, really when it comes to excessive nutrition
are you gaining body fat?
That's really what it comes down to, you know.
Other than that, like, I mean, you can be,
if you're putting in more food
and somebody's just performing better
and getting more jacked, cool, keep putting in more food.
You just, maximizing on as much possible adaptation
that they can get.
Really your only limitation there is going to be
like time logistics and the digestive tract.
So you don't need to stop getting more food
unless one of those things happens or they start putting
on body fat faster than you would like to.
Now, signs that we need to increase the training.,
very simple ones.
Difficulty is too low, post-work our exhaustion is too low,
volume seems to be low compared to the others,
not increasing performance stimulus.
The other option would be staying weight stable
and not recapping at all.
You could look at that.
So it would be, you're gaining too much fat
but you're gaining the fat in the absence of gaining weight.
If we're focusing on a recomposition phase.
For incorrectly stimulating, basically what
you're gonna see is you're gonna see a biomarker
and performance trend that purely resembles
either metabolic or neurologic.
'Cause it will be, if you're incorrectly stimulating
you had to go in one direction or the other
unless you were just like getting no stimulus,
like are you doing the, the kitchen sink method
of including everything in a program
and that's where you're gonna see all the biomarkers off.
But, what you're generally gonna see is,
if your program is too metabolic for this person
and that's becoming the limiter,
is that their biomarkers are going to look
like somebody that's over-training metabolically.
And if it's the other way, it's gonna look
like they're, over-training neurologically.
And you're gonna see the pattern reflect
the biomarkers that we discussed in those phases
and then you're gonna see the performance, reflect
those performance markers from those phases.
So if you're looking at something and it's like
this looks like metabolic stress, it probably is.
They're just getting there by volume,
rather than intensity of the metabolic stress.
So the tips and tricks of the trade.
Covered some of these
but let's just put an explanation point on some.
Volume and sleep.
Those are your two biggest focal points
in terms of what you're assessing.
And then, you know, the thing that you're gonna solve most
of your problems with is, you know,
if it's not volume or sleep, then its gonna be food.
You know, then you can jump down all the rabbit holes,
but provided the person comes in relatively healthy,
you've done your due diligence of like periodization.
When you're in a hypertrophy phase
you shouldn't be saying a whole bunch of other stuff.
Most of your problems can be solved by adjusting volume,
getting adequate sleep and getting enough food.
Like that's, it should be the simplest programs
for you to maintain.
It might require the most nutritional adjustments
in terms of macros and calories
but it should require the least amount
of investigative work, because you should be like, yeah,
I know what you need more food,
we just gotta figure out how much, so am I gonna go big,
go small, try and go down the middle.
What type of stuff are we're going to throw at you?
If we throw cupcakes at you,
we're gonna throw rice crispy treats like drinking,
you know, into workout Coca-Cola, I'm just kidding.
Nobody drinks, Coca Cola anymore, ever.
Bad Coca-Cola.
Just gotta figure out how you're going to approach it.
If it's sleep, obviously then that becomes
a little bit more investigative.
Volume, really just gotta know your volume stuff.
So this is, speaking of volume,
this is where you really make your money,
understanding the ins and outs of what volume really is.
So volume, if you've, peaked in the progressive overload
like sample content that we put out.
Volume essentially you have how many sets, how many reps,
the proximity of failure of those,
but then you also have tempo
and you also have your exercise selection
and range of motion and all of these things
that come into play.
And so this is where your understanding of everything
from the biomechanics to the physiology really comes in
because well, the regular trainer, when it comes to volume,
they can just be like, well
you either get more sets or less sets.
You can be like, well, we're gonna manipulate tempo here,
we're gonna swap this exercise
or we're gonna to take these exercises closer to failure
and this one we're gonna reduce to failure
or the reduced the proximity to failure.
How many sets where you go to failure,
you can become a programming ninja,
in terms of manipulating volumes,
so that you're getting the maximum amount of stimulus,
where, you know, as the blockhead trainer
that just basically knows volume is just like sets.
That's the only thing that they can adjust,
they're gonna leave a lot of results on the table
and they're gonna have a lot fewer options
in terms of how they can progress training,
because somebody, there may be a lot of things
that you can do in between somebody being able
to tolerate six and eight sets of something.
There may be a large way to be able to bridge
with intensity and tempo and exercise selection, you know
to make better progressions and volume
rather than just simply doing more sets,
especially, for people where they can only get so much
out of a certain type of set, right?
So for a given exercise and a given technique and tempo,
like you can only get accumulate so much mechanical tension.
Knowing all the things that you guys now know about volume
you can figure out,
how do I get more mechanical tension stimulus
out of the same amount of sets, reps, tempo, time, et cetera
without having to make that huge jump into another set.
Because if you follow the effect of reps theory,
meaning that it's only the, you know,
the later portion of a set that is actually contributing
to the mechanical tension stimulus.
Every time we add a set, we add a certain amount of volume
that isn't efficient 'cause it's non stimulatory volume.
So being able to manipulate all those factors
allows you to increase stimulus
without adding stimulatory volume,
so you're much more efficient at it.
So this is the place where you get to play
around with those tools.
I honestly, love hypertrophy programming
on the like the programming side of it,
because you do, you get to like, you get to use
all of those fun little tweaks.
So maybe the boys wanna come here
on the end and, you know, make some comments
and stuff on some of the stuff that they've used
or saw or whatever.
You know, but that's, it's very simple.
Just, you gotta find the most efficient way
to add stimulus without adding more volume
because adding more stimulus means more adaptation,
more results.
Adding more volume than isn't stimulating
just means less recovery.
Don't underestimate the impact of proximity to
failure on volume.
This is especially true for younger trainees
or people with worse technique because the closer
they get to failure, the worse their technique goes,
the more they compensate all of that thing.
So this is even a bigger factor for people
with a lower training age or people, you know
doing a new exercise, whatever it may be.
There when you push things to failure
and it's not as clean, there's a lot more CNS stress
that comes along with that, you know, and things like that.
So you need to really pay attention
to how much and how close you're going to failure,
how well this person is able to actually, you know track
and measure that, so if you have somebody
and you know, they always overshoot,
you have to think about that when you do your programming,
you know, or undershoot for that matter as well, right?
'Cause this can go the other direction,
as you can have somebody where you seem to be putting
a reasonable amount of volume on them
but they're getting very little stimulus out of it.
And it might be because they're just sandbagging
all of those sets, thinking that they're,
you know, too IRR, when really they're like six.
Body parts specific responses are really gonna show up here.
So looking at like, instead of just like,
are we progressing or not progressing.
But really paying attention to what's progressing.
and what's not.
Because depending on your exercise selection and you know,
the types of training people have done previously,
they may have very different trainability
across different muscle tissues.
So they may be getting too much volume
in one body part too little in another
and so you can actually get them
from a holistic perspective, recovering optimally
by just shifting the volume to the appropriate places, okay?
So I mean 'cause the goal is just get the stimulus
where you need it.
So you might need, you know, six sets for chest
but only four sets for biceps and you might need eight sets
for quads, whatever it may be like, that's perfectly fine.
So hypertrophy programs and you know, Cody
just EMS right now, they don't have to be symmetrical
or look pretty on paper, right?
So they can be bad for people on OCD
but very good for hypertrophy, if you will.
So, sometimes the numbers can look pretty fucking ugly
but that can be exactly what the body needs
at that time, right?
You know, sometimes you can do reps or sets of seven
and nine and 11, you can do it.
So lots of different things.
Now with performance, performance is a key biomarker.
But I think sometimes people forget
that we're using performance as a very important biomarker
but performance is not the goal, okay.
We're going for progress, not PR.
So when I say that, you know, all right
performance is gonna be very important,
we're looking for performance in this rep range
is that we're looking for progress
not necessarily PR
because of the amount of volume that you may be accumulating
before your top set, that's really gonna,
it's gonna affect what your top set is.
Like, so if you're looking at that.
So you're looking at, you know, progress
over the course of the workout and you know, progress
from workout to workout, but you're not necessarily looking
at like, well, the last set I'm doing
that's the one I'm taking to failure,
I'm gonna hit a PR over the last time I did this,
you know, weight or whatever.
But you might be coming in and that exercise is later
in the workout or it's happening two sets later
than the last time you "PR did" or whatever.
So it's not the same conditions
and that can really throw people off.
So we're not looking at like, okay
because performance is important,
we should be hitting our best RM ever in this.
But man, that's very different if you did four sets of eight
versus if you did six sets of eight,
versus if you did eight, eight, six, six, four, four,
whatever you're doing, you have to look at performance
across the same context
and then progress in that same context.
So it doesn't matter if you're hitting lifetime PRs on this,
what matters is that you're progressing session to session.
And then the last one on here is ignore most
of the claims on proxies for hypertrophy,
I know it's really common for people to, you know
rattle off all these things about like pumps
and you know, like whether or not you're shaking
when you're pouring your gallon of orange juice
or whatever the hell else people,
like literally heard people like,
well, if you shut the car door and you're like,
oh my chest hurt, when yo shut the car door...
That must be a sign that this is a good hypertrophy program.
What the hell?
Welcome to the fitness industry.
You know, this stuff is more popular than me,
believe it or not.
So you can't, you proxy an adaptation
that has not occurred yet.
So like on the day of training, I can't tell you,
like, oh I can tell hypertrophy occurred because,
but it hasn't occurred yet.
How can you tell something has happened
that hasn't happened?
So you really have to look at progress as the main thing.
Like, do you have signs that you're recovering well?
That's a good thing.
Are we making progress in the rep ranges?
That's a good thing.
Is the weight moving in the right direction?
There you go.
Like there's your three things, right?
Hypertrophy is very complicated.
Sometimes you're gonna get good pumps,
sometimes you're gonna get, not good pumps.
It's gonna be dependent on food is gonna be dependent
on where in the hypertrophy rep range,
like obviously if you're doing more sarcoplasmic stuff,
yeah, you're going to get greater pumps.
If you're doing more things on the lower end of,
you know straight mechanical transduction,
you're not gonna get as bigger pumps.
If you're really pushing the, you know
the food and the surplus, you're going to get better pumps
than if you're trying to like lean gain
and kinda stay on there.
And so like using these various subjective markers
can be really, really misleading.
But if you can see in the future
please contact me because I require your services.
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