In this episode of the How To Train Series, we discuss Bodybuilding & Muscle Hypertrophy. If you want to get bigger, build muscle, or just build a more toned, beach-ready body, this episode will help you understand how you should be training.
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Transcript
The following transcript is AI generated, so please excuse any errors:
Gary McGowan:
Hello and welcome to the Triage Method Podcast with me, Gary McGowan and my co-host as always, Mr. Patrick Farrell. Paddy, how are you this week?
Paddy:
I’m positively splendid Gary. It’s been beautifully sunny so I’ve been happy. Getting a nice little tan on.
Gary McGowan:
It was myself still out here in Portugal, home now early in the week, but still enjoying the beautiful weather. Portuguese, I was going to say beaches, but not a big fan of the beaches, you know, so we’ll just leave that.
Paddy:
Forest enjoyers, mountain enjoyers, that’s where it’s at.
Gary McGowan:
So, wave-oids and beach-wits aside, today we’re going to talk a little bit about bodybuilding. So firstly, two things. One, this is the how to train series. So we’re going to work through a number of different goals and tell you exactly the core principles of training to reach that goal. But the second thing is that if you came into this podcast and saw the word bodybuilding and thought, oh, I’m not a bodybuilder. I don’t need this. It’s actually really important to note that bodybuilding actually encompasses a lot of us, okay? Because what we’re focusing on here is how to build muscle. And of course, a bodybuilder, a competitive bodybuilder, is going to be taking that to the extreme. But a lot of us, in some capacity, if we wanna improve how we look for the beach, if we wanna build muscle for the purpose of health, we actually still have a bodybuilding goal at the core. So that’s really important to a lot of us. should think of ourselves, when we’re in the gym, a little bit more like bodybuilders. Of course, still doing our cardio and all the things like that, but we are all bodybuilders in some capacity. We just might be getting on stage in our trunk.
Paddy:
Yeah, like there’s a difference between like the amateur and then the professional. And I don’t even mean that in terms of like whether or not you get paid to do this. It’s like, when you’re talking about the amateur, it’s like this is just a person doing it casually. Like you’re a casual bodybuilder, you know? I suppose actually that’s probably a better categorization. It’s like you’re a casual bodybuilder in terms of you’re building your body casually. And then you’re an amateur, like you’re actually trying to start going for bodybuilding competitions and stuff, you know? And then maybe if you’re pro, if you’re jacked out of your mind, you can go pro. But the goal of bodybuilding is a really interesting one because if you go into any gym and say, oh, yeah, I’m a bodybuilder, people will automatically assume you’re a competitive bodybuilder. Even though the vast majority of people in the gym or even outside the gym, like they do actually… try to build their body in terms of they try to build muscle you know and I’m talking obviously about people who are interested in their health and fitness not just the average person the average person is not going like oh yeah I’m actively trying to build muscle while not exercising like you know that’s just that’s just not the case you know and but as we were saying in the last episode in this series we have to try to cut through all the noise. When we talk about training specifics of a specific goal, whether it’s rugby, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, just general health, bodybuilding, whatever, right? If you type that in online, how to train like a bodybuilder, or how to train to start bodybuilding, whatever search terms you come up with, you get so much fucking noise, right? And as we said in the last episode, and we’ve said it loads of times throughout the podcast, series, and we say it all the time in general. We want to focus on the principles, not the protocols. Very often, people get too caught up on the protocols. They get too caught up on trying to follow whatever ex-bodybuilder did. They’re like, oh, well, this guy did this, so I’m just gonna copy what they did and get good results. I’m gonna get the same results as them. When that person probably had, first of all, just great genetics, but that person probably had a better understanding of the principles and manipulated their training get the results that they wanted right or they just would have got results on any program anyway because they just have phenomenal genetics which is probably you know the case for most people that are like at the top echelons of bodybuilding and other sports you know but also as individuals we want to focus on the main principles around the how to set up our training. Because if we understand the principles, then we can always change the protocols. We can always manipulate the protocols. Like, oh, we need to train, maybe your legs don’t respond as well as my legs. So my training program, I need to train legs less because they’re already a dominant body part. Whereas for you, you need to train them more, or you need to do more volume, or more intensity, or whatever. We’ll talk about all that kind of stuff now in a second. But if you understand the principles, you’re not left just following the exact same program and it’s not getting you the results that you want, you know, because you’re not me, right, or you know, the bodybuilder of your dreams, whatever, right. So there’s a few things as well that I do want to cover in this episode. Well, talk through the basic like resistance training principles because obviously that’s going to be the bread and butter stuff that we do here when we’re talking about bodybuilding because that’s what drives the muscle growth. But I do also want to talk about the broader training. I don’t know what you want to call it, theory, whatever, right? Set up, because very often when you talk about bodybuilding, people are, unfortunately, they’re optimizing for the shorter term and they’re not really thinking longer term, right? And this goes for whether you are like the bodybuilder who’s like, I want to be, you know, 300 pounds on stage shredded out of my mind. or you’re just the casual like, oh I just wanna get a bit bigger, right? And we still need to be thinking, not, oh what do we do over the next 10 years to build the body that we want, we also need to be thinking, well what am I gonna do when I’m 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, you know, like what’s the long term here? Am I just gonna drop off training? Am I just gonna, you know, no longer train? Am I just gonna try to stay as big as possible? Can we see this all the time with, you know. actual professional bodybuilders and stuff, they try to stay as big as possible and it’s probably just not a healthy approach, right? So when we’re talking about all this stuff, we need to optimize not only for the results that we want in the shorter term, we also need to optimize for the longer term. Now this is really… It’s actually really handy in this term in regards to this goal, bodybuilding, because bodybuilding takes so fucking long. Building muscle is so slow. There’s this whenever we talk about like biology, I always think that there’s this kind of concept of. And it’s kind of hard for most average people to kind of just get their head around, because it’s not really how you think in the world, right? It’s kind of like compound interest, really. But. we want to optimize for the duration of time, right? We want to optimize for getting things right for a longer period of time, not just getting things perfect for a shorter period of time, or not just, I’m gonna go extra hard for a short period of time, right? All these processes in the body, well, not all, but the vast majority of processes in the body, like, they just take a long time. Like, say, for example, how do you prevent heart disease? Like, oh, my LDL is whatever. you know, it’s high. So I’m gonna go on the most aggressive statin therapy, I’m gonna go change my diet, do everything little thing to get that down to as low as possible, right? And yeah, that’s definitely an approach, right? But what a better approach would be was, well, let’s actually just make sure that it’s at a lower level for a long, long time, you know? Like it’s been low since you were 12. Like that would be a much better approach from the perspective of like preventing heart disease. And it’s kind of the same with muscle building where Yeah, you can train really hard for 12 weeks, 16 weeks, and really push your body. And you can get phenomenal results, don’t get me wrong, that you can build a significant amount of muscle. But that significant amount of muscle that you can build in that 12 weeks pales in comparison with the significant amount of muscle that you can build over 20, 30, 40 years. You know? So that’s actually what we wanna optimize for. And unfortunately, the vast majority of people optimize for that on the net. try to train hard for 12 weeks or 16 weeks, I’m gonna go on the most aggressive training program, like super high volume, I’m gonna be pushing myself. And they do that, they get some good results, but then they drop off because it was too hard. You know, it wasn’t something that they could sustain for even a year. It’s not something they could sustain for a couple of months. It’s something that they could only sustain for that 12 week block, right? So we have to keep that in mind that we’re optimizing for duration, right? And with that in mind, We also need to think of, well, what’s the end goal after we’ve already achieved the goal? Like, let’s say your goal is, I wanna be 100 kilos shredded out of my mind. What happens after that? Are you still gonna be pushing training this hard? Are you gonna be dropping training back? Are you gonna be doing a little bit more like cardiovascular training? Like, you need to be thinking about that stuff overall. Now, we’re obviously not gonna cover absolutely every nuance of that discussion today. We’re really just talking about how to set up training, but I do want you to keep that in mind where you might be listening to this bodybuilding. like how to train series here, or this episode in that series, but other episodes in the series might also apply to you. Like we just covered the general health stuff, you know? So just because you’re focused on bodybuilding doesn’t mean that you then just go, oh, well, I’m not even gonna listen to that episode because it doesn’t matter to me. Because it does matter to you because you need to be doing some of those things right now and we’ll touch on them. But then after when you’ve achieved your bodybuilding goal, I get 100 kilos shredded, whatever the goal is, Maybe you are gonna switch to a bit more of a general health focused approach and you’re just gonna maintain the muscle mass that you have. Maybe focus on a few areas where you’re like, I wouldn’t mind getting a bit stronger or bigger or whatever in those areas, you know? Anyway, Gary, unless you’re finding an ad to that, where do we start when we’re thinking about the program set up for the goal of bodybuilding?
Gary McGowan:
Yeah, so the first core principle that I’ll cover in two points is that of training volume. So when we talk about training volume, what we’re talking about is our best quantification of how much work that you’re doing. And that is actually surprisingly imprecise but useful, which is the number of sets that you do per body part. Okay. You can obviously look at this in terms of per whole body or per session itself as well. But per body part tends to be the most helpful as it allows you to stratify based on what muscles you want to work. What muscles require more work, what muscles maybe you don’t have as good recovery in, and so on, okay? So the general recommendation, and this is obviously a general guideline, it is supported by the available research, but we’re always going to have some variations from this, is 10 to 20 sets per body part per week. So in practice, what that might look like would be, let’s say you’re somewhere in the middle of the range, you’re going for 15 sets per week, that’ll be seven days, or seven sets for chess, let’s say on a Monday, and eight sets for chess on a Friday, something like that, okay? So let’s say you do four sets of bench press and three sets of a machine chess press, there’s your seven sets, okay? And people get all worked up about, you know, do my warmup sets count, you know, what if? what if I’m doing a shoulder press and my chest is also working? Just don’t sweat it too much, okay? We’re talking generally about exercises where there’s a dominant prime mover, okay? So like in a bench press, your chest is gonna be probably the biggest contributor there. We’d consider that to be a triceps exercise as well. So don’t get too worried about, you know, do I need to count my squats towards my trap? and lat volume because I’m holding the bar. There’s no need to go that deep on it. It’s just a general recommendation of 10 to 20 sets per body part per week and that’s a good place to start. Then what you do is you say, okay, per workout what should I do? Should I do all 20 sets in one workout? Probably not, okay. I’d go somewhere between maybe eight and 10 sets at most per body part per workout. Because what happens is, If you need 20 sets, let’s say, and you do them all in one workout, the second 10 sets that you do are going to be in a fatigued state. You’re not as focused anymore. You’re a little bit lower in energy. Maybe your shoulders start to get at you. You’re not going to be able to get the same quality stimulus out of the second 10 sets as you would the first. And therefore, from a practical perspective, it makes a lot more sense to split it up into at least two sessions per week. especially as you go towards higher and higher volumes. Okay, so that’s the first thing in relation to volume. You’re going to need to add on the volume top.
Paddy:
And not really, I think it is important, again, for most people, you see all these discussions of like, you know, I feel like I can’t my working sets, and what if I do like one hard set, and then like a back off set, and you know, all these kind of different, again, protocols. And it’s just noise, right? It just, it doesn’t matter, right? Just think of them in terms of hard sets. How many hard sets did you do? And what’s a hard set? Let’s just say it’s a set that you do that is within five reps of failure. You know, so if you’re able to do 120 kilo squat for eight reps, you know, and you do that 120 kilos and you do two reps, you know, it might be a little bit challenging because, you know, the weight is 120 kilos regardless of if you go to failure or not, but I probably wouldn’t count that towards your sets. You know, it’s just, you barely even got moving. It’s two reps, you’re nowhere near failure. You know, it’s just like, that probably moved very quickly. Yeah, you still have to be focused. but it just wasn’t a hard set, right? And if it was a hard set and you’re like breathing, you have to like catch your breath between every single rep or whatever, that probably isn’t an actual eight rep max, it’s probably eight singles, because you do see people do that all the time. Where they spend like five minutes in between every single rep from rep one. You know, you basically just did a cluster set, right? But anyway, I digress, right? So it’s just hard sets within five reps of failure, you know, count those. And this is something that is a little bit annoying and again it goes back to this noise where you’ll see people say like, oh I actually need really low volume, I really just go for a low volume approach, these guys are saying 10 to 20 body part or 10 to 20 sets per body part per week and I do like 8 max. And when you actually look at their training and you see them training they do like 10 warm up sets and those warm up sets for that one set that they’re like oh I just do one set, it’s like those warm up sets are like hard like they’re pushing like yeah okay it’s not the eight rep target or the six to eight rep target or whatever that they were aiming for but they were doing all of the warm-up sets relatively close to failure like so you would just you they’re just sets right
Gary McGowan:
Yep, absolutely. So that kind of goes both ways really, doesn’t it? You know, the warm-up sets topic, if you’re doing tons and tons and tons of warm-up sets, that’s all contributing. But then on the other side of things, you know, sometimes people, they’re counting sets that are their warm-up sets that they’re really not putting much effort into, and they could probably be doing a little bit more volume or a little bit more quality work, okay? So you know, my clients ask me about that all the time. They’re like, you know, Gary, I did my first set and then I realized the weight that I set was way too light. Should I count that as a set? It’s, you know, just count the challenging sets where you feel like you were working at the appropriate RPE or reps and reserve target, which we’ll get to in a moment. I don’t stress about it too much. Okay. And the only other point I’ll add in that is when I say 10 to 20, I know you sitting at home, all you hear is 20. It happens all the time. As soon as we give a range of volume, people just go right to the top, okay? And don’t do that. The thing is, people think they’re like cheating the system. It’s like, if 10 to 20 is the range, then 20 means the best results. But it actually doesn’t, because sometimes you do too much too soon, you get injured, or you actually just create so much muscle damage and so much recovery deficit that you maybe even gain less muscle, okay? So more isn’t always better. So don’t just hammer yourself. ground if you don’t need it. And I suppose one thing to note in that then is how do I know if I should do more or if I should do less? And some really simple common-sense indicators like are you extremely sore for three plus days every time you do this workout? You’re probably doing a little bit too much. I’d probably pull volume back a touch. On the other side of things if you’re never sore and you feel like you always have more to give in your workouts and you could be doing more then maybe that’s an indication that you could indeed go up the chain. Okay, so that’s for another day to get into those nuances. But use a little bit of common sense there and you’ll actually get quite far. Because the next thing to talk about is how much effort you put into your sets. And this is really important as it’s integral to the discussion of volume really. And what we say is, most of the time, I would say on average, two to three reps in reserve, meaning that at the end of your set, you have two to three more reps you could do, but you’re not going to do voluntarily, that’s probably the sweet spot for most of your sets most of the time. Now I know there’s some of you that are saying, but why wouldn’t I just go to failure? It just seems intuitive that I do as much as I can. And to be honest with you, a lot of the time when we look at what people call failure in the gym, there are actually still a few reps from failure and there probably really are around this two to three reps in reserve range. Most people don’t train as hard as they think they do and one of the things that we try to do is help our clients to calibrate where this two to three reps in reserve is. So for example, I’ll have a client that is rating two RIR, two RIR on all their sets, I get them to send me a video and I’m saying. look, I’ll be honest with you, that looks more like five. I think you could push yourself a bit further. So that’s one of the things you can do to improve your calibration here is to start videoing your sets, reviewing them yourself, and if you happen to have a friend or a coach yourself that could, or your own coach, that could have a look at these for you, then they can review and give you some feedback. And that’s how you get better at gauging this over time. And the reason we don’t wanna go to true failure all the time, like genuinely not able to perform another rep, yeah.
Paddy:
It’s on about this thing. Before you get stuck into that, another way to do it is to pick a really safe exercise for your chest, just do a chest press machine and actually go to failure. Go to the point where you’re like, I physically cannot do another rep. I actually try and it gets to a quarter of the way and I’m shaking and I’m pushing as hard as possible. Now you have an idea of, oh, well, that’s what. failure feels like, that’s what failure looks like for this exercise at least, you know? And you can build that kind of mental picture of like, okay, well, what did I feel like when I was three reps from failure, you know? And you can kind of, again, just build that mental picture in your head of like, okay, well, that’s what that felt like on that exercise. Now, it might be different for different exercises, but once you do that, you’ll realize that, oh, fuck, I haven’t been training to failure like I thought I was. And when I see all these other people that say they’re training to failure, they’re not training to failure, you know? And this is one of those things that does actually trigger me a little bit when people are like, oh, I couldn’t do this, reps and reserves stuff, I need to be training to failure because, you know, I have to know I’ve given it all my all, right? And I know you’re gonna get into why that’s not a good approach in a second, but when you see half these people train, like, I mean, more than half, the vast majority of these people train, you look at what they say failure is for them and you’re like, you literally have about three reps left here. Like you could push harder for three reps. Like this is not failure. This is literally what three reps from failure looks like and feels like. You’re just stopping because it momentarily got a bit sore. You got a little bit pumped or whatever. And that’s just three reps from failure. Like people have this idea in their head that, oh, well, if I don’t go to failure, like I’m not going to be training hard enough. Like three reps from failure is easy. No, three reps from failure is like, the weight’s already starting to like, grind, like you have to like push, it’s going slow, you know? So when someone says that, they’re like, oh, there’s three reps from failure, it’s easy training. Like you just know, you can almost guarantee that person does not train to failure because what they’re talking about is, oh well that’s failure, like the weight started to slow down and it was a bit challenging. I’m like, yeah, that’s what it feels like when you’re three reps from failure. Like.
Gary McGowan:
Exactly, so that is really important and videoing yourself or getting someone else to review it is a good start. And then as Paddy said, what you can do is have like challenge sets programmed into your workouts. I do this with clients sometimes and like Paddy said, the best thing you can do is you do it on a safe exercise. You know, don’t say, all right, I’m going to do barbell back squats and see. when I fail and then you’re lying on the floor with the bar on top of you and your spine is broken and it’s just not a great situation, okay? So instead, pick a machine exercise ideally and go after it. You’ll find that you have a lot more in the tank. Now with that said, the reason you don’t want to go to total failure all the time is because you just get a disproportionate amount of fatigue and there’s probably an increase in injury risk relative to just staying a couple of reps shy of failure.
We also don’t have great evidence to suggest that you know, that this comes, the disproportionate fatigue comes with disproportionate gains in muscle, because that would be worth it. If we could see that taking every single step to failure gained or allowed you to gain significantly more muscle and that outweighs the additional fatigue or the injury risk that might come from that, then that probably would be worth it, especially if you’re a bodybuilder. But I just don’t think that evidence is there. I’d be more than happy to change my mind if that was the case, because I quite enjoy training to failure myself. You know, it was actually a change in my training approach in the past to move towards leaving a few reps in the tank because it seemed like a smart approach. And I’m probably a little bit biased here as well by the fact that I work with so many people who are injured and who have got injured in the gym and where pain significantly obstructs their training and using reps and reserve, keeping reps in the tank and not going to failure all the time. is really game changing for a lot of those clients specifically. So especially if you’re someone who’s been, you know, constantly having niggles in the gym, constantly injured, this is something you really need to consider. So in summary, two to three reps in reserve most of the time. In reality, what this probably looks like, if you were to look at the programs that we put out, it’s probably zero to four. That’s like the big range, because sometimes we program to failure, you know, especially on those safer exercises towards the end of the workout. And sometimes… I want my clients to actually stay even further from failure. And it wouldn’t be uncommon for me to write a program where I have five reps in reserve even, especially as my clients come back from injury. And I really just don’t want them going anywhere near that point. All I want them is to just start getting that little bit of stimulus, okay? So with that said, the next question that someone will ask is how many reps should I do? And to be honest, this is probably one of the first questions a lot of people ask in the beginner stage, you know, should I do 10, should I do 20, what should I be doing? And most of the time, the practical range is somewhere between 6 and 15 reps. And again, in reality, it’s probably, if you were to look at our programs, you might see somewhere between 1 and 30 as kind of the broad range that’s there. But 6 to 15 probably covers 90% of the sets that we’re going to program in a workout that’s designed for muscle building. As you go below that, you’re training more maximal strength. And that might be a good thing, if that’s your goal. But it does come with a lot of fatigue and again that kind of risk associated with it. So that’s sort of like the training to failure equivalent but on the reps front. And then on the very high end, if you’re doing sets of 30, again you actually get disproportionate amounts of fatigue associated with that because of the very high metabolite production that we start to get. And it’s also just a practical consideration doing a lot of reps to get the same stimulus as doing less reps. doesn’t really make sense from a time perspective. It does make sense in some cases where, let’s say I have a client again that’s injured and I want them to use lighter weights overall. If they do more reps, then we get less joint stress and we can still get a similar stimulus. So it is useful in some cases, but six to 15 covers the majority of the sets that we would program, I would say.
Paddy:
Yeah, I would agree, especially for bodybuilding, this is probably most bang for your buck rep ranges. Now, it can be a little bit hard to rationalize that, because if we just head right, basically the last five reps are kind of the money sets. They’re the money reps, so to speak, I should say, where you’re like, oh, those last five reps, once you’re winning five reps of failure, we’re like, that’s a hard set, count that as a hard set, count that towards your overall volume. And so if that’s the case, why not just do five reps? Just do five reps on everything. It’s like that’s the lowest hit you need to do. If it’s like you need to do five reps or be within five reps, just do five reps. So you know every single one of those reps is a stimulating rep, so to speak, right? But you get a disproportionate amount of fatigue by doing that, right? And five reps, maybe you can get away with it, right? But the actual reward that you get from that is not… necessarily proportionate to the amount of fatigue that generates. Sometimes it just doesn’t make sense. What are you going to do, five reps on your curls? You’re going to do five rep max on your bicep curls. There’s just so much extra juggle, extra movement going on that you’re probably not going to be able to put a significant amount of force into that bicep curl to do a true five rep max unless you really locked everything down, like your arm was by your side, locked in, whatever. So practically speaking, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense to go really low on the reps and you get a disproportionate amount of fatigue. And similarly, like what you’re saying, if you go up onto the high end of the rep range, where you’re above 15, for most people, you’re going to get a significant cardiovascular challenge from that. You’re also gonna have to deal with a lot of this metabolic waste, these buildup of hydrogen ions and different things, lactate, et cetera, right? Which… isn’t necessarily bad and can potentially play a role in muscle building and signaling for other things as well. It’s not, I’m not saying it’s bad, but it’s also very fatiguing. It’s also very hard to train that way. Like if I’m not saying, oh yeah, you need to do three sets of 30 on each leg for your Bulgarian split squats, you know? Like you’re gonna be in fucking bits. After set one, you’re gonna be on the ground, heart rate 120 beats per minute, you know, okay. Right, that wasn’t too bad, but it was quite a significant cardiovascular stimulus. Set two, you’re at 180 beats per minute on your heart. You’re struggling to even breathe. And it’s not your actual quads or your glutes or whatever way you’re doing the Bulgarian split squats that are the limiting factor. It’s the fact that you’re sucking in air and your legs are absolutely burning just in general. Your hands are burning if you’re holding the weights. Again, we just have to think about what’s practically an easier way to do. the rep, the set, to get the same result, or potentially even get better results. Like, are you more likely to push hard on a set of 30 on your Bulgarian split squats, or are you more likely to push hard on a set of eight? You know? It’s probably gonna be easier to push that set of eight harder versus that set of 30. So again, we’re just talking about this broad range, six to 15 reps. It doesn’t have to be, like if you do 16 reps, it’s not to say that. you’re getting shit results. If you do five reps, again, not to say you’re getting shit results, but practically that six to 15 rep range seems to be the kind of sweet spot.
Gary McGowan:
Yes sir, I’m in. And then the next thing is, you know, well, should I do the same weights forever? Is that just what I do? I just do three sets, 10 same weights? And of course the answer is no. One of the core things that we need to have in pretty much any program, whether it’s for endurance, for strength, for muscle building, is some form of progression. Okay, so you need to progress your workouts over time. We typically call this progressive overload. The idea here is that you increase the stimulus that you’re applying to the body as the body adapts As you won’t be able to continue applying the same stimulus With the same weights as you adapt. Okay, that’s the whole point If you lift a hundred kilos for ten reps for ten weeks in a row and you adapt to that now your body Treats that as a lower stimulus because it has adapted So you therefore need to increase the number of reps you’re doing number of sets that you’re doing the weight that you’re lifting or other variables like maybe slowing down the tempo for example. Okay, so there’s many different ways of progressing. The most common one is if you have a fixed workout that you just try to increase the weight on the bar or on the machine, etc. So for example, you go in one week and you add 2.5 kilos, can you do the same amount of reps? Does it feel just as difficult? Does it feel more difficult? And then you do that for a couple of weeks and then you try to add more weight and so on. The same thing can be applied then if you have a rep range, let’s say, of eight to 12 reps. You might do eight reps one week, nine the next, then 10, then 11, then 12. Once you reach the top, then you increase the weight and you go back down the rep ladder. So it’s kind of like a double progression method. That’s something we use a lot of the time. And then you can increase sets overall, which is something that you can use, I would say sparingly, okay? Because if you try to use this all the time, you end up doing 40 sets and it’s just ridiculous. but it is something that you can use throughout your program. For example, if you have an eight week program that’s planned out, maybe the first few weeks, the sets are stable, but you’re aiming to add weights and reps, then as you move further into the program, maybe towards the end, you add an extra set or two per exercise, and now you’ve got a really potent stimulus towards the end that might be a little bit on the upper end of what we’re able to tolerate, but then maybe you have your D-load or slightly lower. volume approach then going into your next phase or as a kind of recovery period after that phase of training Okay, so that’s something you can do but I would say increasing weight or reps is the real cornerstone here when it comes to progression
Paddy:
Yeah, I would agree. And I think for most people, the most practical way to think about things is just that classical way of just like, oh, I’m going to try to do a little bit heavier weight week on week. Why? I want to see it going up over time. The way I always I often well, I often describe it to my clients is like, when you were learning to do your multiplication times tables, you know, like You didn’t just stop at like your two times tables. You didn’t just go, oh, just two times tables, I know all my twos, that’s me done. Like you’ve become accustomed to that, so you know how that works. To get better at maths overall, you’re gonna need to learn your three times tables, your four or five, and so on, right? And that’s kind of what we need to do with training. You need to go, okay, you’ve mastered this, you know, you’ve. you’ve got this weight, it’s perfect, everything’s good about it, you’ve squeezed all the juice, so to speak, so we need to progress it in some way, right? The easiest way to progress it is just to add a little bit more weight, right? Now again, that’s not always practical, especially if you’re training a smaller muscle group, you’re a smaller individual, weaker individual, like you might be better served by adding some more reps. Now that’s not always the case as well, but either way, those are our kind of two main variables here. You can reps. Fantastic. The other one, we can control the tempo better, control the exercise better, really try to maximize the quality of the rep. That’s obviously another way that we can really progressively overload, but I would kind of argue that we should do that from the start. But either way, another way we can do it is we can push for more sets. And this is actually something that I really like, right? But the major drawback of this is that Like Gary said, first of all, what are you gonna do? Just keep getting up to like 40 sets, 50 sets per body part per week, you know? It’s not practical, right? But let’s just say we’re still staying within a normal range. You’re like, maybe you’re getting up to like 25 sets, maybe even 30 sets per body part per week. You know, you’re above the 10th, 20 that we’re saying, but you’re really trying to push the sets and you know you’re gonna have like a deload or something in the future, right? Like, the major limiting factor here is the fact that the vast majority of people that are training have other commitments. You’re not gonna be spending like four hours in the gym. You know, it would be great if you could be like, oh yeah, I’m just gonna do like 30 sets per body part. But to spread that across the week, you’re either gonna have to train twice per day, which a lot of bodybuilders do, or your training sessions are just gonna have to be like these mammoth sessions of like two to three hours. So that’s just impractical for the vast majority of people. So for the vast majority of people, you’re gonna have to focus on. can I get stronger, can I add more weight to the bar, or can I maybe do an extra rep or two here across time? So that’s something to keep in mind. Now, one of the things that I find, and you might disagree with this, Gary, is for beginners to intermediate and even like touching into advanced, it’s really easy to keep making progress by just adding more reps or adding more weight. But there comes a point where like strength gains They’re just so slow, like you’ve already like, you’re already incredibly strong, you know? Adding an extra rep is actually like a monumental task, right, or adding an extra, even like, kilo to the bar is a monumental task. Now, you can somewhat overcome this with, you know, the smaller microplates or, you know, they have different names, but these, like, smaller plates that are like 100 grams, you know? Like, so you can still be making some progress, but. What I often find when people are in that kind of late intermediate to advanced, pushing that vector for progressive overload of, you know, trying to add more reps or trying to add more weight, it becomes a very slow return endeavor where you might actually get a better return by just adding more sets, you know? Like if you’ve always done, let’s just say three sets of 10, like that’s kind of like your jam. It’s like, that’s, that’s my bread and butter. I’ve been focusing on that. I’ve been doing that for all my exercises and now I’m like, I don’t know, bench pressing like 140 kilos for three sets of 10. You know, it’s like, but I just can’t, I can’t go more than that. Like you’re already like incredibly strong, you’ve got great results, your chest is huge, et cetera, et cetera, right? Obviously if you’re benching 140 kilos for three sets of 10, you would expect to get a nice return on investment, right? But you still want more progress. You’re like, oh, how do I push this? Like I can’t really add more weight and you’ve done different things in terms of like. these like wave loading, you’re like, I’ll pull the weight back a little bit and just really focus on the quality and I’m still training with these like two to three reps in reserve, et cetera, et cetera, right? But you always kind of bump up to this like 140 kilos, three sets of 10. What can be really good then is to do, okay, well, we’re just gonna change it. We’re gonna do four sets of 10, right? So over time, again, you maybe start at 120 and you build back up. If you can get four sets of 10, like you’ve actually just done like 33% more volume. in that single workout. So you’ve done 33% more because you’ve gone from like three sets of 10 to four sets of 10, right? So that can be a really potent stimulus, especially as you get up to the kind of topper, topper? The upper limit of like your strength abilities, right? And maybe obviously you have more to gain, whatever it’s not to say that you’re just topped out, you’re done. But that’s something that I find. Now, again, it is one of those things where the more and more sets you add, the lower return on investment you actually get. Because again, if you go from three sets to four sets, you’re now doing 133%, right? So obviously you’d expect like a nice bump, not maybe 33% extra gains, but at least a nice bump. Whereas if you go from four sets of 10 to five sets of 10, you’ve only done 125% extra. So you’ve increased the overall volume by a lower amount, relatively speaking. So obviously the results you get from that you would presume they’re going to be lower, even though you feel like you’ve put in more work. But again, proportionately, it’s actually a lower increase in volume, you know? But anyway, what are your thoughts on that?
Gary McGowan:
Yeah, very similar to what I would do in practice, to be honest. And, you know, all of this then fits in with the next couple of points, which are important as well, which are spreading your training appropriately. Okay. So this is something that’s, you know, just is factored into every decent program where you just spread your training appropriately across the week, especially for our clients who have. maybe a couple of goals. So for example, somewhere this comes up a lot of the time is in GA athletes that we would coach. So for example, if they have a training session on a Tuesday and Thursday with their club, then we’ll try to keep maybe some of the lower body work away from the harder session and things like that. But this applies to core bodybuilding training as well. So it comes back to what split you’re gonna do. Do I do full body? Do I do upper lower? Do I do a body part split? And ultimately, you just want to make sure that you’re spreading your training out appropriately so that you’re recovered between each workout. And recovered doesn’t mean 100 percent. You know, it’s OK to train if you still have a little bit of muscle soreness or if you don’t feel 100 percent, that’s fine. And then also that there is crossover between different muscle groups. So, for example, if you were squatting on one of your training days and you were deadlifting on another one of your training days, you wouldn’t want to do those two days in a row if you can avoid it. Okay, it’s no problem to do it two days in a row if that’s just the way your program has to be set up. But if you could put a bit of time between those, then you’re probably gonna get a bit more out of, especially the one that you’re doing second, because of the crossover fatigue. Your program should endeavor to minimize crossover fatigue between training days and across the training week as a whole. And that can also extend to within the workout, you know, when you’re planning your training, you wouldn’t do your deadlifts. after doing loads of rows and loads of squats first, if you wanted your deadlifts to be a priority, okay? So you need to figure out what your priorities are and then figure out what trade-offs you’re willing to accept in crossover. So for example, a lot of people might be willing to do their shoulders after their chest training because they want to prioritize their bench press and get stronger on that while they build muscle, knowing that they won’t be able to put quite as much force output, they won’t be as strong. when it comes to the shoulder work later in the workout, but it’s trade-off, they’re willing to accept. That’s kind of a personal decision within programming.
Paddy:
100% and this it goes like you said it goes from within the workout and then the workout week overall And this is something that you see all the time where people will do something like I’m gonna do like a six day per week training program and they’ll do like chest back lower back or lower back lower body right and This is probably one of the worst ways that you can organize your training in terms of minimizing crossover but it’s the way they do it because they’re like, oh well I actually really care about the chest muscles, you know, and then maybe I care a little bit less about the back muscles and even further less about the lower body training, you know? But people will do it, they’ll be like, right, first day I’m doing chest or push muscles, you know? And they train those, no issue with that. And then the next day they train their back and they’re doing maybe rows, bent over rows, whatever. Their lower back is fatigued, their upper back is fatigued now as a result of that. And then they go in and they’re like, yeah, my squat is just so bad, like any of my like. hip hinging, like ordeal, it’s just so bad. I was like, yeah, every single time you do a lower body session, the day before that session, you train the muscles that are required to like stabilize the bar on your back, to hold the bar in your hands when you do your ordeal. You know, like you’ve just maximized for fatigue in your back going into that lower body session, which is fine, right? If you just don’t care as much about developing your lower body, right? You’re just like, it’s just, it’s a lower. priority for me I really care about getting my push muscles and my pull muscles they’re the they’re the priority for me cool set it up like that but when you have something coming to you and they go look my legs they just don’t grow they’re just they’re you know they’re not something that I respond well to and you look at their training and they’re doing something like that you’re like yeah you’re doing everything right in terms of you’ve got all the sets you’re doing enough sets you’re doing the reps you’re progressing appropriately you’re training within a an appropriate you know proximity to failure, et cetera. They’re doing everything right, on paper, right? But then when you look at their training program, you look at it and you go, yeah, like, the way you’ve set up, the way you’ve distributed your training across the week just means that you’re a little bit more fatigued before this session every single time, right? If we just reorganize your training across the week, we can potentially avoid that. And it’s as simple as, rather than doing that, like push, pull, legs, push, pull, legs, if you’re doing six days per week, now you’re just doing legs. poor push, right, because there’s less crossover fatigue there, right? Now, that might not be the case. You might be someone that just experiences like crippling doms the second day after a training stimulus, you know? So then we would have to be like, right, okay, well now we need to, you know, train around that. That’s the kind of thing that you have to deal with, you know? And then we might change around your volume, change different exercises to try to avoid that. let’s just say it is just something that you just always experience. Because I’ve had clients like that before, even if we’re training in the mid-range, there’s no length and range challenge, there’s no anything crazy, and it’s just a normal amount of volume, they still just get crippling doms two days after. It’s just the way their body responds. I’m like, cool, right, so we’re gonna just make sure that our training program takes that into account. So that is something that I see a lot of beginners make the mistake of, where they just follow a program that isn’t optimized for what they need. and by just changing around the overall training layout, you can get significantly better results as a result. And this kind of makes sense as well for, I know we have it marked to talk about later on, but you can organize that training so that you can focus on certain muscles more than others. Like say for example, you want to, I don’t know, bring up your calves. I know everyone wants to have like big juicy calves. You know, it’s a sign of health and wealth and everything, you know? But rather than training at the end of your training session where you’re fatigued and you’re kind of like, oh, like, it’s just, it’s kind of an afterthought. You could just put that at the start of your day, right? The start of your training session. I’m gonna do, oh, I have to do my 20 sets of calves. Okay, well that’s the first thing you do when you go into the gym. You know, it’s like, you can really organize your training so that… you minimize fatigue for the things that you want to train the hardest or to get the best results with. And oftentimes people don’t think of this. They just go, oh well this is just how you structure a program, this is how I’ve always seen programs structured. I always just train the smaller muscle groups at the end of the training session, like my biceps, my triceps, you know forearms, you know abs and fucking, I don’t know calves, whatever. They’re just like all of these smaller muscle groups, they just get trained at the end. And like that’s fine if you’re getting good results with those, but if you’re getting shitty results, you’re just like. yeah my biceps aren’t growing and I really, that’s what I care about most. Training at the start of your sessions when you’re coming in freshest, you’re ready to go, yeah it’s probably gonna negatively impact your back training, your training back and biceps, but who cares? Because your priority, you’re like, oh my back is fine. I still wanna see some progression, but the actual thing I wanna bring up is my biceps. And again, you can maybe start playing around with the distribution of those exercises across the week. Maybe you do biceps. and then you do like chest, you know, rather than doing like back and biceps, and then you do triceps and back or whatever, you know, like you can play around with these things. Once you understand the principles, it doesn’t just have to be like, oh, well, this is how I’ve always seen training programs done. Like it doesn’t matter. It’s just a distribution of training, right? It matters in so far as your recovery, the results that you want and your ability to push hard on those exercises across the week. Like some people that might be doing some sort of like full body training. program across the week, for other people it’s gonna be like a body part split, for other people it’s gonna be something completely different, some sort of fucking mix, you know? Now there probably is a bottom end to the amount of sets, the amount of stimulation that you need in a given workout, like if you just go in and go, oh I’m just gonna do one set, you know? Like yeah, it’s probably going to do something, like if you’re just like, oh I’m gonna spread my volume out across, spread my volume out across the week, right? there probably still is a lower limit in terms of you still need a certain amount of volume to actually stimulate that muscle growth for that given day. Like, I don’t know if it’s one set, two sets, three sets, it’s probably different for everyone. I would argue it’s probably around that kind of like two to three set mark. You need to do at least like two to three sets to really initiate like, you know, protein synthesis, et cetera. That’s not to say that doing just a single set for a body part at some stage throughout the week, it’s not going to give you results. but it is probably better if you’re trying to really spread out your volume for that body part. It’s probably better to do at least like two to three sets rather than just going in, I’m just gonna do like one set here or there because it’s all just volume at the end of the day so it doesn’t matter. Like that’s like saying similarly with your diet, it’s like oh well if I just need to hit like 200 grams of protein per day, that means I need to hit like 1400 per week so who cares if I just do it all. on one day versus spread out throughout the week. You know, it’s like, no, you still need to be doing, you still need to hit a certain amount each day, you know?
Gary McGowan:
So the next couple of points are very much related to each other. The first one being related to the exercises that you choose. This is something we talk about a lot at triage because there is a lot of dogma in the fitness industry in relation to what exercises people choose. You’ll have these guys that just say, oh, just squat bench deadlift, bro. You don’t need to do anything else. You’ll have people that talk about machines saying that they’re useless. And then you probably have people on the other side of the spectrum that every exercise has to be the perfect machine. Everything has to be set up absolutely perfectly with bands and daisy chains and cables, and everything has to be perfect. And there’s kind of utility in both approaches because the people that are… bit more over analytical with the exercises that they’re choosing, they’re doing so generally with pretty good reasoning, but it’s probably just taking it too far relative to the benefit that’s gonna come from it, because there comes a point where you’re optimizing so much that you kind of lose the practical considerations, for example, how long is the workout gonna take? Can someone even achieve their appropriate volume if they’re trying to set up for all this time? And also, with all of these different rules in mind, like does this actually apply to this individual’s anatomy and do we know for sure that they wouldn’t just get the same stimulus from one of the machines or one of the basic barbell exercises as you say. Okay, so you don’t need to over optimize. But on the other side of things, the person that says just do barbell exercises, there’s merit to that in that it’s quite practical. It’s very much a shotgun approach. If you do all the basic barbell exercises, yes, you’re gonna train everything. But that means that we let some people fall to the side, you know, because they maybe find that squats don’t give them a great leg stimulus. They just feel it in their back and they feel it in their hips and they’re not getting a great quad stimulus at all. And while a large portion of people might get a great quad stimulus, some people won’t. So what you should do is pick the highest yield exercises for your body rather than just what everyone else does, okay? So you might find that, let’s say, there’s two chest press machines in your gym. You’re not sure from an exercise mechanics perspective. You know, you’re not a personal trainer yourself. You don’t know what the difference really is between those two machines. But you know that when you use one, your chest feels much better, far more stimulus than when you use the other one which just hurts your shoulders. You don’t need any reasoning other than that to just say, do you know what? I’m gonna use this chest press. That seems to make more sense. The same thing goes with free weight exercises. Maybe you’re doing a flat dumbbell press and then you do an incline dumbbell press. And when you do the incline, you think to yourself, God, this feels way better on my chest. I’m not feeling my shoulders as much. Boom, there’s your reasoning. There’s your reasoning. So pick the highest electricians for your body. And generally what we would say is, most programs for muscle building should probably feature a mix of some free weights, some machines, and then some cables, which is kind of just machines anyway. That allows you generally to hit a muscle from multiple different angles. multiple different resistance profiles, for example the shortened range versus the lengthened range as a bias, training the full range of motion of the muscles contractile range and that’s the best approach really. You know if you’re just doing one exercise per muscle you’re probably maybe leaving some gains on the table. You might still get most of them but a mix of different types of exercises is probably best and once you pick your exercises what you do then is you try to become a specialist at performing those exercises. really appropriately, really precisely. So you don’t just sit down on the machine or the weight training, the free weight exercise, and just crank out reps, okay? You think about, where do I feel this most? I might want to spend a bit more time there, I might want to slow down, change direction, so I feel it on my chest a bit more. And you become quite precise in how you perform the exercise, which is then supplemented by things like an internal focus. So you might think when you’re doing your chest press, Okay, I want to really focus on my pecs. I want to squeeze when I get to the short range and then back down. Okay, and then there might be external focus points as well that help you out. So for example, one of the things that some people will use is, I want to think like I’m pushing myself back into the bench. Okay, or you might think bar up and back. Whatever happens to work for you to help you focus on the muscle. And that’s really the key point with all of this, whether it’s how you perform the exercise, the exercise that you choose or where your focus is. The goal really is to stimulate the muscle rather than to maximize the weight that you’re lifting on the bar. Because the weight is just a tool. Ultimately what we’re looking for is the stimulus on the muscle.
Paddy:
100% I don’t really have anything to add to that and we did have marked here to just note that you can run like Specialization cycles you don’t have to be like oh, yeah I’ll just do the exact same thing that everyone else is doing even though I can clearly see that I’m not getting the results That they want that the other people are getting like again Maybe your biceps need more attention in your back Whatever fuck it is like don’t be afraid to increase the volume of those muscle groups and then decrease the volume on other muscle groups that are you know just muscles that respond really, really well for you, right? I don’t think we need to go too deep into that, but the next point then is, that you need to do all of this stuff for three to 10 years. And that’s the unfortunate reality, where people think, oh, I’m just gonna be able to completely transform my body in 12 weeks. And while it would be lovely to say, like, oh, three months is all you need to get absolutely jacked out of your mind, but realistically, we’re looking at three years at a minimum here. And for most people, it’s probably closer to 10 plus years. Because muscle building takes time. So you need to optimize things again for duration. Duration of time doing things right. That’s what you need to optimize for. You’re not optimizing for speed. It can be tempting to think like, oh, I’m gonna optimize for getting everything perfect, beyond perfect, training harder than ever for 12 weeks. But that’s the wrong goal. The goal should be doing that. for 12 years. How do you optimize things so that you can continue doing this for 12 years? Which I know that’s not what people wanna hear. People wanna hear like, oh this guy knows secrets, he’s gonna get me phenomenal goal or phenomenal gains in six months. That’s all I need to spend with time with this guy getting coaching or whatever. And that’s just a lie. That no one can promise you that unless they’re just giving you some of the secret sauce. They’re giving you steroids. So it’s just unrealistic. for the vast majority of people, again, it’s gonna take a long period of time. Even if you are enhanced, it’s just gonna take a long, long time to actually get the results that you want. Do you have anything to say on that, Gary?
Gary McGowan:
No, it’s a long road and that’s it. You know what I’m supposed to say.
Paddy:
Yeah, and then the other things I just want to say just finally and this is more specific to like actual bodybuilders. Well, the first one is a little bit specific to everyone but like for bodybuilders obviously there’s some changes in terms of like maybe you change your training around dieting versus gaining, whatever, right? We have to remember that when we are trying to gain weight it is the training that drives the adaptations, right? while you still do get some of the adaptations in terms of like muscle building from just calories and protein, right? They both stimulate muscle growth. Like you need to think of your training as the way to guide all of those calories and protein. It’s like they guide the process, right? So they’re the one, they’re the leader, right? The other two are just following along, right? They help support the leader, but the leader is the training stimulus, right? And very often people kind of get this the other way around in their head and they think, I’m just going to optimize the diet and like my training can be like, you know, it’s fine. You know, it’s just I’m kind of ticking the boxes. And yeah, like that can work, but it’s probably not the best approach overall. Your training is probably what’s driving the vast majority of the growth, right? So if you really optimize your training, you’re going to get a bigger return on investment than just really optimizing your diet. Now, obviously for you, maybe your training is already good to all right. So you don’t need to like push it further. if your diet is like shit and that’s obviously the limiting factor but if we’re talking about all things being equal you’re probably going to get more return on investment from a muscle building perspective if you’re ticking the boxes the baseline boxes with nutrition and Then really making sure your training is phenomenal, right? We only need a small calorie surplus and we only need to hit our like, you know baseline targets for protein to be able to build muscle Effectively, right? But we need to eat enough calories to support the training. So again, the diet is still fundamental but the training stimulus has to be as dialed in as possible if you’re really looking to maximize the process. And as I said, very often people kind of get this backwards and they really focus on like, oh, I’m just gonna eat an extra 500 calories or a thousand calories and try to like, brute force muscle gain, right? And that goes back to the previous point we talked about where that’s optimizing for speed and it’s not optimizing for duration. So yeah, you might gain five kilos in a month. but it’s not actual five kilos of muscle, so you’re just gonna have to lose that fat, and as a result, you’re gonna spend less time in a surplus, and as a result, you’re gonna have less muscle building opportunity. So the person who optimizes for duration, like this endurance where it’s like, oh, well, I’m gonna, it’s gonna take three to five years, three to 10 years, whatever, to build significant amount of muscle. Can I spend those fucking 10 years in a very small surplus so that I’m ever so slightly gaining? all the time, like that’s obviously the absolute pinnacle here of muscle building. Yeah, it’s impractical for most people. Most people are going to gain some fat, want to diet down, get leaner for a holiday, whatever, right? But if you can do that, spend 10 years in this small surplus, so you’re seeing gains every single week, month, year, fucking whatever, but it’s not excessive, that’s probably the best approach. Now I know again, people don’t want to hear that, but it is what it is, right? Now on the flip side. when you are dieting, like you’re trying to lose fat, like you now have a significant fatiguer, stressor from the diet by virtue of, you know, you’re just not eating enough calories, you know, you’re not eating enough, you’re not getting enough energy in, right? So as a result, you are probably generating a lot more fatigue from your training, because again, you just have a lower baseline recovery, right? So as a result, you might actually need to do less. training as you diet. You might need to do less sets, you might need to use lighter weights, you know, whatever, right? And that’s just something to take into account when you are dieting, you maybe are gonna get weaker and you maybe aren’t gonna be able to do as much as you previously were able to do, right? So it helps to just kind of flip the thought process in the mind to, okay, this is not a growth phase, I’m not really trying to like, excessively progress my training, like yeah, if you can get some progression going, happy days. but what you’re really trying to do is maintain the progress that you’ve made. So you’re still giving an adequate stimulus that you can recover from, but the goal is just to maintain the muscle, right? I always call it like gain-taining, where it’s like, you know, if we can get some gains here as well, happy days, but the real focus is kind of just like, maintaining the progress that we’ve built, right? And so that’s just something to take into account. Obviously that applies a lot more to bodybuilders who are actually competing and trying to get down to like, whatever, 6% body fat or whatever, versus someone that’s just like dieting for a holiday and they get down to like 12% body fat, right? Obviously there’s some fatigue still there, but it’s not the same level of fatigue, right? And just on that, one of the things, and bodybuilders don’t generally do this, but the general population do, and it is something that does take away from the process, is we’re not using training, especially not resistance training, as a calorie burning session. You know, like that’s not the goal here. The goal of resistance training is to build muscle or maintain muscle, right? So don’t turn it into this like, oh, can I burn a thousand calories by virtue of resistance training, right? That’s, even if you’re dieting, that’s just not the goal to have, you know?
Gary McGowan:
Yeah, absolutely. A lot of people trade off the stimulus from their workouts just for sweating, getting their heart rate up and burning calories. You know, it’s just not the best approach. Okay. So weight training, not for burning calories. It does burn calories. It can be significant, but it’s just not the primary goal. All right. So I think that brings us just to just to one final point, really, which is that even if your goal is bodybuilding, even if your goal is to maximize your muscle mass. cardio should still be performed in some capacity. Okay, so you start by getting the basic steps per day, aiming for somewhere between, let’s say, six and 12,000, seven or 8,000 probably is the average for a lot of people is fine. More is fine too, but that’s generally where we want people to be. Okay, so preserving cardiovascular health, getting energy expenditure up, as we said, this is a better time to try to do that rather than to do it via just. the weight training workouts themselves. And then ideally additional cardio in accordance with the recommendations of the previous podcast. Okay, so we still want you doing your steady state cardio. We want to be getting a couple of hours at least per week of that. And don’t be worried about that eating into your gains. This is something a lot of people worry about. Will it compromise my muscle gain? Generally not, okay. There can be some conditions where maybe it might. For example, let’s say you finish a full body workout that was really demanding. and then you go straight into two hours of cardio right after that, you’re gonna be in a very energy depleted state, you’re not supporting recovery, especially if you’re not having a post-workout shake or something between the two workouts, that can absolutely compromise your gains. Similarly, if you do so much cardio that pushes you into a deficit out of your surplus, that’ll compromise your gains. But for the most part, if you’re practicing good training and nutrition practices, cardio isn’t really going to interfere with muscle gain, especially in accordance with just cardio for health. Cardio for endurance training, if you’re doing 15, 20 hours a week, that might eat into it. You’re not gonna be able to recover and perform as well as you can, and therefore that could compromise your gains. Okay, so that’s all really we have to say on cardio, because we did a lot in the last episode.
Paddy:
Just to say on that as well, this is something you see a lot of people do as well, where they’ll do like, oh well, I don’t really like cardio, so I’m just gonna do high intensity cardio.
Gary McGowan:
Yeah.
Paddy:
So I get it done, get done in five minutes, while I can get done in half an hour in terms of a calorie burn perspective, and maybe some of the heart adaptations, et cetera. And unfortunately, high intensity cardio is the most fatiguing form of cardio. So it’s probably going to affect your resistance training then as a result, and you’re going to be like, fuck I can’t do any of this cardio stuff because my resistance training suffers and therefore my muscle gain suffers my muscle building processes suffer right so you are actually better off doing like lower intensity stuff and again the trade-off unfortunately is that it just takes more time you know but it’s less fatiguing and it probably gives you more beneficial adaptations from a body building perspective especially if you’re enhanced you know it’s like heart diseases pretty bad thing and if you’re on anabolic steroids you know it’s an increased risk and that is something that a lot of bodybuilders kind of fear they’re like oh I’m never going to do aerobic cardio like oh fuck couldn’t do that you know and unfortunately that’s the best type I would argue for a bodybuilder because it’s the lowest fatiguing type and you can actually just do a lot without compromising your muscle building results.
Gary McGowan:
Check, I think that covers it all.
Paddy:
100%
Gary McGowan:
So guys, as always, if you enjoy the podcast, make sure to share it, make sure you’re subscribed and all that, that really helps us out. Remember that we have it in multiple forms, so if you’re listening, we also have video format, and also if you go on our website, you’ll be able to get the transcript, so in some cases, people might want to have a look at just the text of this, to remind themselves of something that we said, or maybe to send a recommendation that we made to a friend. that can all be done via the transcript on our website. In addition to that, we have coaching spaces available. So if you’d like to work with our expert coaching team towards your muscle building goals, your fat loss goals, your health goals, your rehab goals, et cetera, we can cater for your needs. You can also make sure that you’re subscribed to our email newsletter, the triagemethan newsletter, where we provide information that doesn’t go out on our public social media. So you get an article there each week, you get… an update of all the stuff that we’re posting on social media if you want a weekly roundup and we also send out special offers as well to our email list so make sure that you subscribe there and if you are on social media and you like following along there triage method on Instagram, Twitter, on YouTube all of them okay we put out a lot of content on YouTube these days very high quality content very useful content and we actually just had a video last week on this exact topic where we were covering you know, training volume for muscle building. So that’s something to watch if you want to flesh out some of the discussions of volume further, okay? I think that’s pretty much everything. We do have our nutrition certification, which closes at the end of this month, so make sure this is the last week that you can get involved in that. So if you’d like to get involved before the next intake in six months’ time, now is the time to do that.
Paddy:
100%. Thanks for watching!
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