Exercise Scientist Critiques Strongman Brian Shaw

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0:00 Mike vs Brian Shaw
2:00 Event Training
5:42 Strategy in Sport
9:34 200lb Dumbbells
15:26 Box Squats
20:45 Log Press
22:57 Mike’s Rating

[Music] so I mean look those were really well controlled really good range of motion full lockout reps what could Brian not do with the 80s bicep curls easy lateral almost certainly decent technique good [Music] God hey folks Dr Mike here for RP strength I am a longtime professor of exercise and sports science a competitive bodybuilder Brazilian Jutsu Grappler and person who cares I’ve actually been accused of caring too much though technically I believe that is in one of the lower courts and if the accusations hold up we’ll be going to the Supreme Court for that one but until unless we do the person who has focused my care for me today is Mr Brian Shaw no relation to Mr Nick Shaw CEO of RP but um don’t all white people look kind of the same though not really because Brian Shaw is like 6’8 in like 440 lbs probably in the conversation no probably in the actually holds the informal title of the greatest strength athlete of all time I think definitely the greatest strongman competitor of all time if you measure out all the things that need measuring and in the conversation for the strongest human being that’s ever lived with other people like Zuna cisus of course let’s take a look at how Brian trains and um see what we can pick apart now Brian has an excellent YouTube channel I highly recommend you subscribe tons of fun stuff on there but a lot of stuff he does on there is kind of you know for funsy stuff we have some videos of this today we’re going to look at for actual strongman training and maybe a couple Oddball inclusions here and there so let’s do Oddball things and comment about another grown man and how he does things this is where we’re at folks 3 2 1 hit it set go damn that guy can move that’s scary Scott imagine him running at you like that nah bear coming out here yeah okay so I wonder how heavy these things are I’m inclined to believe all of these implements are over 100 lb probably in the 150 plus range so just watch how Brian handles them this again 6’8 440 there’s nobody in the NFL this big or this strong this is a real trip to watch a human do these things whatever I just run with that okay so that’s definitely hundreds of pounds based on how he’s holding it quick go it’s your average medicine ball JK weighs like a trillion go go moving let’s [Applause] go beautiful 194 well I got 193 but it’s Brian’s second or third time the really cool thing about event training is that it’s fun if you have access to the events and it makes you acutely better and really prepared for the actual competition you’re going to have shaving a second or two here and there off events learning exactly what to where to put what step how to transition how to breathe how to pace yourself how to not pace yourself because you’re like do this event so short I can just gas it the whole time you might not know that until unless you try it and you probably won’t figure it out after time number one that consistently once a week twice a week coming back to events be they heavy if you’re recovered and really want to test the limits you’re not trying to get stronger from these events you just have to test them heavy because that’s how they’re going to be in competition and light if you want good technical practice if you want a brainstorming session of how to move if you want to work on your speed a little bit more and your Transitions and if your recoveries impinged a little bit you’re like dude no heavy farmers walk today that but I’ll do some light walks to work on the turns and everything if you’re doing that let me make something really clear to you guys from a sport Science perspective 90% a little less a little more something like that of what makes Brian Shaw Brian Shaw is him lifting weights in the gym doing presses and pulls and rows and squats and training shoulders and arms and chest and all of that stuff Gym training is the core of strongman sport because it gives you that strength and size generally the 15% 10% or so part of strongman sport that is event training allows you to take those General hugeness and strength qualities and teach yourself teach your body to execute with them as Weapons as effectively as possible on the actual strongman equipment themselves on the actual events that you’re going to be potentially tested in even though that’s only 10% it’s an important 10% I would use the icing on the cake analogy for this is the people say it’s just the icing on the cake but like how many of you guys eat cake with no icing like that sucks where the hell as my icing who didn’t make my cake R lineup all the employees just start firing people at random until someone just starts crying like you you’re extra fired the rest of you who got fired already you’re still fired I never take my word back that’s how I would run a business of given access luckily Mr Nick Shaw won’t let me do that but on a serious note icing is really important to the cake it makes the cake whole it makes it presentable it makes it delicious so yes training in the gym is the core of getting stronger guys there’s no amount of event practice you can do if you’re just not strong enough in squats and pulls and presses you’re not going to be a good strongman and that’s how you get good in the gym on the events it’s that last bit of icing on the cake but it’s an important part and critical to being a modern strongman one of the things that Brian Shaw brought to the sport is I am actually uh not a strongman sport competitor not a strongman sport dreamer but a uh this is maybe one of the only Sports in which I’m like moderately a fan as you guys can see my relationship to All Sports is written on my t-shirt today uh Brian Shaw has brought in a Next Level critical thinking about sport Brian uh stood out when he arrived and now set the new standard for today of athletes really thinking about their sport really planning out their strategy I’m going to grab that block first then I’m going to grab that round thing then I’m going to grab that sharp weird thing cuz you or whatever kind of reasoning Brian really thought through stuff he thought through his training and he was one of the first strong men that when he was financially able to do so but he started building and had having built a lot of strongman equipment around him so that it’s unlikely Brian will ever show up to a strongman competition and not know what’s going on and not know how to approach the events optimally and not have ever seen the events or anything similar used to be back in the old days of strongmen 70s 80s the 90s especially um these were just guys that were super jacked and super strong at least half the time the other half were really Pro strongman in the technical sense of like they trained the the lifts when they could and they organized all the training around strong man the other guys were just super strong super Jack guys from a bunch of other sports weightlifters rugby players and they did very well but Brian almost typifies the the culminating Elite of the professional strongman and and that is a huge huge deal really giving a really thinking things through and really planning stuff not just saying like ah I’m strong I’ll handle this on Vibes assuming that you know I want as as much out of this performance as possible let me really think through my strategy my Approach my training so that when I come to the the competition I know that I’ve done everything I could to prepare myself to win this very competition but as I understand from various interviews Brian Shaw really does not like losing and really likes winning a lot so that explains it the last thing about strongman sport is I don’t know why but they take people who happen to be mostly from northern European evolutionary zones like the United Kingdom the British Isles Ireland same thing Irish people stay calm the Nordic countries the Eastern European countries that’s where most Pro strong man come from and they inevitably take them to places like koala Lum or Malaysia to compete or the Philippines why not folks if you’ve ever been to qual on poor Malaysia the degree of hot and humid that it gets is unconscionable does the United Nations even allow such a temperature to exist here’s the thing if you’re a pro strongman and you are training and competing out in that kind of heat and humidity there is a problem you are losing not only fluid through sweat but electrolytes through your sweat if you are empowered with the great Steed this horse comes running through you’re like what the hell but the horse is made entirely of fluid and you’re like what it’s like and then it collides with you and it turns out the horse was made from element was already dissolved in packets and element is an awesome sponsor of of uh the RP uh channel here and they want you to buy their products and I’m supposed to say exciting things about them so that you buy them but legit elements dope there’s no and there’s no fake crap it’s just a few different kinds of salt and a little bit of a flavor you put it into water and all of a sudden when you’re drinking if you mistakenly find yourself in quala lur competing in a strongman event and losing like a liter per 30 minutes of fluid out of your pores you can drink that back in and maintain high levels of performance for what to go out to the club later and I don’t know what the clubbing scene in qual and po looks like but I know they have Malaysians there and I Jared feather exists you guys put the two together on the next topic there are not too many people in history that could walk over to the rack grab the 200s carry them to the bench then lift them I mean there might there might have been like 10 people ever that could do that which is insane I’m sure sure not one of them 200 lb dumbbell is like a joke right you’re like nobody lift that but Brian says Nah fam I didn’t see him carry him over Scott this is it’s a edit that was my fault a set up I cut that out yeah let’s keep going are those really 200s you know fake weights LOL all right so let’s see what Brian does with them I say they look like like ‘ 80s they look like 80s qu what could Brian not do with the 80s wrist curls yeah lateral almost certainly decent technique good God bicep curls easy good God Scott could you imagine you walk in a gym and someone like Brian is strict curling the 80s and two arm dumbbell curls and you’re just like you just walk back out H I must have gone the wrong gym so I mean look those are really well controlled really good range of motion full lockout reps what get like six or something with a 200s that’s nonsense I mean that’s a completely categorically different level of strength but let me say something about that really quick a lot of people look at the really heavy dumbbells and they think the way I get stronger is challenging myself to lift heavier dumbbells I’ll lift you know the 80s tomorrow for a set of six maximum and then you know next week I’ll try the ’90s the thing is is that when you try the ’90s you might get a set of two and you’re like all right two but what is that actually training at that point in order to get the strongest you can possibly be to handle the heaviest dumbbells you have to get bigger and then stronger using best practices and then you can parlay that into any gym lift you like in just a few sessions of dumbbell inclines or dumbbell flat presses later your Technique is very good you’re really expressing your two strength so the best way to be able to train to lift a huge amount of weight in incline dumbbell press and flat dumbbell presses for example is to do barbell work machine work and dumbbell work in a variety of rep ranges anywhere from sets of five to sets of 15 if you’re really focused on building the kind of size that translates to strength the most and just size overall sets of five to sets of 30 and then as you build your strength with multiple exercises for multiple months you do some dumbbell pressing and really focus on it as the first exercise in that 5 to 10 rep range to set some Mega PRS that’s how you’re going to have the best time of it what you don’t want to do is say Okay I want to get to be the best dumbbell presser I can be I’m just doing dumbbell work for months and months and months and I’m always trying to challenge myself with limit weights every single workout I’m always trying to push to higher and higher dumbbells not by gradations not like I’m going to slap the magnetic weights on there and get the 92 and a halfs going like 90 100 110 that’s fun it’s doing dope ego points but the way you get from 90 to 110 isn’t just deciding you’re going to do them some days it is mostly putting in the work on machine and barbell and dumbbell chest movements and tricep movements until your chest and triceps are so big and so generally strong that when you start on the 990s in a few months you’re like dude I can do these for 12 then you start on the hundreds that next week you do them for sets of you know six to eight after a few weeks of the hundreds you you Peak at 100 for 11 that’s an awesome PR and that means a few months of really good dedicated basic all around chest and shoulder and tricep work later using again a combination of uh machines and barbells and dumbbells you again weave in to some dumbbell presses maybe then you take the 110 for a ride and you start out with five and eventually after several weeks you had a PR of the 11 for eight notice most of the work wasn’t even done with the actual dumbbells themselves your overall bigger muscle size and bigger strength that you gain doing everything for months beforehand is allowed to fine-tune and express itself with that last cycle of dumbbell pressing that you do so if you want to be the best dumbbell presser in the world and I know that this is the thing people are going to tune into because holy you guys ever been to the average gym every dude over 18 is a 50% chance of being that guy it’s like looks like the 95s are broken you’re like yeah that sucks man like going to have to go to the hundreds like isn’t your PR 80 for four like live or die today brother like is there someone watching you do this that when you do the one for one and a half and scream a bit so you get assistance on the next two reps some woman drops out of the ceiling with vagina first and covers your face and that gooey goodness that would be sweet but it’s unlikely to be happening is what I’m trying to say but if you want to get to Big dumbbell pressing wherever that takes you Town USA well now you have a scientific approach to do it you can use the rpy app you cannot use it just keep cell phones away from moist areas otherwise they tend to break Scott I learned that the hard way the three generations of iPhone we had to throw down the toilet really what he was doing with them was close to the toilet already but I’m saying too much folks there is still more video to come but if you want the extended edition of this video the extended edition of every other exercise science video we’ve ever put up and tons of awesome content for just a low low price you can get in the link in the description and join our members area and that’s going to be awesome because it’s more money for us and more fun for you I guess that works hey but there’s more fun ahead for totally free stay tuned and we’re going to be getting right back to this video right very now we’re going to go 10 sets of two so this is just a one of the training modalities that I would use I would go up to potentially in some workouts 15 sets of two um with this but again we’re building speed we’re building work capacity it’s just trying to be explosive so that’s where you will wear yourself out with this more so people are going to think well it’s only two routes but if you sit down in that box and explode and get up as as hard and as quick as you can it’ll take more out of you than you think it’s interesting approach to training 10 sets of two adopted I believe probably largely from the Westside style conjugate training that Louis Simmons used to propose was a good idea definitely some good upsides so the upsides of 10x two or even more sets of two than that training is that you get a lot of practice at very heavy weights you get lots of rest so you’re super ready and when you’re doing doubles you can really Express very close to your true strength and true Speed without have to worry about fatigue because you can just take a break after two reps and rest another 3 to 5 minutes and then get back at it so it really does favor explosion and a maximum performance what it probably doesn’t do super well is Boost muscle growth a ton because sets of two tend to be not as muscle growth promoting as probably more like sets of five and you would have to do an inordinate number of sets of two to get up what just a few sets of five can give you muscle growth wise probably isn’t the best way to build work capacity either because the total amount of work and the impingement of fatigue are the thing that build work capacity the best so if you’re fatigued while in the process of trying to get in lots of workloads and you get up to huge workloads that builds work capacity really well on both ends sets of two probably don’t do either one of those things super well if you want to build work capacity the best way to do that in a way that transfers to barbell sport is probably with sets of five sets of 10 something like that and look like yeah six or seven sets of 10 or eight or nine sets of five will definitely do the job of work capacity better than any realistic number of uh sets of two but for some uh sort of work on the higher velocity end of the spectrum for what a squat looks like and to make sure that every time you get under the bar you’re producing High forces and high velocities you have to take lots of rest do you really need lots of volume like that 10 sets I would say probably in most cases no maybe Brian has a good use case for it but the vast majority of folks out there such as yourself probably should be sticking to like two or three sets of two for real power and explosion type of training of which you never really need much of a dose in any one time you’re better off doing higher frequency like training it three or four times during the week than doing it once a week and doing something like 10 sets of two or if you’re doing 10 sets of anything it should be 10 sets of 5 to 30 repetitions in hypertrophy moves or maybe five or six sets of three to six reps in the basic strength range 10 x two is just kind of like a little bit too much volume paired to that level of relative effort and paired to that level of low per set volume I don’t love it love it but it definitely has its use cases squat the video guy just asked what about the Box squatting part well so squatting to a box is cool for when you’re an equi powerlifter when you have to meet that depth you just have to get really good at practicing that depth the thing is if you set a box to the appropriate height you’re going to be hitting your competition depth every single time and then it’s also going to sort of unload you at the bottom in a similar way that a squat suit would the problem is you can’t train your squat suit all the time cuz it actually stretches it out degrades it a squat suit is maybe only very charitably 5 to 10 good high run uses until you have to replace it with something else also getting a squat suit onto your body and off of your body is profoundly difficult it’s super super annoying it hurts and sometimes like when you have a quad pump can’t really take it off which is a bit of a cut cut me out of the suit sort of scenario so the Box takes place for that and for that it is good for some sporting context especially if you’re working on explosiveness through that mid-range of the motion then box box squatting is really good for most muscle growth contexts box squatting literally misses out on that high tension at the deepest stretch so with the opposite of what you would want to do to enhance muscle growth and because the bands and chains in addition to that make that tension really high at the top but lower at the bottom that whole complex Brian is doing really is not the way to put on muscle size best there are better ways to do that there if you just take the squat for example a full squat all the way to the bottom of the high bar position and that bottom part going as deep as you can and and spending about two or 3 seconds extra at that super super deep depth with the quad tension activated that’s probably how you get the most jacked from squats and actually you might not even have to lock out you can do each rep to about 2/3 height and then come back down that sequester metabolites it makes more of the tension applied in that lengthen position that’s the way to do that this is preparation for part of a general uh sport prep in which it may very well have its uses but for just getting jacked and strong at home I would say the Box the bands and the chains all need to go you have a barbell you squat it nice and deep for sets of three to six if you want to get strong for sets of 5 to 15 or 5 to 20 if you’re a psychopath if you want to get jacked and then all the other leg work will come from other machines and other ways of doing things log press hey you want to you want to be a real man she wish sir I sure do well you got to be able to log press your body weight for insert random number of reps here God damn it okay anyway that’s what I think about log pressing what do you guys think is that pretty good dope cool so a part of the log press that’s tricky is the lockout it requires producing insane amounts of force under not so ideally stable situations and thus you can see Brian here for his accessory work doing interesting the deadlift bar as you get so strong you put the deadlift bar on top of the rack who the Scott who put that up there how do you even put that up there who’s strong oh you have to have Brian around to be able to do that for you Brian can you can you get can you put that up there thank you uh he put that up there he’s got it banded and with weights and that makes it unstable and also it’s front to back unstable because it’s the hex bar it can go forward or backward super easily now he needs to work on generating plenty of explosion really following through that lockout under the situation of low stability this is a great way to do that upper accessory work multiple sets of five or something like that when you don’t have the fatigue tolerance or room in your program anymore to actually Continental clean load and then push that whole log press so a really cool part about accessory lift and strength sport is we can take this whole lift and the whole lift is great you should be doing that a lot but take remove a couple of components from the whole lift that we’re not trying to train right very now and just focus on the one we are trying to train this is an ex excellent example of that um but uh you know uh you you could not listen to what I say you could go throw away your notpad and your Excel sheets the RP hypertrophy app has all of your workouts displayed in one place with guided videos on exercise techniques and a program that evolves to better suit your needs the longer you use the app all you have to do is follow the plan right on your phone and get the gains click on the link in the description of this video to get started all right folks that was super fun in a way that makes you feel like you’re not a real man and there are other people who grew up to be truly adults and then there are people like Brian Shaw who grew up to be extra more double times 10 adults in any case Brian’s awesome I love his systematic approach it’s one of these things where if I criticize some folks in the community I’m like yeah that guy’s just an idiot he’s just doing this wrong to criticize Brian Shaw I’m usually like I bet he’s thought this through and at worst has a really good reasoning for this and at best is completely correct and I’m totally wrong so everything I say in this video please I hope you would have already taken it with a bit of a grain of salt as usual Brian gets Mega ultimate respect I rate Brian Shaw as one of the best to ever do it out of 10 and uh I’ve only gotten a rating like that from other people on a few things but they’re too disgusting and unethical to mention on our YouTube channel see you guys next time all right that was super do you know what else is super there are other videos on YouTube did you know that it’s not just this one video you saw there are many many other videos maybe you can start with clicking the one that YouTube says you should right now and who knows where your journey will end see you next time