Renowned trainers Christian Thibaudeau and Tom Sheppard discuss old school training methods, why they are effective, and benefits of the overload system. All of the topics and more can also be found in their book, The Overload System for Strength: A Modern Application of Old-School Training. https://ecs.page.link/PA4pV
Uh thanks everyone for joining us today for this edition of author talk my name is Aaron and um as you probably noticed already uh we have a couple of guests that for a lot of you should be familiar faces and names uh we have uh Tom
Shepard who is the uh head coach of tib Army and works with a variety of athletes including powerlifters he’s also an educator with Elite FTS um and you see we have Christian Tibido is a strength coach with over 22 years experience um he all seminars uh in various countries around the world to
Train athletes from high school to Pros um and he’s the author of a number of books uh including the Black Book of training Secrets the uh Theory and application of modern strength and power methods um high threshold muscle building the maximum muscle B Bible and his latest that uh Tom and Christian
Have co-authored here the overload system for strength uh which they’re going to talk a little bit about today so um I really appreciate uh both of you uh hopping on for a little bit so we can uh talk about this today um now I I gave
A I gave a brief introduction there but I I know that uh at least today people don’t want to listen to me talk they’d rather hear it from you so if you if you could uh for the listeners kind of uh give a little more information about yourself uh about your background and
Kind of how you got to where you are today great you want to go first you you got more you got more to go on there than I think if you go first it’s better because that’s give us a pretty good assessment of people’s resiliency and how
Long you can one up me whenever I say that as well so well played sir uh so I started coaching probably 12 13 years ago uh when I was at University I was actually studying um marine biology of all things at the time uh I did annc snc
Program to uh like an internship to become an snc coach while I was doing my degree finished University realized that marine biology is really interesting but um doesn’t really pay and involves traveling the world with not a lot of Promise of return on it um at that point
I’d kind of already been um coaching like uh informally if you like for a couple years anyway so I decided to jump jump kind of head first into that came out university did all my qualifications um and then did the usual thing of starting as a PT and in a gym
You know with with Jen PK and things like that uh did that for seven eight nine years ended up being the manager of the gym that I was training at um during that time I made probably what is one of the worst life decisions that I’ve ever
Made and um reached out to Christian to coach me um you know I’m still recovering mentally from that now but what what did what did come from that was uh what is proving to be a really really good um fruitful relationship for us on especially on a business Point
Christian um reached out and said that he’d like me to work for him um then started with uh online coaching and and all that type of thing and now we’re at the point where we’re doing joint seminars and you know releasing books together um which which has been a
Really cool experience over the last couple of years to for that to take off and then um over the last couple of years as well my wife Naomi um who’s sponsored by Le FTS they had us out there to their compound so we ended up doing some content and some material for
Them too and actually now in a couple of weeks time um we’re actually moving out to Ohio so that we can do some more work for elite FTS and also then be based in North America which is going to make all of the work that we do for tib Army and
Seminars and all that type of thing hopefully way more easy and accessible in the in the near future so it’s exciting times it’s been a a very productive and cool couple of years for me on a career standpoint I must say well me my honestly uh I guess my
Presence in the strength coaching field predates this thing we call internet so it’s it’s been going on for close to 30 years uh so I’m not going to talk about myself for that long because people just can research it and I don’t want them to be bored to death so let’s
Just let’s just say that I did start training mostly for football uh because I was not very athletically gifted but I felt the need to be respected for something physical because uh I’ve always felt um low level of self-esteem and so on and so forth and I believe
That being good at sports would help me alleviate that and it didn’t but that was my my thinking and after I was done with football I switched to Olympic weightlifting because I was doing the Olympic lifts in my training and that was that felt like a logical progression
And the other reason is that at the time that was years decades really before CrossFit Olympic lifting was in its downward popularity in North America which meant that it was pretty easy to get a provincial medal like I’m the third strongest in the province there’s like three competitors but but for
Someone with low self-esteem that was like the easy way in and I always enjoyed um explosive work way more than uh every work although I do like every work and that led me to research the training of old school strong men they’ve always been my model
Because yes I want to be strong in the Olympic lifts I want to be strong overall but I want to look like I I lifted and to me the training of the old school lifters like before 1950 and probably like in the 1930 or even earlier is the best example of what
I was person looking for when it comes to training and earlier on even when I started working in the in the community in the field that was really the basis of every system I came up with so that I think the B the book is a logical conclusion for my whole training career
And it’s it’s funny because it was a fairly long process because I’ve not been used working with a big publishing house before so I actually forgotten what the book read like so for the first time in my life I actually read something I wrote which I never do
I never look at anything I publish and you know what the book is mesmerizing I I feel really bad to say this but I actually enjoyed reading it h which is weird because I never enjoy anything I I write and I even survived dumb chapters which a lot the the B he hasn’t
Told you there that he pretty much wrote it in like two weeks as well which is very typical of Christian I get an email be like hey I got an idea for a book what do you think does this sound good I like yeah it sounds great let’s do that
And then two weeks later he’s like here’s the manuscript here’s what you need to here’s what your bits can go yeah are you done yet my secret is that when I told you let’s write a book I already had like eight chapters yeah it makes me look really
Really awesome but I just I just have images of you just popping mafel every hour just not sleeping time I did that to be fair was when I wrote the book with Paul because that was an actual competition to see who would finish first and when I would add a chapter he
Felt the need to have the same number of chapters that I did so you wrote one more and that’s just pil on and pil on uh but yeah lots of fun and I think that it’s weird because I redesigned my own training based on the book like sometimes you
Know stuff I mean when you’ve been in the strengthen conditioning Community for a long time you’ve experimented with pretty much all the systems and methods and all that stuff that and you forgot what actually got you where you are we did that both dude yeah we need to do
That so I revent my the training yeah every every time I open it up I look at the the range of motion progression system in there and like I need to do that every single time it’s like I need to go back to that it’s fun
It is your favorite I mean it does fit your your psychological profile doing the possible and still feeling strong yeah that’s it so it’s in some places that would be called efficiency just putting that out there but sure okay fine let’s go with that uh so so part
Part of what you touched on there uh Christian actually leads into one of the questions that I wanted to ask uh that the second part of the title a modern application of old school training that why is that part so important in terms of or why is it so important to apply
Old school methods to uh you know what we’re doing right now well I think that the first reason is that well there were no perform enhancing enhancing drugs back then I mean it started out if you want to be really an anal about it it really started out in
1956 for the 1956 Olympics by the Russian weightlifters but that was extremely Niche right and it’s after that that uh steroids were first developed to counterbalance the testosterone use of the Russian lifters American lifters so by the mid 60s is when it was being spread around among weight leers and bodybuilders in North
America but prior to that it’s pretty safe to say that that they were not enhanced unless you count Arsenic and amphetamine well amphetamine would be a of course a per enhancing drug although I use them for Rai parties rather than strength back in my days uh but it’s
Still not the same effect it doesn’t change your physiology the same as St do and these guys were getting I would argue stronger than the vast majority of strong people to and certainly stronger than those who are not utilizing drugs so to me and again it’s not a rent against drugs
Or anything like that it’s just a matter of well if you are someone with average genetics who does not want to go that route might as well look for those who were the most successful without them and the old school strong men were these people also there was no internet or and
Very few magazines so the only way of learning new effective training methods was to experiment and you were not looked upon if you were trying stuff that looked funny in a gym well most of all didn’t train in gyms anyway but you could do anything you want if it worked
It worked nowadays it seems like you need to fit a certain criteria of what nexercise should look like be socially acceptable and social media and stuff so I think that back then creativity was very important for lifters it seems like today you look the trend on social media it’s almost like
People all do the same thing it’s either high volume or high effort but really there’s no difference within that group there’s very little place for experimenting with training methods and so on and so forth that’s why I think for me pure hypertrophy training is boring because they’re right as long as
You train hard and you gradually progress it will work strength is is a different thing power is a different thing there are many different ways of improving physical capacities and it’s a lot more requires more knowledge and knowhow than just building muscle I think to piggy back on the the
PD point there I think even as well just from like a lifestyle point of view like if you go back to the 20s 30s 40s whatever like not only were they not having access to PDS like what was the average person’s lifestyle like back then like a lot of people were they were
Working in factories doing really hard manual labor jobs or on farms and things like that and then they were going in the gym and doing programs and methods that you know maybe a lot of people would look at now and say like oh that’s overtraining but it’s like well if these
Guys were doing it after a 12-hour factory shift when living on large sandwiches and whatever else they could get their hands on foodwise at those kind of times you know and they not only were they were they kind of tolerating it they were progressing and like Christian said probably matching or you
Know doing better than what a lot of people are doing drug free now maybe there’s something to that you know maybe we’re actually capable of more than we think we just we just using the wrong methods or training in the wrong way or perhaps we’ve gotten soft who knows you
Know it’s probably a whole mix of things right but you can’t you can’t deny that back then they they had much less favorable conditions in just about every single context for getting big and strong even if you just look at gym equipment lack of squat RX you know
Whatever it might be and yet you know a lot of these strong guys from those decades would be considered freaks now so I mean they they basically make the perfect Role Models as far as I’m concerned but what you would see though is that they understood because back
Then it was a lot more about strength than about just size size was byproduct right they understood that to get strong you need to be to lift big weights and there was no I would say bias against partial range of motion partial range of motion lifting was just seen as a way to
Prepare your body to handle very very heavy weights and there was no negative side to that so that’s why you would see those old time strong men doing lots of partial lifts uh like lots of dead lifting from the knees with one hand with a few fingers H and that got them
Strong because yeah full range of motion might arguably be better for hypertrophy but for strength the heavy loads even though they are on partial ranges will work the connective tissues the fascia and the nerves probably better than the full range movement you still need to practice the full range
Exercises to get good at the full range exercises and also and to build more muscle but this purely strength building component the tendonous tissues the fascia the nervous system works very well with any method that really overload the system and that’s a large part of the book utilizing those methods
That allow you to use more weight than you’re capable of on the full movement another thing that I kind of really like about that era as well is that you know a lot a lot of these these athletes and stuff were multiport athletes you know as well they weren’t just Olympic weightlifters or
Bodybuilders or or strongman or whatever you know a lot of them were were doing multiple Sports and disciplines and it was just varying across the year which one they were competing you know based on the comp calendar and I think now like now you know I coach a lot of power
LIF is I’m going to kind of be biased and just go it from this kind of viewpoint but like so many people get caught into just like doing squat bench and deadlift so early on in their like lifting career for want of a a better word they end up kind of cutting
Themselves short in terms of their upper season because it’s you know it’s just like taking like a youth athlete and having them specialize in one sport two early on their their kind of toolbox of movement patterns and stuff like that is get s SL down so fast that they end up
Bringing their ceiling down because they end up with overuse injuries and all these types of things whereas I think what a lot of these athletes were doing so well was you know training a lot of disciplines and being good well-rounded athletes which I think helped them in a
Lot of different ways they were doing all kinds of odd lifts they were doing gymnastics they were using support Feats all that stuff that we wouldn’t see today first we would not be capable of doing them because our bodies are not prepared for that especially from a pendant standpoint but it’s something
You can work your way toward are you seeing this type of training come back around at all um I mean I guess outside of say like strong men and uh and powerlifting are are you seeing a shift back to this type of training a little
More or or do or do you think everyone’s still kind of stuck in kind of more the modern style of you know that the General person might just want to uh you know train for hypertrophy or whatnot I do have my opinion on that I want to
Hear Tom’s first okay I I would say yes I think you know a lot of the methods that we outlined in the book um maybe the average trainer will look at and think like this this is crazy how do we get used to that like that type of thing
But you know I do think that people are almost scared now to experiment a little bit like Christian said because it’s it’s so biased compared to what looks good on Instagram and what you see on social media and all that type of thing and Everyone is always trying to Market
Their system as the absolute best system or whatever but you know at the end of the day you can’t argue with the fact that the waters have been muddied by pdus like like Chris says nothing against it but it changes it changes things massively right so if we go back
And use them as a model when the only information you had was let’s do it and find out if it works that’s almost like the purest form of research if you’re okay it’s not done in a lab with the N equals 48 and meta analysis or whatever
But what tends to happen in the fitness industry over time is that the methods that really work will stick you know over time and last two generations and I think you know I don’t want to speak for Christian here but I think one of the motivations behind bringing this book
Out was that these methods are effective but are probably under represented in the population right now and there are a lot of methods in there that the average trainer would definitely benefit from and I think personally that a lot of people are training in a way right now
Where they especially when people are training for primarily Aesthetics and hypertrophy that they they’re not strong enough to get enough out of the hypertrophy style training that they’re doing and if they did even just do this type of training for phases of their kind kind of annual training plan it
Would make all the other training more effective that they’re doing as well as bringing up all those systems like Christian mentioned that you know maybe they’re not training directly well enough like the nervous system the tendons all that type of thing so to answer your question no I don’t think
It’s really catching on but it at some point it will because like I said these things all tend to go around in cycles and circles at the moment and like this type of stuff is almost on the back end of that cycle right now I feel and I’m
Sure at some point it’s going to come back around and Hope the book is going to make speed up that process yeah I think I think it’s stable I mean we’ve written a book about this type of training so obviously the smart answer would be oh yeah it’s becoming more and
More popular get the book you learn how to do it but in reality we have factors that pull it upwards and factors that pull it downwards the main factor that pull pulls this side of training upwards is the one extreme popularity of CrossFit and it’s coming down but what we find is that
CrossFit has introduced people to the big basic lifts explosive poles the dead lifts the presses the squats and so on and so forth and what we find is that a lot of people Branch out to weightlifting Branch out to power LIF thing Branch out to strong man because they found that
They have more affinity with that style of training so that pulls up the style of training the thing that pulls it downwards is that the vast majority of the population that is into resistance training is first looking at only at the uh from the aesthetic standpoint which might not be the best
Fit for the system although if you do it with proper dieting I strongly believe you’ll get the same kind of visual results if you really invest yourself into it but more importantly I find and that’s been for from interacting with people online for years and in gyms for years
People are becoming less and less focused on training hard people are looking for the easy way out and you see that a lot with people overusing science to justify not training hard and training hard could be well I’m going to justify not pushing my sets close to the
L or I’m going to use science to justify not doing many sets but it seems that people are always looking for justification to not train as hard if that’s if there’s one thing that was true from those whole time from them and from people who come from Crossfit and
Transfer to those Sports is that they are hard workers and you know what and Tom I mentioned that in the past and you know when you work card things tend to work out pretty well regardless of the system you use but some some people are looking for be
Focus on I’m going to use perfect pristine form 15.3 degrees of elbow flexion to maximize this and that I’m going to use that exact Tempo I’m going to use that exact progression because they are subconsciously um I want to say uh not sure about making gains so they try to
Reassure themselves by attaching themselves to number from coming from the favorite influencers they also are not hard workers by Nature that’s a newer generation and I don’t blame the new generation I don’t blame the kids I mean when a kid comes to life he doesn’t know doesn’t know anything okay it’s the
Parents the adults interacting with the kids who basically program the child and we have been asking a lot less out of them than generation past and that leads to people who are entitled people who are not used to physical effort basically because technology made everything super simple so when we ask
Them to they just don’t have the natural tendency to want to outwork anybody in the gym so they are they will look for method that are easy or feel easy and that’s basically the opposite of kind of training i’ I’d be interested to get Christian’s take on on this bit too but
I do Al to continue that a little bit I think there’s like a behavioral or an attitude difference as well in that you know again you go back to a lot of these athletes in in those times although a lot of those methods that we outlined in the book for example
They all they’re all very heavy and and difficult and whatnot but the the attitude that was applied to them was a work hard but also be technically proficient and also be patient with the progression system that use like with that range of motion progression you’ll stick with the same weight for anywhere
Between you know maybe eight and 16 weeks and then at the end of that 12 16 week cycle whatever maybe they add5 pounds whatever they if if that’s what they felt comfortable doing then that’s what they did likewise you know a lot of their lifts would be done with an
Emphasis on skill because you know if you’re a circus strong man you you got to go on stage four or five times a day or whatever it might be you don’t get much chance to warm up you got to be able to just go out and nail 85 90% with
No warm up perfect every time that that enforces very good technical application of your lifts right so there was I think there was probably a greater focus on the quality of what they did also rather than the quantity whereas I think that even even in the the strength training
Performance-based training realm is also being lost now where you know people are just worried more about trying to race the numbers up faster rather than thinking long game you know and seeing what that type of progression system could do for them over a two three or
Four year period you know things like um Christian’s just written an article on the headone progression model you know that’s a great example um Jim wendland’s 531 is another great example do you offer people now two and a half kilos a month on a lift and that doesn’t that
Doesn’t appeal to them but if you add that up over two or three years those are results that anyone who knows anything about lifting would would snap your hand off for but I think you know a lot of the time people aren’t focused enough on the quality of their work and
Like maybe Christian said maybe they’re trying to use too much science to almost cheat the system and progress quicker than they’re actually earning the right to in many scenarios yeah you can gain again depending on your level of experience between 0.25 and 2% of strength per week
Obviously the 2% would be the very beginners and that would be mostly due to technical efficiency and neurological adaptations so for other people it will range between 0.25 and 1% per week uh non- beginners would be closer to one to 0.25 to 0.5% and of course from week to week
Sometimes you are able to add 10 more pounds but often times that’s an illusion you’re not 10 pounds stronger maybe your set was taken two reps closer to failure in the week before strength fluctuates daily so maybe you had a very good day and the
Other day was a bad day maybe you made some technical tweaks maybe you cheated somewhat without even noticing it but in the long run that’s what it is and I think that as some mentioned being impatient is the main issue I think it’s the number one reason why people fail to
Achieve their goals regardless of its strength or its size and that comes mostly from unrealistic expectations and that again I still blame social media a lot for that but magazines did the same years ago because well now we expect that you can gain 20 pounds of muscle in
Two months and you can increase your bench press by 50 pounds in two months yes sometimes it might happen by Magic but it’s not something that’s usual I mean just adding five pounds to your bench every week would be 250 pounds a year do that for three years your B
Press ,000 pounds that doesn’t work like that so I think that people are because they have unrealistic expectations the moment they are not progressing at the rate they are expecting that’s when they go off script they would had too much weight you crap crappy form they will switch program
Because they think this program is not working I only gained 10 pounds on my bench in three weeks it’s not working dude it’s freaking great so you might actually be successful and stop doing a successful program because of un ristic expectations and again if you so that’s
A main issue don’t forget that and Tom wrote a great article about that when he was talking about what is strong and he said that we have a certain bias because the people we tend to follow on social media are people we admire in our field
So people who are doing what we would have hope to do in one day so they are the best at what they do so when you constantly see people bench pressing 600 700 pound and you D bench 300 say dude I need to catch up and my training is not
Working otherwise I’d be at that guy’s level but these guys are freaks of freaks so it again unrealistic expectation leads to impatience impatience lead to less focus on technique that’s why Tom’s chapter is so important where he goes into excruciatingly detailed explanations on all the main lists on how to execute
Them perfectly and again the old school l saw their training as practice they were and you actually see that in Old text it’s lifting practice not training and that’s the way you should see it do you think maybe those unrealistic expectations uh might be one reason that
People plateau uh really soon after they start training or at least feel like they platto just because they have those unrealistic expectations that they should be lifting a lot more weight of course for three reasons the first reason is that mindset and that’s going to be like very esoteric that’s going to
Scare people off but there are some interesting data about it the strength of your belief in what you’re are doing has a great impact on how successful you will actually be and the theory is that it could actually lead to some Gene activation facilitating the attainment
Of those goals there was an old study in the 1970s they didn’t measure that but that’s what we can actually infer from that study so they had a group of people and they told them we’re going to train hard for five weeks and those who get
The best results will be put on steroids legit dyable for three weeks so of course they had and that back then there was no Stigma about steroids and the L are the same right so people wanted to be in that group so that pretty much ensured that for the first five weeks
They would be training balls out so after five weeks they make x amount of gains and they pick like the 10 or so best and they’re given D and in three weeks they achieved results in strength that was that were five to 10 times greater in half the time as they reach
In the first block only they were not given dynol it was a so that basic again that just explained the power of belief they were sure that they were on gas ass man I’m going to gain great and they were already training super hard so it’s not because they were training harder but
The belief might have actually help physiologically speaking so when you you hit a plateau and you don’t have patience when you have unrealistic expectation it can just crumble your motivation your drive and your belief in yourself and that will hurt second the moment you’re not gaining fast enough what most people do
Is the stupidest thing they should do is is that they they adal way to the bar just to convince themselves I’m strong enough to list this they raise their B of the Ben they bounce the bar they cut the range of motion but I did the lift just because they need to convince
Themselves that they’re getting stronger and that will obviously need to loss in technical proficiency potential injuries uh nervous system fatigue and so on and so forth and finally I think there’s the the what’s next appeal so I’m going to give this a try for three weeks if it
Doesn’t work out like I want I’m going to look for the next secret but there’s never any next secret that never works people the only reason why it might work is that because you get excited about trying that stuff out so for two weeks you’re super excited that might help you
A bit but when you realize that you know what it’s on the magic feeli I I hope it was it would be then us your back to scare one I think I think as well if we’re talking about like people kind of hitting their first Plateau like you go
From that kind of beginner stage to intermediate where all of a sudden it just doesn’t doesn’t come so easy now and you’re not adding every week and stuff like that that that is the first time that as a lifter or an athlete you know whatever you want to call yourself
That all of a sudden now you have to actually be introspective and self assessed like you’ve gone from almost having guaranteed progress from just going in and you know clocking in clocking out with the most basic program whatever it might be that’s that’s going
To get you progress over a am of time on is a linear fashion now all of a sudden you’ve got to this point where now now you’re strong enough to have weaknesses now you’re strong enough to have things that are holding you back and now you need to develop the skill set of
Analyzing your own performance and starting to look at what what are the things that are holding me back and where do I need to allocate my resources now to to attack these things and work on you know what the main problems that are stopping me from progression whereas
Until that point you haven’t had to do that you everything’s been completely Rosy and progress has been almost you know guaranteed so you know that’s often where a lot of the times people will either just not develop that ability and just be plateaued they might hire a
Coach to do it for them but then a lot of the time what ends up happening is they let the coach do that for them they get a bit further and if they stop working with that coach now they’re just a bit further on but they still haven’t
Developed that skill set at all or the ones that generally end up getting past that stage then are the ones that start doing that stuff and sitting down and thinking pragmatically about what is it that I need to do now what’s what’s got
Me from A to B is not going to get me from B to C so what needs to change to do that yeah and it’s something we actually discussed in the book because at one point you need to allocate more resources to fixing something so it can
Be a lagging muscle it can be a lagging part in a range of motion could be focusing on the T the movement and it often comes with the increase an increase in volume and frequency to solve that issue or the very selection of better assistance exercises and we
Cover both when we talk for example about devoting a phase of training to fixing one issue a specialization phase most people understand that if I need to fix a weaker muscle or weak lift I will need to invest more volume on that lift okay and more frequency what they don’t
Get is that when you put something in you must take something out because otherwise you just increase the systemic stress of the program you run into neurological fatigue which decreases your capacity to recruit the fast switch fibers and your training is off for not so that’s why you need to decide I need
To add this amount of volume and frequency to that lift and its assistance work what do I take out for that four to six weeks period to have the physiological and neurolog neurological resources to recover and improve and that’s a thing that people are afraid of doing I
Don’t want to decrease my squat volume I’m going to get weak on squat well not even four to six weeks but when you Advanced and you decide that your solution is investing more volume or more frequency on fixing a mistake you need to be the grownup in the room and
Accept taking something out you won’t lose anything in 46 week you might actually gain anyway right all right sorry go on oh no you can go ahead I was going to say that’s that’s kind of also where I think the the technical understanding of the lifts that you
Focus on can come in to be really important as well because obviously we want to be performing them well but when you know what the lift should look like the different phases of each lift what muscle groups are the primary movers in each lift then all of a sudden you’ve
Got kind of a blueprint to work with so then when you start if you do start looking at your own lift seeing where you get stuck seeing where you get deviations from what would be deemed optimal technique for you then you can start to use that to give you you know
Clues as to what is holding you back because not everyone’s going to be able to just know instinctively or my hamstrings or weak or you know whatever it might be but if you know what muscle groups of the the dominant movers at each part of the lift or you know what
What the bar path should look like on each lift and you see that you’re deviating consistently in a consistent way from that that can help you figure out then where you’re going wrong maybe what muscle groups you’re subconsciously trying to avoid loading what ones doing
Too much of the work so on and so forth so again then that’s where that kind of technical knowledge can come in and help you get past those plateus because now you’ve got something to you have a blueprint to know what it should look like which means you can identify
Obviously when it deviates from that you also need to understand the the rate of improvement that is possible so for example if the problem you’re trying to fix is a lagging muscle group the gains in strength from addressing that weakness will be much slower than if the
Issue is a weak part in a range of motion due to neurological factors or if there are technical issues because everything that’s neurological can be improved significantly in as little as three weeks you can make pretty dramatic neurological Improvement in three weeks with the right methods but muscle growth
Is still limited by your physiology so let’s say that best best case scenario you’re not a beginner you might gain 0.5 to one pound of muscle per month that doesn’t sound like much but when’s the last time you saw a non beginner gain 12 solid pound of
Muscles naturally okay and not not body weight because that 12 pound is is likely gonna be like 25 pounds of scale weight okay and doing that it’s very hard past the beginner stage but let’s just say that it’s one pound per month well that one pound is still spread over
The whole body because you’re still training the whole body even if you’re spending a bit more volume it’s on your triceps you’re not going to be adding one pound to your tricep in a month it might be at a few grams like maybe 250 grams on your triceps so the time it
Would take to add enough muscle tissue to make that lagging muscle strong enough to work alongside with the chest and shoulders for example might take you several specialization phases so that’s why people often times fail to fix weaknesses is that they are addressing muscle weaknesses and think the problem
Will be fixed in four weeks when it’s not fixed yet they figure this is not working well if it’s neurological yeah if it doesn’t work in four weeks you probably did not use the right approach but it’s muscle it’s like almost a year round or a year long
Approach because you need to add a lot enough muscle tissue in that specific place to make that muscle stronger all right um I I want to get to um some of the specific methods now I know you mentioned 10 methods in the book but and and I know we don’t have
Time to go over all those so what I would like to do instead of that is um maybe and I know this would depend on you know specific goals or maybe phase of training uh but what are your maybe your favorite uh methods uh that you talk about in the book
First you go first I’m gonna end up picking always what you’re always doing and we’re always looking for new variations uh I’m an older more basic guy than you are so my own favorite method is clusters uh clusters has always been not always but it’s for at
Least I want to say 23 years my favorite strength training method it’s funny because can actually referred me as the cluster guy and I actually learned about clusters when I was doing a seminar with Charles paulon so I was something like 21 at the time I was transitioning into weightlifting from
Football and I was already pretty strong but because my technique was not up to the level of those who were doing that I’d been doing that for years and years I feel well the only way to catch up to these guys is to be brutally stronger than they are
Ask Charles at lunch break which you never do with Charles anyway Charles what’s the best way to get stronger so you would actually not even look at me and say well Charles I’m an Olympic weightlifter I want to get stronger no now you lit up because he love strength
Athletes and see Christian the best method for strength is clusters great clusters what the hell of clusters Charles in a cluster you do a w then you rest 25 seconds then you do a rep then you rest 25 then you go on until you get five and
My excitement just went way down say dude that’s what we do all the time in weightlifting you snatch the bar you drop the bar down you reset take a few breath maybe 20 seconds you snatch again so you’re telling me that the best strength method is the one method I’ve
Already been using thought about disappointment right so you do that for your strength CP for squats for PS for deadlifts okay so I started doing that and of course the more I learned about clusters the more variations I learned for example with Tom clusters didn’t work because the traditional polycin clusters
Which use your trrm for five reps with 15 to 20 seconds between reps that was just way too short of a rest period for time for set you would actually be stronger on five regular reps than five cluster reps because the factor that Charles didn’t consider or maybe because he was working
Mostly with hockey players or don’t have the strength level or the fast switch dominance that tum has is that when you do let say a bench press or a squat the racking unracking the bar walking out the squat that takes a lot out of you so that needs to be factored in
So I research clusters more and it turns out that the original clusters the one by Joe Miller was a weightlifting coach used rest periods of 45 to 60 seconds between reps and when we started doing that now it worked so clusters when they’re properly applied and adapted to your physiology physiology is probably
My favorite method now it doesn’t work for all the lifts like for a dumbbell press it wouldn’t work it takes just to wait too much energy to the back the weight in place the less energy is needed to rack and rack the weight the better clusters will work but the way
The reason it works is that it gives you the same neurological stimulus as a near Max effort but still gives you enough effective reps in a set to trigger maximum hypertrophy so you get both muscular and neural adaptations yeah I mean my personal favorite method of the book is the
Progressive range of motion me um I know right it gets it allows you to lift maximally heavy stuff every single week without breaking yourself which is my specialty um but if I had to pick a favorite method for not myself out the book it would actually be the
Loaded stretching um that which we address in quite good detail and Christian has written a lot about loaded stretching but um honestly if I if I had to say like one method that has improved the mobility the resiliency and the movement quality of the people that I
Coach it would be loaded stretching um okay not only that but I and Christian is not a fan of using it in warmups um I’ve been experimenting with using it in warrants for people who are who need the mobility work for example um just doing it a bit less intensely than what you’d
Maybe do it for if you’re looking for maximal hypertrophy out of it and you know improve improvements in people’s like thoracic Mobility for their Arch on bench press and all these types of things the results have been great but also a lot of the time it removes um the
Need for any any fancy long duration warm-ups that you know no long you can take someone who needs to spend 20 25 minutes warming up for bench press doing van pull aparts y raises face pulls and all these types of things they do three one minute sets of the dumbbell bench
Press loaded stretch they get under a bar and they actually feel better than they do that whole 20 25 minute routine but not only that their movement’s better their Mobility is better and so on um so I think if if there was one method in that book that the most people
Could benefit from implementing in their training it would be that lifters hate Mobility work it’s boring it’s uncomfortable whatever but if you can find a method of Mobility work benefits for your tendons your ligaments and also hypertrophy then we can tick all that all those box at the same time and
Actually make lifters do the stuff they need to be doing that would be the one I would pick for everyone to implement out the book if I could only pick one the reason I once I told you that I didn’t like loaded stretching as a warm-up was because I was doing them in
Properly and it was not a technical issue it was a breathing issue I would essentially stay in apnea for for the whole 90 seconds or do what or use paradoxical breathing a very short choppy breathing with the thoracic area rather than with the using the diaphragm
And belly so if you focus on deep nose breathing like four seconds in 4 seconds out extending your belly it actually has very low stress levels it was more the ioia that caused the stress but yeah I can I was able to uh take a cry a guy was doing CrossFit recreationally former
Competitive swimmer on the butterfly so problem with range of motion the shoulder very int introverted so he couldn’t do overhead squats and in one loaded Strat session he was able to do full snatches oh wow so that was aett well we spent almost a whole workout on
On loaded stretching but you have been trying with all kinds of stretching to fix his AED position for at least a year that actually fixed in a long session but still in one session wow that’s amazing that’s when I was reading through the book that I mean
I think that’s one that I probably need to incorporate a little bit more uh in into my training uh for sure just to work on a lot of that uh this has been an outstanding conversation I do I want to be mindful of the time and respectful
Of your time um so for the listeners if you haven’t got your copy yet pick up your copy of um overload uh system for strength um you’ll in the book you’ll find everything that we talked about today you’ll find quite a bit more uh there are pictures descriptions of
Exercises make sure that you’re doing them correctly um I know that there are um uh what like uh sample or recommendations to on how to set up your uh training during the week just a ton of great information so if you got a lot out of this conversation definitely pick
Up your your copy of the book you’re going to get so much more out of that so thank you so much for your time um before weop off I know that a lot of a lot of people probably already know where to find you guys but um I I’ll
Give you a chance to kind of uh you know plug your website your system um and uh have let you guys have the last word there yeah well I’m just on Instagram Phoenix Performance training that’s that’s where you find me I’m a complete social hermit outside of that so that’s
Where you’ll find me Facebook uh I’m on why you on also on Elite fds and t.com you have articles there uh I’m obviously on on T army.com and the Instagram is T Army so chrisan T Army and also uh still on tal Nation tnation.com where I have almost weekly
Articles all right awesome again thank you so much uh for the conversation today it was excellent I know a lot of people uh took quite a bit from the conversation so go ahead grab your copy if you don’t have it overload system for strength um and again thank you so much
I will talk to you guys soon
