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Episode 1 · 2 years ago
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Episode 1 · 2 years ago
01. Home Training with Jacob Schepis
ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Hello and welcome to the first ever ad strength and performance podcast. In today's episode, I spoke to Jacobs Keppus, the owner of JPs health and fitness, about all things home training. So sit back, relax and enjoy the episode. All righty, Jacob, welcome to the first ever episode of the show. Thank you for coming on. All Right, Alex, my absolute pleasure. Man. I'm very excited to have a chat and I guess make more formal our late night ramblings and conversations. So this is very cool opportunity to, I guess can peel bit of insciting to the the verbiage that we spill. We have our phone calls. So thank you for having me. Worries. I wanted to get you one today to talk a bit bit about training at home. Now, obviously, due to the world's current circumstances, a lot of us have been forced to now train at home with very little, if any, equipment, and that has brought up many different challenges across various domains. So can you please tell us a bit about what some of those challenge is? Yeah, yeah, for sure. So obviously this is the word of the week. Unprecedented social distancing. Like all these kind of guess casual phrases that we are now hearing to describe what is occurring due to the covid nineteen, and I don't want to sort of put training on a pedestal. Is like our biggest problems that we face and how we navigate those. I'd first like to just state that there are far more serious things that we need to be focusing on as individuals and as a collective community, our nation and, obviously, our species. But to that end, and without that out of the way, I think we definitely have our work cut out for us when it comes to training now, because many of us have, for long periods of time had the convenience and luxury of training in very well decked out gym facilities and the the current landscape of people's training situation is such that they're training at home and they have limited equipment. Often in many cases, as is the case for many of my clients, sometimes it's only their body weight and a couple of bands, and this brings about many changes to how we need to operate and go about how training. So I think that situation in and of itself is problematic, but with every problem there is a solution. You just have to be able to locate the source of the problem and you need to be able to, in situations that you don't have experience or a lot of knowledge in, be able to logically and rationally work your way through the problem that you're facing to uncover what that problem is and how to best go about solving it. So I think, from what I can see, the true source of the the problem that people are going to face, which ripples through all the other sort of more superficial problems that we're going to be up against when it comes to our training, is that people are lacking goals, direction and a sense of purpose in their training and their motivation now is going to take a huge hit because, especially in my world of the lifting community, we're dealing with a lot of bodybuilders and power lifters who...
...are all training towards an end goal of a competition. With many of those competitions now being removed or rescheduled, this is completely overhauling their training program and really interrupting their their goals and their ability to work towards something. I think that that's really important is we're creatures that thrive upon working towards something, and I think when that's something gets taken away from you, it becomes all the more difficult to stay motivated. So I think that is a huge challenge we face and the motivation side of things is going to be something that a lot of people are going to struggle with, specifically finding that internal and instrinsic motivation so a deep and meaningful reason why they train, because it's very easy to train. We don't need to sort of anchor our behaviors on intrinsic motivation as much when we have routine, structure, consistency and a lot of sort of external factors that that drive our motivation in a certain direction, for example, like your buddies call you up and say hey, you know, let's go to a workout. Like that forces you back into a performing the behaviors that you want and need to be performing in order to achieve your goal. But when that all, all of that stuff, gets taken away, it's really up to you and there's no nobody else and nothing else that can affect your ability to take action, to make a decision. It's all on you, and I think this is where people are going to struggle, because most people don't have a very clear and accurate perception or understanding of why they train, and it is very superficial and extrinsically determined for most people. I think that's something that people will certainly struggle with. So that's on the motivational front. I think from program design, we're going to see a lot of people really struggle with putting together a program that will facilitate their goals without the equipment that they would normally use. We sort of become really accustomed to training in a certain way without thinking too much about why we train in that way. But now, where we don't have the equipment and we can't follow the regular programs and routines, we're gonna have to really think about what's required to achieve that goal at a physiological level, and that takes a fair, fairly deep level of knowledge and understanding of that topic. So I think people are going to be caught out a little bit there in when it comes to program design. And finally, I think the obvious one much more superficial. So we've kind of worked our way out from that locating the source of the problem. When we work out, I think at the very surface level the biggest problem is going to be the equipment to strengths that people are going through be facing, and that sort of rule feedback down into the program design and to the to the motivation issues, because when you can't train it a way that you like or that you're accustomed to, you don't really know how to program. We don't really know how to program, you don't really have any goals, direction, any motivation terms to shit. So I think it's just like kind of cool, sort of like three three prong you know, challenges, three different challenges we're going to be facing and I think if we locate the source of the problems, that which is the goals, direction and purpose, and we can start to work out towards looking at how we can best facilitate that goal through program design and then use whatever equipment we have available, will be in a much better position to be able to combat these times and training during this period, as well as ensure that people are still training with meaning and they're still staying fit, healthy, progressing, and we'll come out on the other side of this, hopefully in a better position than what they were originally.
And by better position, I think we need to take a much more multidimensional view of what progress means. Now I think progress should be viewed as has somebody developed their themselves at the personal level, like, are they are better person now? Are they are more knowledgeable lifter and athlete, and do they now have more tools and skills and confidences to be able to regulate themselves, you know, in new training environments at a different circumstances are that they otherwise wouldn't have acquired if this whole covid nineteen thing didn't happen. So I'm very much looking at progress over the course of the next through sixty five months. Have Long this might go on for in a far more broad through a far more broad lends and not just at you. Is My lift lifting ability going up on down? So that would be kind of my thoughts on that. Yeah, and I think I think purpose and direction is quite key there, because there are people who have the as scarrite truly decked out and have all their equipment and limited by program design, but things are definitely still different for them. Yeah, no, I totally agree and I think this is just an example of people relying on extrinsic motivation and they're the kind of folk who they trained well. Yeah, when the stars aligned and they've had their pre workout. You know, when they've had their pre workout meal, they're going to the gym with their lifting partner. You know, just before that they unrack the bar the squat. You know they press play and the beat drops. You know they've got all the bells and whistles and it's like it's a very sort of controlled environment. This is this is what they look at in a lot of the psychology research, which is called self efficacy theory, and basically it's like your task specific abilities and your self confidence in your abilities to perform a specific task. And there's a couple of different components of off efficacy and one of them is like your ability to regulate your performance and your behaviors with changes in environment and circumstances. So I think a lot of people have the confidence in their abilities to train and they can perform the tasks and they're motivated to do so when they've bought very consistent external environments and everything's lined up as they expect from our plan for a but as soon as you start to take away some of those things, they fall apart in the crumble and I think this will separate the men from the boys, so to speak. We'll see who's really, you know, got the the balls of steel, so to speak. And Yeah, I think we'll find out who trains to train versus who trains only because there's a carrot dangling in front of them and thinking that they're going to get rewarded with you know something, do you think that they are any advantages to train it at home? Is there anything that we can make the most of them? Yeah, I think that is a hundred and one different advantages of training at home. First, I'll say that being forced into a new training environment can confer a lot of benefits to an athlete or lifters develop want, because it forces them to expand their their tool set and to practice working in situations and environments that are wildly different. Now, is this something that you would deliberately seek to do, you know, right before a competition or, you know, before a big meets or anything like that? Probably not. That's not going to be a wise choice. But...
...for the most part, I think yet being able to have some diversity in your training environments is going to be husgely beneficial. Who knows what's going to happen, you know, to some people, you know in twelve twenty, four months, five years, ten years. You know, people might find themselves traveling for extended periods without equipment, and now they've, you know, been forced to train without any equipment and do these home gym workouts. They know how to navigate that situation. Then I'm going to be as scared or nervous, you know, traveling for an extended period, you know, without a gym, because they know that they can train sufficiently hard and they can do all the things that they need to do to at least maintain their fitness or make some improvements in some areas with minimal equipment. So I think it's going to have huge advantages in that sense by teaching people how to be quite diverse in their their training. I also think there's a lot to be said about being able to train in such like an isolated, unintended environment, because you don't have distractions, you can really really focus and control so many variables. I've said to a lot of my contents for athletes, you know that whilst this time is like, no doubt, you know, not desirable like by any stretch of the imagination for a body builder or somebody who's looking to get on stage. This is a really good opportunity to you know, he heals him and get some some progress done in the fat lost apartment, because you don't have the temptations of going out and socializing and having to say no to people where they offer your food and drinks. Like you're at home, you get to control everything, and I think, you know, being at home, not just being training at home, but being at home, isolating, social distancing, under quarantine, lockdown, all of those sorts of things, gives people the opportunity to really build some positive structures, routines, not just in their training but, you know, through their rehab, their Prehab, you know, their mental preparation for both training competition, their overall mindset, you know, whether it's meditation, gratitude, journaling and just general productivity like this this periodizolation. Yeah, there's there's a million diamonds in the rough that can be found if you look hard enough. But I think to do that, and this is a huge problem that I've seen the fitness industry, everyone's really throwing down the gauntlet for the you know, like Hustle, Hustle, hustle, you know, be productive, like you've got to be doing more. You got to, you know, make the most out of this timeline. It's like you can only do that once you have stability, once you have safety, and I don't want to come across a somebody who's pushing the whole notion of you have to go ham and you know team nowadays, off kind of thing like during this period, because, man, that that that can only come when you do have a lot of safety. You've got the safety nets, they're around you and with what's going on from both a health and economic standpoints, you know there isn't a lot of stability or safety right whether it's our careers, whatever the case may be. We need to find that stability, that security, so that we are we have something to launch ourselves off and then we can work forward from that. A lot of people are throwing around the term pivot and I don't like that at all, because you can only pivot off something that's stable. You can't pivot it off something that's not stable. And I really dislike the whole notion that, you know, we've got a pivot and adapt. It's like, yeah, you adapt, you know, in amount of when the distress or whatever is imposed that alters the system, is you know, adaptive, like it's going to be something that is not going to cause, you know, maladaptation, right, like what we're experiencing now has caused like a lot of fucking pathological things to occurrent our lives. Like this is not something that you want to pivot...
...off, this is something you want to fucking recover from. So you're going to recover. You got to get stable, you're got to have a foundation before you look to get getting all that product. To the original question of you know, O there any benefit? Yes, I think finding the ability, knowing that you can pull yourself out of shit right and dig through that shit to find your gold right, which might be that, you know, silver lining the diamonds in the rough, whatever you want to call it, which could be finding some new skills with the training whatever. Right, that is the real prize. The real prize is being able to Pat yourself back up and falling down and overcoming, you know, such a like MOU mental hurdle, which is what we're all faced like. Training side training is a very fucking small part of the picture of the air and it's a luxury. Right. It's like my advice to anyone who's before you look at the advantages of home training. It's yeah, get yourself in a position where your life is pretty predictable and stable, because you can't do much good on something that's Bill Shaking Foundation. We get those foundations set. When you've got those set, then you can start to look to, you know, reading all the role rewards that come with just this new experience, and I think there are many with hope of the play. So, given we now have all these restrictions when it comes to our training, Yep, what are now realistic expectations for people to have, and how might that be different when comparing training age or comparing guess training goal? So whether that be for high perch fee or for strength? Yeah, so I think we need to pass this into two separate discussions. Needs to be first looked at from muscle growth, like a morphological perspective, and then we can look at the the string stuff, because they are quite different fitness qualities and they and the expectations that we have around both of those is completely different, and I'll try to explain why I spect I can. So, when it comes to high perch to feed, the primary mechanism that caused a muscle growth is what's called mechanical tension, and this is basically the tension experience at the lep level of the fibers through the muscle contracting and trying to produce an amount of force that meets or exceeds the imposed demands of whatever activity we're doing. And this tension is generally highest when we lived with heavy loads and we get full mode recruitment or near full mode recruitment, or we livet with lighter weights, we take them pretty close to failure. So there's a there's a load component and a fatigue component. So we want to get this some mechanical tension when it comes to muscle growth and that means that hyperch fee, so building or retaining muscle is really just at tension dependent process at a physiological level. And we know through some pretty good research, and you know there's some Meta analytic data by shown Feld study he did in two thousand and seventy eight where he looked at strength and high pressure, adaptations between low and high loads, resistance strength, and they basically, you found that you can build and retain muscle with five to thirty reps and use both, you know, low to high loads, you know, provided that volume is equated and you're training pretty hard within a proximity of failure of a ground, you know, and RP fiver less. We've also seen that again through some met analytic data, that highper she has a Dosal sponse relationship with training volume increases, seeing more hyper trophy to a point. Generally tend to twenty hard sets per week from US group produced pretty good Games. We've also...
...seen that training freaks is about round one and a half to two times per week from muscle group allow for pretty effective distribution of volume for high perch fee. And Yeah, that's all the, I guess, the nuts and bolts of what it takes to build muscle. So if we can replicate that in our home gym training, we can still build a muscle. So if we can still place a significant amount of mechanical potensional the muscles, training the five to thirty refrange with, you know, our peers of five or less, so getting close to failure training with the decent amount of volume per muscle group and a frequency around one a half time to two times a week, we're going to do a pretty good job and keeping our muscle, if not building it. And I think the expectations that you can have as a beginner when it comes to muscle high perch for are. You know, if you've got some basic weights, resistance bands or you can do some bodyway stuff, you can still build some really good muscles. Of Beginner. Obviously, the amount of muscle that you can build during this home gym isolation type training is going to decrease with training age, not only because training age we see less and less muscle worth occur because people are reaching their genetic ceiling, but also because it's going to get harder and harder to replicate or achieve the stimulus necessary when training at home for an advanced lifter, because they're going to be limited by equipment. So I think yet advanced lifters can still build muscle, but it's going to really depend on what kind of equipment to have available, and this is where I recommend, as your more advance is probably a good opportunity, if you're training at home you don't have much equipment available, to to try and specialize as in muscle groups that you can train. So, for example, everyone's got some bands or can do, say, some polar ups, whatever the case may be. You can do it a bicep specialization cycle and a pull up specialization cycle where you just go ham on those two movers. You're training the pulling muscles and you might make some pretty good gains. Are they actually three to four months? Right? You could do the same to push ups and triceps, right, like you could just really overload your pushups with to specialize you push ups. I think the benefit of this is, for tie full circle back to one of the problems of people face in their training at home now, is that it gives you some goals. You've now got goals and purpose around your training and something to train for, and I think that's hugely important at this point. And now just to note that, when it comes to building muscle and our expectations around that, this will require, for the most part at least coloring maintenance and a small surplus, you know, moderate tie protein intakes. So, yeah, dieting in during this period, especially if you're more advanced, more likely to lose muscle, unless you really have to pull in on a good idea, you probably want to be eating at a surplus to make sure that you're providing enough resources to go towards adaptations. And Yeah, just don't be afraid that your training at home is going to see you lose any muscle, because we've seen through a study by bickle at all. It's quite a popular study. They looked at exercises posting to retain resistance training adaptations in young and older adults. This was a two thousand and eleven paper and yeah, it was pretty interesting. They basically are had one group, I believe, D train for like it's like thirty two weeks or something. It was like a really long puck in time. And Anyway, they found that maintaining muscle requires a lot less volume than it does to build it, and you can use around sixty five percent less volume to maintain your muscle mass. So that's a lot less. So I wouldn't be too worried about losing muscle if you're eating a surplus. You're just training hard. You're trying to tick all those boxes that I mentioned earlier in terms of getting that tension, training rep rangers and loading zones, making sure you're training hard, close to failure, training with enough volume and the frequency one a half to two times a week from muscle group. You're doing all of that, I think you're going to be good to go. And again beginners...
...can build more muscle than advanced and you just do your best to work around the limitations that you had. So the strength sides a little bit different, because strength is much more function of neural qualities. So the skill and proficiency of lifting heavy weights, because lifting is a skill at a very base lettle bit, so too is lifting heavy weights. So what what we will see with a lot of people who are now training at home and unable to go to the gym and lift the weights that would normally lift, is that their strengths will drop off pretty quickly. If they were to, say, take four weeks off but then go back into their normal resistance training program their strength could be down quite a bit. But the good news is that although strength neural adaptation, so this like nervous system mediated co ordination, basically of lifting, is much more prominent in strength development for novice lifters. So lifters who are new to training, most of their early games come from the the neural qualities. When we get more and more advanced, up to sixty five percent of our strength adaptations come from our muscle mass. So for strength athletes, if you're not having to compete in the near future, your objective should be to just build or attain muscle, because you're still going to be able to do that training at home if you don't have equipment to do your say, squat bench in theirlift and enough weights to do so right. So you just have to shift gears a little bit bit and focus on building attained muscle, because that contributes more to your strength as you get more and more advanced. I also think that this opportunity is a brilliant time for strength athletes to shift gears to the hypertrophee style of training to build some muscle. Also their work capacity and their aerobic conditioning, which can have a delayed transfer to their strength levels. So, for example, a lot of Palapterors won't go and improve their robic capacity to joining running things like that, but this period could be a very good opportunity for them to do so. Because we know that high courach a fee best occurs when we get local or prooferal fatigue. So you know that's going to come in to the high ret rangers. However, our ability to get that localize fatigue is often limited by our aerobic capacity. So we fatigue centrally throughout the Cardio Vest vatascular system before we can get that stimulus on the muscle. And a lot of people. I see this a lot of the time with power lifters, because they do train in the low rep rangers and as soon as you get them up to fifteen or some more reps, they'll start to gas out aerobically, puffing and panting before the muscle actually fatigues. The best way to notice this is you'll see that their rep speed, so the cadence of their concentrics, is the same and then all of a sudden they just stop the set short because they're puffing and panting, where we know that the muscle is going to be fatigued when we start to see the cadence or the velocity of contraction really slow down, because that means that the fatigue is impairing the amount of force that the muscle can produce, and that's what we want to give us that mechanical tension. Right. So if an athlete can pull back from their training to a little more cardio improve their aerobic capacity, all of a sudden when they go and do their high perchy from training, their aerobic capacity is going to improve. They have to do more work. They need to get to that prooful fatigue, that localise muscule fatigue that we need to build muscle. They're going to build more muscle and if more muscle contributes up to sixty five percent of our strengths game as an advance of storm, I think that's usually important. So I think for the strength to Flete, yes, you don't have to accept the short term hit in your strength. You don't have Barb Bell's bench, you know, and weight. It's a load up to the weights that you would typically lived.
But do your best to replicate your training as best you can. That's my advice for anyone, no matter your goals. And if you can't, then you have to just shift gears and think about which are the training qualities that most closely related to my primary training goals, and for strength athletes it's hypertrophy and then the next down the line from there is muscular endurance and then next downline from there is a erobic capacity. So if you work down and down and down, depending on what you have available to in terms of your equipment availability as well as your individual situations. So did the time frames that you're working within for your next competitions and your annual plan. You just yet work your way through that and also look to just give your joints bit of a spell, work on improving your mobility and some of those other qualities that we often don't talk about. That a little bit more, I guess. Yeah, D emphasized just purely because we always focus on what's going to give us the most immediate results and effect for our goals, and that's like lifting heavy weights and doing those kind of things. So, yeah, they're my thoughts on that. Man, I hope I answer the question and for advance of this again. It's going to be easier for you to get your strength back because a lot of those neural qualities are going to be ingrained and would be a very short time for you to regain your strength. For beginners it's like you're not strong anyway. So you probably have lost my strengths. You just you're just, yea get stronger as you go back to the gym and intermediates. Yeah, just take anywhere from like three to six weeks. I would tree numbers, but it'll take around a month or so to get back to your strength levels when you resumed training, provided you don't lose any muscle mass and do at shoo, would like get hurt. And the final thing I'll stay is, yeah, just remember that muscle memory is beautiful phenomena, you know. So we do have this weird structure of the muscle cell, where as we see satellite cells proliferate through muscle damage and as the muscle gets bigger, we basically need the satellite cells which governed like like a tower, for like a phoneteller does, it governs a certain area in terms of the like radius it provides cellular activity to. As our muscles get bigger, we need more and more satellite cells to govern these errors. Now what happens is when we stop training, the muscle shrinks, but we don't lose the satellite cells, the number of satellite cells. So what happens is, as we start training again, we've got all the satellite cells there's. So I've got all the materials to govern bigger muscles, right, but the muscles have just shrunk a little bit. So as we resume training, our muscles will just rapidly grow back to where they were because we've got all the stuff inside the muscle to allow it to do so. So you will get that muscle back pretty quickly. That's all. Yeah, just complimentary to everything out of just said. Fear less, just getting their trained hard have some fun. So, yeah, that we know what realistic expectations are for our training during this time. How can we achieve that with our training? So what do we need to consider when put in together program yeah, so obviously you want to start with your training intensities, your volumes and your frequencies. They are the big rocks of program design. So, as I said, volume pretty similar to what you've been doing before. You might need a little bit more volume now if you're absolute load is decreasing. So, for example, if you're somebody who's been squatting, say two hundred kilos, you doing heavy leg presses and heavy leg extensions and you've been doing around twelve sets few quads per week, because now you're going to be lifting significantly less low and less they now you just have access to up to thirty kilo done bell and some bands. Right, which is basically my situation, you will most likely need to do a...
...little bit more training volume, because volume an intensity are inextricably related. So basically, when one goes up, the other has to kind of like other stay where it is or come down a little bit, vice versa. So with absolute load coming down, you might be able to train with a little bit more volume. When it comes to training frequency, again, because we're going to be using lower loads and potentially a little bit more volume, we might need to distribute that volume over higher frequencies because it seems to be a per session limit to how much volume is productive and that generally seems to sit around ten to twelve sets per muscle group. So if you're doing a little bit more volume, so number of sets per week per muscle group. So say you've gone from that twelve sets per week and you're going to sixteen sets per week. You might not want to do that over two sets. You might two sessions within the week. Might do it over three. So you might have say eight, four and four, for example. May Have like a really high volume day, you know, a heavier day and then a light of days start and then a heavier day, something like that, just as an example. And when it comes to excise selection, this is obviously the big one because we're going to be now modifying at exercises to make them as hard as possible to try and keep us below thirty reps so that we take out the ability for our aerobic capacity to limit us in achieving that peripheral localized muscle fatigue, whatever you want to call it. And in order to achieve that we're going to need to modify exercises. So instead of doing regular pushups where you might be able to do fifty, you might go with a wider group push up. If you wanting to target the Pex, of course you might increase your range of motion, so you might do extended rage of motion push ups. You might alter the difficulty of the lift by raising your feet in a push up, for example. So you just need to find ways to make exercises harder so that you can achieve a stimulus on the muscle rout that you're trying to target or or train the mover pattern that you want to be focusing on and try and keep you blow thirty reps right. So your goal now is to yeah, peak exercises, the train, the primary movement patterns. Do you want to have a squat? You want to have a hinge? You want to have a horizontal push, a horizontal pull, a Vertical Push, vertical pull? You can do some carriers. The then some APS and you pretty much covered right. So you want to train each of those movement patterns, picking exercises that are going to make it as difficult as possible so that you stay below thirty reps, and then you get after it. You're going to obviously be using more bands and dumb bells and things like that, and that can be really beneficial as well for increasing the difficulty of these lifts through adding resistance. But sometimes you might need to get creative and combined bands with your done bells and things like that, use household implements to add resistance to keep you below that thirty Reps. is there any ways that we can use exercise order to make things more difficult? Yeah, cool, so that's the next variable that we look to in the hierarchy of training variables. We have volume, freaks, the intensity, then we look to exercise selection, then we look to exercise order. So really good question. And when it comes to exercise order, the best way to approach that is as to sort of run out of tools at the level of the exercise selection to keep you below thirty reps. you can start to manipulate the order of exercises to pre exhaust muscles to make the movements that follow that exercise a lot harder. So, for example, you might use a unilateral movement or a single joint exercise where you don't need as much load to train that muscle group. As that muscle group becomes as more and more fatigued from the work that it does on that exercise, then you move into an exercise where you might typically require more load, but because you're already fatigued, you won't need to use as much load. An example of this is what I'm doing at the moment, cc squats. I could probably do about thirty, forty or more if I do them at the start of my work out, but if I do them after four sets of heavy Bulgarian split squats with a pause at the...
...bottom, where I do them like with weight and a band, so I get more resistance at terminal the extension doing the city squads straight after that with Mya Reps. so having really short respiens after that first set is based like a drop set without changing the load is really, really difficult and I can only get like maybe ten reps. so it's perfect. So modifying exercise order to have trained the same muscle group in a row is really useful, but also having the exercise that requires less weight earlier in the workout so that when you get to exercise that require more weight, you don't need as much weight because you're fatigued from the exercises earlier. That's a that's a really cool strategy to use. And so to other intensity techniques, which aren't really intensity techniques. They're more like exercise order and rest techniques. I don't really like the term intensity techniques because we're just manipulating exercise order and the rest that we have between these exercises. But you can use like super sets. So I really like, for reasons that I stated previously. We're talking about excise order. I like agonist supersets, so having the same muscle group trained one after the other without rest. So you can do, for example, like pushups into a dumb bell fly and if you're doing heaps of heaps of pushups and your reps are getting above thirty and you sort of exhausted all other possible sort of manipulations of the movement to keep you blow thirty, you can do your flies first and then you push ups and you get less than thirty because you're fatigue. So I really like that combination of agonis, soup sets, having isolation before compounds, after you've exhausted all the possible options for making the compound as hard as possible and when that's first in that order, and giant sets as well, try or try sets and giant sets, so we have multiple exercises in a row that trained the same muscle group. Really, really useful at this point. And Yeah, moving into the next variable, which is your rest it's if your training is not feeling super difficult, you want to condense your rest periods a little bit so that you're resting maybe I would say forty five to sixty seconds for the most part, and you would scale your rest periods up as you're lifting more and more weight. So if you're absolute loads are getting heavy and heavy and heavy, the need to maintain your performance and as sure you're recovering from a safety perspective will increase. So you need to wrest long. But if you're not using much weight and you're recovering really quickly not feeling like it's very difficult, you want to bring your respience down and tempos. Final sort of variable that you manipulate in your training, and I would just recommend altering the tempo to make the exercises as hard as necessary to keep you below thirty reps, like that's the goal, but also looking at spending more time in both the concentric and a century where the movement is most difficult, because we're going to get any paired stimulus just by nature of not having the equipment and weight available to us. We need to find where the exercise is hardest and spend more time. Then this is going to be really useful. It's going to teach a lot of people about resistance curves. Like they to realize that, hey, when I do banded Bi Sep curls, I don't actually feel anything at the bottom. It's like it kind of really sort of hits me at the top where, you know I mean elbow reflection. That's where the tensions highest. Or, Oh wow, I didn't realize it. When I do abandoned ladder rays, you know there's really no tension until I come up. There's tension for the start, sorry, whereas when I do done bells, is only really tension at the top of the movement. I think let's see that these kind of differences. So wherever an exercise is hardest. You want to probably manipulate your tempo to spend a bit more time there. So again with the PUSHUPS, the hardest part of a pushup is, you know, when we're on the floor in our chest is touching the floor, basically. So we want to maybe use some pauses there or could use pulses, you know, coming up and things like that. And it's also makes things a little bit interesting and it just gives us more tools in the tool belt to be able to make training progressively harder as we get...
...better and better and can perform better over the course of these next three to six months. Yeah, and I think something that hasn't really been talked about as much is what will happen, you know, in a few minute months time, if Jim's are still closed, because I dare say that there's only so long that using shopping bags and using all these strategies will last before getting quite boring. And I wanted to touch on something you said a bit earlier and which we also had a conversation about recently, which was finding your why, finding out why you train. I was hoping you could tell us a bit about that and how that can help us during this time it. Yeah, so we did touch on it to bit earlier, and I think finding a why is like really important now, and it can be quite confronting, like thinking about why you train, and usually people sort of stop when things get hard, like cognitively, like they is like these walls and barriers that prevent them from like getting deeper and deeper inside their head. But introspection is a really useful skill to acquire as a lifter. I think the more able you are to understand your deepest wise, the better off you'll be over the long term and you'll be able to navigate situations like this with a lot more ease. But finding it why you know, as I've done with you, Alex, I think is something that can really shine the torch on what it is that you want out of your training, and when you know that, it can give you a lot of direction and it can help you set goals and better understand what you want to achieve, and therefore you get a lot more purpose out of various things that you do within your training and it gives you a much more multidimensional like reason for training, and I think that's very important because we've seen, like even in literature, that you need dimensional athlete identity leads to burn out and I think our why is like very much tied into our identity as lifters because it is who we are, because the why is going to influence the determine the the how and then the what. Right, so what we do is very much a function of why we we we you know, train in the first place. So finding a why, I just really recommend people sit down and just reflect and get inside your own head. Ask yourself why five times. You know. Why do I lift? Why do I train? You might write down because I want to be strong. Well, the second why would be wide. I want to be strong because I want to challenge myself. Okay, why do I want to challenge myself? Because I love seeing the development and growth that comes when I push my body of mine to the limit. Why don't want to push my body of mine to the limit? Because it gives me a greater sense of satisfaction and it improves my self esteem. And all of the sudden, Holy Shit, you've just uncovered something that is so powerful that literally could ignite the fire and keep the fire within you alive through the Darker Times, and I think that is what people would need to be focusing on now more so than ever. Yeah, it's awesome and I know a lot of people respond really well to that and it's something that I'd encourage everyone to try. We're going to wrap it up there, but before we do, I just wanted to commend you for still sharing a valuable content during this time, and I'm not refer into anything informative or your free programs, but your dad jokes. So I'm giving you this opportunity now to give us some best. Well, before I do that, I think it's important to just mentioned that isolation has a lot of people doing a lot of things that they wouldn't regularly do. Well,...
...haven't done for sometimes, such as puzzles, Playing Card Games, play music, listening to music and so on, and I've been guilty of listening to way too much music, especially oasis, so much so that by my asked me, she's literally says me she needs me to stop seeing one wall. So I said maybe got well, I gotta Mom will like that's Aweso's good, because you'll be much more sime is that? As long as your mom and I are listening, I'm happy. Man. I make sure they did, but let me thank you if I get a laugh out that one. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it and we'll get you back on again at some point. My pleasure, Alex. thank you for having me. If you enjoy today's episode or ease leave a rating or share this around. And if you wanted to find out more about Jacob, I will leave all of his relevant information in the show notes. Thank you for listening and I will catch you in the next one.
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