What is up guys? Happy Tuesday. Welcome back to another episode of Eat, Train, Prosper. This is episode 165 and we are talking training abs and calves. So this will be the conclusion of our training series. I'm sure we may revisit it at some point in the future, but it's been a cool series that we have done over the last six, seven months that we are now wrapping up. But as always, before we get into the meat and potatoes of today's episode, Brian, what's the latest? Another day where I have a bunch of updates and it looks like you have one update. So I will try not to waste everyone's time here. So I went to South Carolina this past weekend to visit my brother. I haven't seen him in a year. I took Bryce in there, my older son, last summer to visit and meet his cousin. She's now almost seven. And this year I decided to bring Vivi, which is my younger daughter. She's four and a half. And so she got to meet her cousin. And it was amazing. It was just super cool to see them get to play together. They're their only cousins that exist. Like our family is not a huge family with a bunch of, you know, kids to play with an extended family, which is kind of a bummer. I grew up in a family where there was like 25 or 30 of us in the D .C. area and we would always get together for holidays. And I knew all my cousins and there were tons of them. And literally my kids have one cousin. So not quite. as much of a family vibe, but it was great for them to see each other. They were amazing together. They just vibed super hard. And then as it relates to fitness, which is, you know, the purpose of this podcast and stuff, it was another weekend where I had five days where I only got to work out twice. And these weren't even like the typical type workouts that I would usually do when I'm home. These were very truncated workouts that I just was trying to fit in. So we left on Friday. And so I had Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, which was our travel day back where I didn't have my normal routine four days. And during that time I did one resistance workout. I went to a park when we were at the beach at the lake and I did seven rounds of seven pull -ups and seven dips. Boom. 49 reps of each took me 16 minutes. That was the only resistance training I did the whole time. And then the next day my brother and I went for a run. did about two and a half miles, like super low key at zone two, and then found this hill by his house and we did seven hill sprints. So that was like a 35 or 40 minute cardio workout. So I literally worked out for less than an hour total over four days, which had me itching kind of honestly, because my normal workout structure as we've discussed on one of the Q and A's, someone asked about exercise addiction and I was like, yeah, I pretty much move. you know, two to three hours a day when you include walks and all the fitness that I do. So this was definitely different. But as I've been discussing all summer, these long weekends of not working out that much have produced some stellar performances upon my return. And so yesterday I went for a bike ride, still on my mountain bike as my gravel bike is still completely collapsed from when I got my concussion. I'm hoping to get that back in a couple of weeks. I went on my mountain bike and went an hour and a half and set like the highest speed that I've done on this course with like a super low heart rate, blah, blah, all that good stuff. Really just continuing to validate the importance of recovery and how that can really manifest performance at least acutely in one session. I'm not of the belief or mindset that, hey, just take tons of time off every week because you'll come back stronger. I do think you have to accumulate fatigue and then have that manifest in improved adaptations, which we also see. in strength training as well. On the strength training front, somehow I've managed to maintain my body weight this entire bike season at just under 200 pounds. Like it literally has actually gone up. When I started bike season, I was 194, 195. I'm 199 right now. And somehow my body weight has not plummeted like it did in prior years and in fact has increased and my performance has increased along with it. My bike performance obviously has been insane, like way better than last year. And my weightlifting has continued to improve. I've been literally setting PRs on some of my lower body based movements week to week. And I can only attribute that to the fact that body weight has remained stable or increasing. And I think it really just has shifted my perspective on what optimal is when it comes to hybrid training. So maybe I'll have some further thoughts on this and we can do an episode on, you know, hybrid training again, kind of revisit this as I think our last official episode where we discussed cardio was like zone two and zone five training, like maybe 50 episodes ago or something like that. And then we had an episode with Mike T. Nelson where we discussed a bunch of that stuff too, but maybe worth revisiting at some point as I'm now like, you know, multiple years into this hybrid training approach and kind of have some shift shifted thoughts on it. So Anyway, that was my weekend current state of things. Kids are starting school this week. Bryson starts today, which is Wednesday. Viv starts tomorrow. I cannot wait to have kids back at school. This is literally the parents' nightmare is summer. And I think we've touched on this, but it's so funny how as a kid, you know, you look forward to summer and you want summer all the time. And it's this freedom and this playing outside and being with your friends and late nights and all this stuff. And parents are just like, It's hell, like get the kids back to school. So it has been interesting, but definitely ready to get back into structure and routine. that is my life, Mr. Straker, what is going on with you? I have some some thoughts on the summer thing. I think the world has changed a lot, with summer like or just in general. Like I remember in summer, even being quite young, like second grade ish. So that's what eight years old. I would just disappear for the day with my friends and we would just go like ride our bikes through the neighborhood into these woods on the far side of the neighborhood. And like I would leave it like nine a and come home at like four or something like that. And that was just normal. Like me and my friends just disappear for the day. But like I don't think that happens anymore. And I think that's why it's like so much more stress on the parents. Like I would just go, I would literally go disappear for eight hours with my friends in the middle of the day. But I don't think that happens anymore. of an interesting question there, but do you have any recollection of what you did for food or sustenance during those times where you would just disappear? I think maybe we would like ride back to someone's house and eat something, but probably just didn't eat. Yeah, or just didn't eat anything. Yeah. Yeah, so I agree that's certainly different. I don't know that I was doing that at eight, maybe like 10, 11, I would be doing that. I think part of the stress right now at least is that the kids are in summer camps and stuff. And so where one of them goes isn't necessarily where the other one goes proximity wise. And this has been the biggest stress for Kim and I is that during the school year, It's like one of us does drop off and one of us does pick up. But when they're at camps on completely opposite sides of town, it's like one of us has to do drop off one side of town and one of us has to drop off on the other side of town and then we both have to do pick up as well. And so we're wasting like a bunch of time on either side of our day. And it just feels like there's a lot less time for us to like do work or exercise or whatever it is that needs to be done, you know. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, I have, so as you maybe have seen, I've gotten multiple questions about this from clients, people watching. I have this stupid bandage thing on my pinky. And I make the joke that like I'm very patient in certain aspects of my life with like investments in certain projects that are building, which I'll get into next. But then there's other times where I am like the most impatient asshole on planet. And that kind of bit me in the ass where I had a blood blister in my finger. like pinched it in between some plates at the gym. And then I got sick of the blood blister there and I like ripped it open one day and it bled a bunch. And then, of course, being lazy, I didn't like clean it properly or whatever. And then it got infected. then and then. Yeah. And then very strangely, a wart grew inside of it as it like healed. Yeah, super strange. So then I didn't want to. I didn't want to deal with it and I went to the dermatologist last Monday. So we're talking like 10 days ago now and I was like a little bit firmer than I probably should have been. And I my words were I need this taken care of today. And I was like, I'm not coming back here because she was giving me options to go. We can do the like the freeze spray, but it might not go all the way down. Then you have to come back. And it was like a 45 minute ride. I'm like, I'm not coming back. Take it out today. Whatever you need to do. So some things kind of maybe got like lost in translation and she was like, okay, yeah, I'll take it out. I mean, she cut a gaping hole into my hand, into my finger. So now I have like a wound there that has to stay covered because it's like a dime sized hole. That's probably like three or four dimes like deep, like she dug out a section of my finger. And now I have to manage this for probably like a month on the back end of it. So. I have to keep it covered like 24 seven or it will get like gnarly infected and I'll probably lose my finger. And that's why I have this stupid thing on that I have to, well, Jenny changes it. I can't do it myself, but I mean, it's, I'm so mad at myself for just being impatient and pretty much demanding to cut it out. huge bummer. mean, I think ultimately you made the right move long -term because those warts do tend to come back. Like I remember I used to have a couple of those back in teenage years for whatever reason. And we tried the freezing thing and it never worked. It never actually worked. It was like, I don't know, like the wart formed from like stress, improper diet, sleep. a number of different stresses across life that I guess I had as a teenager. And yeah, so I don't know, it was really like the freezing didn't work. One of them got cut out and then like one or two other ones just kind of went away once I think lifestyle got cleaned up. So warts are just a weird, weird thing. I don't really know too much about them, but I did have a situation like yours where I, so I tend to pick at things too. I think it's been passed down generationally. Like my mom said, my grandma used to do it too all the time. It would drive her crazy. but anytime I have anything I need to pick at it. in college, I went running, I got a blister on my foot. I used nail clippers to pop the blister, which is a whole other story because I didn't sanitize them first. So like a night or two later, I'm out partying. We're at this club. I'm in rainbows and there's like disgusting beer and sludge all over the ground. And I have this like open wound on my foot and I guess it got infected. either from the nail clippers or from the sludge on the ground. literally the next day I couldn't walk. Like I couldn't put any pressure on my foot at all. And I went to the emergency room and they were like, yeah, you're like a day away from us potentially having to amputate something. So thank God for antibiotics. And within a day or two, was back to good. But there's a lesson in not picking at things. Yeah, yeah, this one. it's like, and all because I was like, I need this gone today because I'm sick of it being there. And now it's literally going to be like this month long process until it's back to normal. Anyway, next, my approach. I am nine weeks and like three days post -op. I feel pretty, I feel pretty good. And the way I feel pretty good is I don't, I'm not like consciously thinking about it and trying to like, overly brace when I'm like picking up a weight or anything like I'm pretty much back to operating as is. And my approach to returning to training is I'm following pretty much my identical training program. need to modify leg stuff a little bit, which I believe I talked about last week, but I'm only doing two sets of everything. And I'm going to wait until my training performance matches where it was previously before I escalate anything else or make any further modifications from a volume standpoint. So I want to return my performance on those top sets back to my baselines, you know, which was the end of May. before I make any further modifications and certain things are progressing very, very fast. Unfortunately, there things that like, you don't fucking care about, like the seated adductor machine. I'm like a week away from being back to where I was. Other things, I'm still like 20 kilos off sort of thing. So that's just been interesting to see and watch how things can return a lot faster than you might expect. So that has had me excited, you know, but still being semi -cautious of not like just, you know, swinging for the fences fully and being cognizant of like my bracing and overarching and those sorts of things there. Are you still getting pretty sore from the lower volume dose, given that it's relatively novel in the grand scheme of you coming back? So the very flakes, the first two weeks back I got was getting insanely sore, but honestly, no, I'm the first leg session back I got insanely sore. My calves hurt so bad. I was like, especially after like when I would wake up in the middle of the night to peer in the mornings because like your feet are obviously like a little bit dorsiflex when you sleep. just standing flat on the ground was like excruciating pain for my calf. So I was like walking on my toes to the bathroom so I wouldn't have to stand flat. But other than that, no, like upper body really hasn't been getting sore really at all, surprisingly. interesting. And then the last update which is just kind of cool our Undefeated nutrition for our cream of rice brand that we have here available in Indonesia is now up on Tokopedia Which is kind of like an Amazon? An Indonesian Amazon comm where a lot of things are done here. So we are now shipping Indonesia wide which is pretty Dude, that's really cool. Congrats. That's awesome. Yeah, so it's been very cool to see something go full life cycle from literally what was just an idea, message, to then formulating a recipe and selecting suppliers and then designing stuff. It's really cool to see, and we've gotten really, really good feedback on it too, which makes me feel great, because I'm definitely that person who's terrified to put something out there, and people are gonna be like, this fucking sucks, you're stupid, you're bad at what you do. People are stoked on it, so I'm very, very happy. Yeah, you have a number of different kind of companies and pans in the fire or whatever the saying is for that. Now you have a bunch of different revenue sources, which is cool. Yeah, but I mean, in full transparency, everything we might my coaching is my bread and butter still, right? That's how I save money. Everything else has gotten rolled into the next project. So like every dime that I made off of the online coaching upgrade went into undefeated gym. Like every dime that we've made from from anything we've sold has gone to, you know, building the buying the next big production. I've literally not pulled a dime out of anything. That's way it's done, man. That's how to do it. Yeah. fortunate with the other, with my coaching and stuff like that. I don't rely on any of this yet, and it's fun getting to build cool things is the part of it there. That's it for me. that it? My, my last thing to say here, we always forget to promote our own stuff. Paragon has new cycles starting on August 26th. So when this comes out, that should be a perfect time to get going. It's a 12 week hypertrophy cycle. And I just wrote a really dope blog talking about why hypertrophy is the best and kind of all the different aspects that go into programming the hypertrophy cycle for me. So you can check out that blog on the website and then the new cycles start on the 26th. Yes, sir. Question for you about the new hypertrophy cycles. Is there any kind of like twist or anything that you built into these ones? I know you're not just like, with like your creative side of things, you're not just like pumping out a generic hypertrophy cycle. So is there any like wrinkle in this one? Well, we have a we're using low bar good mornings as one of the repeating movements for hip hinging, which we haven't done in years. It's always like an RDL. And we've had a number of requests to kind of try some good mornings. So that's cool for the full gym program. You can use a Smith machine, which I really prefer for good mornings as well. And then I've really kind of doubled down. One of the things we were talking about before we got on air just now was the current state of the evidence based space. And so we want to do an episode about this and kind of discuss some of these hot topics that are currently going on in the space right now. But one of them is rest periods. And I think that now when you look at the research as a whole, you can pretty confidently see that straight sets with long rest periods are super effective, which we already knew. But then you're also seeing that using things like rest pause sets and drop sets and things like that can be super effective with an increased set volume. And so I'm using a lot of that in this cycle where the compound movements that are really fatiguing are just done with two to three minutes of rest straight sets, you get the most bang for your buck from them. But smaller movements like single joint movements, especially short overload stuff, we're using a lot of short rest sequences just as a way to get more in in less time. And I think that that's a I wouldn't call it a unique aspect of the programing because there's other people doing it. But it's something that I've been using a lot in my training a lot with my clients one on one and something that I'm doubling down on in this cycle to really kind of get the most bang for your buck there. Yeah, perfect. That's pretty much the exact answer I was looking for. So, cool. Thanks for the question. All right, do you want to lead us into this one, Brian, here? Yeah, so this is our final one of the training series, abs and calves. I honestly don't have like a ton to say on this topic, so I think it's gonna be our shortest one, which is great. So the idea here will be to talk about the different movements and planes of movement that we would work through, and then kind of discuss frequency, volume, and intensity for like how we would go about maybe programming them into our own training here. So I think starting with abs makes sense. There are essentially four planes of movement here that we're gonna discuss for abs that are relevant for how you would want to train your abs if you were going to train them through their full range of movement here. And so the most obvious one is flexion. That literally just means you're taking your upper body and you're moving it closer to your lower body. or taking your lower body and moving it closer to your upper body. So one example would be like a standard sit up or a standard crunch or a curl up or something like that. And the other would be maybe like a hanging knee raise, a lying knee raise, a gar hammer crunch, something along those lines. And so those are gonna be the two most common, which are primarily focused on flexion. But the second component of abs is extension. And so this is actually a very undervalued and under thought about aspect of abs because when you're doing both of those movements that I mentioned earlier, which would be some sort of upper body to your knees or some sort of knees to your upper body, you have the option of not just creating flexion, which is the contraction or the short position, but you also have the ability to create extension, which would be the stretching of your abs or the arching of your low back. And so you can kind of think about, you know, If you're doing a, is it like a cat cow? Is that kind of a flexion and extension movement that people do on the ground or like, yeah. Yeah. So that's kind of how we want to think about implementing ab movements is that it's not just about creating tension at that short position where you're flexing the abs. It's also about extending the spine or arching the spine because when you arch the spine and kind of extend it, overextend even in a sense, the abs stretch as a result of what you're doing. So if you're just standing there listening to this and you stick your chest up real big and try to kind of arch your back and lean backwards without bending your knees, you will feel a stretch in your abs. As you're stretching your abs, your spinal muscles are actually contracting. And then as your abs contract, your spinal muscles are actually extending or stretching. So these two, sections of the body in your midline, your spine and your rectus abdominis, they're just universally linked when one is stretched, the other is extended, et cetera. Similarly to what we see with biceps and triceps or hamstrings and quads. Same kind of idea. So as you're initially getting into training your abs, I think focusing on flexion and extension and making sure you're attacking both portions of that range of motion are super important. Before I move on to the other planes, anything to add to that or questions or whatever? I mean, no, how you explain it is precisely how I explain it to clients. I'll typically use like the bicep example, right? Because for how when I program apps for clients and I tell you about, I want you moving through flexion and extension. And I usually use this example of you see people in the gym training their abs and they're just doing like a hollow kind of crunch hold and doing like twisty shit, right? And I'm like, how do you train your bicep? Like we go through extension and flexion. You don't like flex your bicep and then twist your forearm back and forth for like 50 reps. That's not what you do, but that's how people will train their abs. And I'm like, do we take it through flexion and extension just like we would a bicep? The abs are interesting because you could be holding one portion of the abs isometrically, like you're talking about doing something where you're sitting there twisting. So in my mind, when you say that, I think of a Russian dumbbell twist, where in this movement you would essentially prop your torso up, keep your feet off the ground, and you'd have a dumbbell or med ball in your hand, and you would twist side to side with that. In that movement, what you're doing is your rectus abdominis are mostly going to be held isometrically, like static. They're not actually doing flexion or extension. But what we are doing in that movement is one of our other planes. So the other two planes of movement that go into training abs are lateral flexion and trunk rotation. And so lateral flexion would literally be like, okay, let's back up a second. One of the movements that we can use for flexion and extension is the cable crunch. This is actually what I should have mentioned in the beginning when I said a curl up or a set up or something like that. Like a cable crunch is probably the best example of this because in a cable crunch, what we do is we will extend the spine at the top. So at the very top of the movement, we'll try to stretch those abs. And then as we move forward in the cable crunch, we'll be kind of curling ourselves forward into flexion as the abs contract. When we're doing lateral flexion, you could use a cable crunch again as a great example of this. So as you have that cable up on your head and you're about to go into your crunch, instead of crunching forward, you would set yourself up in a manner where you can crunch to the side. So you would set up the resistance so that instead of the resistance coming straight forward, sagittally plane from your body, you would set it up coming from the side. So it's kind of coming from the opposite side that you wanna bend over to. And that would be lateral flexion. So we can do lateral flexion with a cable. Like I just mentioned, you could do it with a dumbbell, like the old, you know, strongman exercise of taking like a hundred pound dumbbell and then just kind of bending to the side and coming back up and bending to the side and coming back up. Yeah, jump in. But we want one dumbbell, not a dumbbell in each hand. Which I still see people doing all the time where they're just holding a dumbbell in each hand, just letting the dumbbell pull them side to side. Exactly, exactly. So one dumbbell. But yeah, lateral flexion would be another component of training abs. And then the fourth component is trunk rotation. And so this brings us full circle back to that discussion of the dumbbell Russian twist or med ball Russian twist. because at this point, now you can better understand where that movement fits into the spectrum of training abs is like, yes, it's not training your rectus abdominis through flexion and extension, but we are training the rotation of the trunk, which will include the obliques, the serratus, like some of these other muscles that run along kind of the sides of the abs. And you do get the isometric aspect of the rectus abdominis holding that position statically as well. So those are kind of the four different regions or ways in which we would train abs. And then I feel like do we want to attack kind of frequency sets, reps, volume, all that good stuff there, and then we can kind of move on to calves. I think we should also include some some extra some like preferred or favorite exercises, maybe exercises we we program most often those sorts of things. yep, absolutely. Do you wanna start? yeah, I will. So the thing with abs is I always try and include it in programs, right? However, it's it's always an interesting placement of it because you place it at the end of a workout. I would say upwards of like 70 percent of clients are just going to skip it, right? I mean, I was guilty of that for literally up until twenty twenty two. I would never train. I would just skip it all the time. I would do like maybe two sets of abs per month. I have gotten significantly better at it. I'm still not convinced it really does much from a hypertrophy standpoint, but I do feel they're more capable now. I do think there's an important component of them, especially if you're someone who like you go to train abs and they cramp really badly. Like that would happen to me numerous times. I have clients that happens to pretty much means like they're very poorly conditioned. So that's kind of a. pretty decent proxy for like, it would be very worthwhile incorporating some specific direct work just to build up a simple layer of proficiency in them. I rarely program them more than twice per week. And it's typically only one exercise, one exercise per session, because again, it's opportunity cost on the time of the training session. And most people are going to have desires that are greater than, you know, potentially the slight hypertrophy we may be able to achieve from training them. Yeah, I totally agree with all of that. I want to touch on two things that you said are actually one and then address kind of the way I program it. You mentioned the benefit of doing them might be overblown or overstated or whatever. How much do you think that genetics plays into this? Because you and I both have pretty good abs genetically. We never really had to train them. Or could it be that maybe we trained them so much when we were younger and through CrossFit that now we have so much development that we're able to maintain the muscle mass that's there without directly training them as much as maybe we would need to. So how do we parse out genetics versus training history and the importance of training abs in that whole spectrum? Yeah, I would say that the genetics are probably have to do with if I, mean, my understanding or not necessarily understanding approach would be if you have abs at like a very high body fat percentage, all relative, right? You're not going to have abs at 20 % body fat. That's probably genetic. Like, and what I really mean by that is kind of like your body fat distribution is probably what most of that is. You might have a more balanced distribution and less of that more typical male androgen storage pattern. Hold on, on, hold on. There we go. yeah, 15 % body fat. But I do think there is there is a usage component to it that I'm actually kind of on the other side of right now. I've just come off of this like kind of eight week period of like really purposefully trying not to train them. And now, like, I really don't have app development and I'm very lean again. Like, like I'm not pinching much, but I'm like. There's no fucking apps there, you know? So I do think there is a component to actually using them, but it can be from different training, right? Like one of my, I have like a very long time repeating client, Ryan Rubio, very strong powerlifting background. Dude has like stacked his apps from all of that powerlifting, right? Just the sheer amount of like circumferential bracing and load that goes through that midsection from all those like years of powerlifting and stuff. Those are like your go, you know, ab muscles. So I do think that the background and the type of sport you played in those sorts of things can really, really contribute. There's no one that I could think of off the top of my head. I'm not saying there's no one, but just the one that I can really think of from just just had like really, really great developed abs, except maybe Jared Feather. That's one that I can think of where he talked about, he trained them. a lot, a lot, a lot when he was first getting started. And now even at like pretty higher body fats and stuff, like he has very good and well developed midsection. He says he doesn't train it pretty much at all anymore. Yeah, and those guys don't even really do a ton of like midline braced exercises anymore at RP. They're pretty much all back supported squat stuff. So you don't see a lot of like even abs being used auxiliary at that point in their training. Okay, so as we kind of get into the way that I like to program apps, very much like Aaron, I also like twice a week for clients or for my general programs. I usually do put them at the end. And the reason I do that is because I feel like if someone is going to skip anything, I would prefer them to skip the abs than to skip the leg extensions or the leg curls or something along those lines. I do provide the kind of advice in the Facebook group or whatever that if people would like to move the ab work onto a rest day or another day, like that is totally fine. There's no benefit in doing the ab work on leg day, which seems to be like the commonplace that most people program habs. I know back in the day for me, when I was following a bro split, we're talking like 15 years ago, 20 years ago, I, I would often just put abs on whatever upper body day felt the easiest. So oftentimes I'd have like a chest day and I'd be like, I love chest day. It's so easy. Like I do nine sets and I'm done and I can be out of there. Well, I'll just put three sets of abs at the end. And now that day turns from 40 minutes into 50 minutes and it's all good. So I think that, you know, where you place abs doesn't so much matter. So twice a week is great. Once a week, totally fine as well. Four days a week, also fine. Like if you, if you're somebody that like, like I've had clients as well who they don't even want. structured training for abs in their program. They're just like, you know, four or five days a week while I'm watching TV, I'll just do some leg lifts and some crunches in the living room for, you know, five minutes or something along those lines. And I'm like, Yep, that's totally fine, too. So I think that with abs, because they get skipped all the time, and people still do fine, you know, aesthetically, any abs you do are better than no abs. So So I think that's like the first thing to think about in most cases. as far as exercise selection programming, stuff like that, I love programming a, a superset of abs where we go from a lower AB exercise that focuses on the stretch or the extension, into an call it upper AB exercise where we focus on the contraction. So we'd be talking about the first exercise being one where you bring your legs into your chest. And then the second exercise being one where you bring your chest to your legs. And so one of my favorite combos there is to go from a hanging leg slash knee raise, where we're really focusing on extending at the bottom into a cable crunch or a curl up. And a curl up is just like a crunch or a sit up, except instead of actually focusing on the crunch or the sit up, you're only focusing on extending and flexing the spine. So literally you're trying to like stretch your spine and can, and stretch and contract your spine, which then stretch and contracts the abs in reverse, as we discussed earlier. So something like that. Huge fan of a decline lying leg raise. One of my favorite things back in the CrossFit days would be to do the GHD but in reverse. So you would basically put your low back over the hump where you would usually be doing sit ups and you'd hold the leg pads with your hands. your legs, as you're doing your leg lift, your legs are down super deep. as your low back is along the barreled pad of the GHD machine and you get just an insane stretch in the abs at the bottom. And so I would superset that with GHD setups. So you're going kind of the complete reverse of each other. Similar idea to what I was saying with, you know, a hanging leg raise into a cable crunch. It's just more of like a hypertrophy focused version of kind of the same idea. So I love, love, love supersets like that. Usually at least once a week in my programming, I'll have one of those super sets for the AB day. And then the other day we'll usually have some sort of, one of the other two parts of the AB. So either trunk, flexion, lateral flexion. to the side or trunk rotation, like kind of that Russian twist or landmine, I don't want to call them wood chops. They're like halos or something like that landmine halos where it kind of comes up and around and over. I kind of like those. I like using the landmine in a lot of cases anyways, like you can kind of do, you can get a little bit of trunk rotation, but also rectus abdominis by using a landmine or a dumbbell and kind of doing a cross sit up. So, you know, you would hold your landmine or your dumbbell in one hand, have your feet anchored, and you would kind of punch across your body as you're sitting up. So I like doing those occasionally, but definitely my bread and butter, like the main movements that I use are going to be cable crunches. I prefer to do them seated because I feel like too much hip involvement occurs when people do them kneeling. So I love doing them personally seated and I like having clients do them seated. One of the easiest ways to do this is to sit in a lat pull down machine, the one with the knee pads or the thigh pads and sit in it in reverse. So your back is leaning up against the thigh pads and then pull the lateral, the pull down machine over your head and do your crunches that way. Love, love, love that variation. Aaron's nodding along like he does as well, which is cool. And then I think curl ups are another one for the for the flexion component. I love the curl up, especially a decline one if you can get yourself on a Swiss ball, or something like that, where you can really focus on using the ball to allow yourself to get full extension of the abs and stretch them and then using the ball to kind of curl your upper back forward. I mean, that setup is is premier. and usually I just stick in low, like the same rep ranges I would use for normal exercises, like eight to 12, six to 10, maybe up to 15. But especially when I'm doing these movements as supersets, I will try to stay in that six to 10 range because you're getting two failure points. It's like for me, it's the same idea of going from like a dumbbell lateral raise to a cable lateral raise, you know, getting that shortened movement into the length and movement. in this case, I guess I'm going lengthen to short. Similar idea though, keeping the reps lower because you're getting two fatigue points. And I think that covers the majority of my thoughts and implementation of abs. Anything to add? I do have a couple couple pieces. One of my favorites that you didn't mention, my all time favorite is definitely the the lat pull down seated cable crunch. And what I love is like you, especially if you have one where the the thigh pad is adjustable, you can adjust the height to put it like right in your low back. And then that gives you kind of that like that physical cue of how to like arch around it to get that stretch at the top. Like I love doing that. One that I use a lot is a a foam roller reverse crunch, where you put the foam roller behind your hamstrings and pin it in with your calves. And then that keeps your hips, your degree of hip flexion fixed. So then you're actually articulating like at the abs really, because I found oftentimes when I would program like the lying leg raises, people just swing their legs to get the reps up and I'll program it in like. you know, eight to 15, they're like, I'm 30 reps easy. And I'm like, show me a video and it's just dog shit performance. And I'm like, no, no, no. So by removing that hip flexion standpoint, like you only have one really movement pattern to articulate. that's rotating into what would be a posterior pelvic tilt. And then that puts all the tension in the abs. So I really like using that one. And that's another one where I mean, you can maybe get like 15 reps on the first set and then they drop off like pretty significantly after that. I also really love the Swiss ball crunch. And that's another one I find that people bastardize and they like make it really easy so they can just like, you know, rep out 40 reps. And I'm like, no, no, no, you need to lay all the way back over that. Let that ball really stretch you out. And then you're getting nine, 10, maybe 12 reps. Like it's very challenging when you do it right. Those I would say are my bread and butters there that I love using. I think the biggest mistake that people make, kind of piggybacking on what you just said, is using the hip flexors too much. And so if we're just raising and lowering the legs and there's actually no movement of the spine flexing and extending, then the hip flexors are gonna be the primary driver of that movement. So when I talk about doing a hanging knee raise, I'm not talking about just like hanging there straight and then lifting your knees up. because if you're just hanging there straight and lifting your knees up, you're just using your hip flexors for the most part. What we really want to do is focus on arching the spine at the bottom and crawling forward at the top. And so that should be ubiquitous across any ab movement is extension and flexion of the spine. And if you're not movement isn't including that, then you are just doing it hip flexor dominant and you will get some abs. Absolutely. Like I've done plenty of hip flexor work that has made my abs sore. And so you could be getting this feedback that you're doing great work for your abs and you are doing some work for your abs, but you could be doing better work for your abs without the fatigue and your hip flexors, which you need for the other movements that we do that are going to be your bread and butter for your hamstrings and your quads and your glutes and stuff like that. So tiring your hip flexors out on ab movements is just not a prudent move. Cool. Well, moving on to calves, guess. So we have two parts of the calf. We have the gastrocnemius, gastroc, and the soleus. The gastroc is going to be the big, bulky part of the upper calf that when people, when you see someone and you're like, damn, that person has great calves, that's because their gastrocnemius, gastroc is quite developed. You see that bulge at the top, relatively close to the back of the knee, depending on where it inserts. And The gastroc is gonna demand the majority of our training for our calves. When you train your gastroc, you're gonna get some soleus in there too. It's not like you only are training your gastroc that way, but when you train your soleus, which is done with bent knees, so that you can think of the seated calf raise as really like the only way you can isolate the soleus is to keep your knees bent. you're not getting much gastroc in there. So you're primarily isolating the soleus and then the soleus is just a much smaller muscle that sits below the gastroc and developing it can look really cool when you're lean. Like if you're you're on stage and like calves are your thing, like you seeing the separation between the soleus and gastroc can look pretty cool. But I don't really program any soleus work. Like I just think when you're talking about bang for your buck, there just isn't much And if we're going to be spending any time at all on calves to begin with, just think 99 % of people need to be focusing that attention onto the gastroc. What do you think? I mean, yeah, you pretty much took the words out of my mouth. If I'm putting two two sessions of cat, like if someone's training legs twice or more per week, and we have like two sessions and I'll typically put like a, you know, a standing variation and then a seated leg curl if their gym has a seated leg curl. But if like someone's are sorry, seated leg. What the fuck is it called? Seated calf raise. Yes, thank you. but I'm not gonna, if someone doesn't have it, I'm not going to have them rig it up some other way because it's just not worth the time and effort. would just do another variation of a standing calf raise or the same exact variation and just work a different rep range really. Yeah, Studies are kind of showing the same thing too. Like I'm not just stating that, you you should do this. their studies are mostly validating the same. And then I think one other component of the calves that has been very prevalent across the research in the last few years even has been how much they respond to the length and position, stretch, mediated hypertrophy. I mean, the whole spectrum of different things you can do to stretch the calf from I guess it would be stretch mediated hypertrophy officially because if you're stretching your calf like Eric Helms did. So this dude, Eric Helms literally got a boot off of Amazon that you can crank and tighten and he would sit his foot in this boot for an hour, six days a week and just stretch his calf at what he considered to be an eight out of 10 level of pain. So we're talking like six hours a week. of stretching his calf at an eight out of 10 level of pain just to see if it would grow. And big surprise, it freaking grew. Like it really grew. And he did that after a study that showed the same thing in a cohort of research subjects where they were stretching their calf in the similar boot for similar amounts of time each day. And in that study, they grew 15 % growth in the calves. from the group that was stretching in the boot to the group that wasn't stretching. And we're not even talking about dynamic movement where you're doing calf raises. We're just talking about sitting in a boot, stretching your calf for an hour, six days a week, produced 15 % growth. I mean, that is insane growth. That's the kind of growth that you actually notice like visually. You don't need an ultrasound to detect that or an MRI or whatever. So A, the calves respond really well to stretch mediated hypertrophy. Then we have another study and we've kind of broken down why we don't love this study in the past, but there was a new study out on calves where they compared a group doing calf raises on a leg press, which is my favorite version of calf raise for anyone that cares. We'll get into that. but calf raise on a leg press where your heels are hanging off the bottom and you kind of put your toes on the bottom of the leg press platform. And they found that doing full range of motion calf raises to failure or doing full range of motion calf raises to failure plus partial reps until you couldn't do 50 % of the rep anymore produced much better growth in that case. Now our problem with that study is that they were doing more volume just by doing the partials at the end. So what they really should have done in that study is had like a third group that did the full range of motion reps and then maybe did top range of motion partials or did a drop set or a rest pause set or did something to kind of match a volume to the group that was doing failure plus partials. But without that data, we can't be 100 % sure that the extra growth they received was from the partials and not from the extra volume that they were doing. So we don't really know, but it does seem that the lean of the literature in general seems to show that the growth of calves is improved by working it through the lengthened range of motion. more and getting kind of some of those extra reps after failure. I have a question, Brian. I know there was a recent CAF study, recent, let's call it this year. I thought it was the one you were speaking about, but I remember seeing there was one that had a third group that pretty much only did like, not necessarily like lengthened partials, but like lengthened back to like parallel or whatever. It could be a completely different study, but okay, okay. And what I was gonna... like, you're right that there was a group that did that in another CAF study. And that's why I was saying there's been like a huge amount of CAF studies recently that kind of validate the same idea. But I off the top of my head cannot recollect the specifics of that other study, the prior study that you're referencing. Yeah, maybe I can dig it up and drop it in the show notes for the listeners, but it was one that the difference was profound enough where it actually changed how I'm training my calves and I'm pretty much training them pretty heavy and maybe like the first two reps I can get like a full all the way up, like full contraction of the gastroc and then I pretty much call the set when I get like pinned at the bottom and can't get off and I'm pretty much just I let my range of motion like shorten, shorten, shorten until I can't get like back to you we would consider like out of a negative, you know, and that's where I've been calling my my set. So and it's I've been doing a lot less than just training them like really hard in that manner, because if I can remember like from this man, I really wish I would have pulled it up. It was a significant improvement over the other other two groups. So, yeah. just really respond to lengthened overload and stretching. kind of related to this when Dave McHoney was here visiting me in April this past year, we went to N1 and hung out with Cass. And at the end of our session with Cass, Dave made us all go through this calf experiment, because he's the guy that's only trained one calf for like the last three years, just to see if there would be any changes. He's super into calves, right? and so he had us do this test where we did a one -legged calf raise, you know, standing on a riser. So you can get that full stretch at the bottom. And he had us go up to the very top, like our top contracted position that you could achieve. And he had that marked. So he had like a little ruler and we marked with like a little piece of tape or whatever, like how high were you at the very top of your very first rep? And then he had you go through a set of single leg calf raises and he would stop the set when you could no longer get as high. at the contraction as you did in the first rep. How many reps do you think like the average of us, me, Berto, Cass and Dave, how many do think we achieved before we couldn't get to the very top contracted position anymore? No weight, just body weight. three to four. wait, no, no, wait. Okay, okay. But either way, we're talking body weight, no weight. And most people when they're doing calf raises are not doing sets of six to 10 with body weight and then going to failure. Most people are using a heavy ass dumbbell. They're doing maybe six to 10, eight to 12, whatever it is. But there's no way that they're actually achieving a peak contraction at the top. And I think that the point of Dave's demo there was just to say that it doesn't matter. Like who cares if you get the peak contraction at the top? Because to us, it felt like we were still getting all the way up and we were losing half an inch, then three quarters of an inch, then a full inch. And yet in our minds, we're like, yeah, we're still getting really quality calf work in right now. It feels like we're still getting a full range of motion, but it just doesn't matter. Like even if we were getting less range of motion or like you said, even if we're going only halfway up to the point where our feet are parallel to the ground, like we're going from a stretch to feet parallel, then a stretch, then feet parallel. You can use so much more weight in that setup than you can trying to get full range of motion all the time, because we were limited to using just body weight, but that's not going to produce the best calf growth. Using a heavily loaded weight in the bottom range of motion is going to produce much better calf growth according to kind of all this research that we've seen over the last few years. And I think that that speaks to the way I've always trained calves to like my entire life. I've done single leg calf raises with a dumbbell on stairs because that's just the most accessible for me. It's the number one way I train calves. Even though I said the leg press is my favorite, I do think doing them on the leg press is my favorite primarily because I can do it bilaterally. So don't have to fail twice, but single leg calf raises on a stair holding a dumbbell have been my bread and butter throughout the majority of my training career. And I would be doing it with somewhere between 50 and 75 pound dumbbell sets of eight to 10. And there's no way I was getting a full contraction at the top, but I really just don't think it matters. And I think most people's calf training probably could be heavier than they're doing it if they're focusing so much on the contraction. Yep. Yeah, I agree. I still I watch people a lot, you know, in the gym and they see what people are doing. And I would say seven out of 10 times, people still are not taking their calf into the stretch position like that knowledge still has not permeated to your like your average gym, bro, in 2024, you know, which is wild to me. But that's just the reality of what I see when I people watch. yeah, no, I agree. Okay, so as far as programming them, much like abs, I program them once or twice a week. They're usually at the end. Sometimes we do them, sometimes we don't. I went through a period of time where I was programming them before my quad movement, and it was an experiment to see if doing it would increase range of motion at my ankle for the quad movement. And I actually think that it helped. Like if I... If I ever reached a point where I was going to try to compete in bodybuilding and actually really cared about full development of my calves, I think that's the way I would do it. I would do calves before my quad work because I don't think it has any negative impact on it. And that way it would force me to ensure that I'm actually getting it done. But given the current state of me, you know, caring as much about biking as I do about lifting, not intending on stepping on stage anytime soon. Calves tend to be something that gets skipped a lot of times. I would say I tend to do them once, maybe twice a month, even though I program them four to six times a month. And usually what I'll do is just do the single leg calf raise on the stair with the dumbbell, because it's right there, it's accessible. I have a home gym. I don't have a leg press where I can do calf raises. So that's really my preference personally. As far as programming it for the masses, usually I'll do the calf raise leg press. For home gym, this is actually something we usually in the other episodes we talk about how would we do this for home gym and full gym and dumbbell programs. I don't think we need to do that full spectrum for these movements. But I do think for for calves, one of the really cool ways that you can create a two legged bilateral calf raise at home would be to use a dip belt and stand on risers. So I used to do this a lot when I cared about calves, I would stand on like a platform a couple inches high, I'd throw a dip belt on and I would use my hands to brace on the power rack and do calf raises that way. Same thing can be done with a safety bar. So again, standing on a riser safety bar on your back, holding on to the power rack for balance. Both of those super effective variations of calf raise for at home people, just annoying because they take setup time. And so that's why I tend to veer more towards the single leg calf raise on the stair versus trying to set up the bilateral calf raise. Yeah, yeah, I would say the same thing. I'm programming fewer and harder sets. I almost always take programs, calves to failure, but I'll provide a titration ramp up so that people don't end up like I did, know, and incapacitated and unable to walk around. And I'll say like, leave it at like three RIR and then like scale, you know, titrate up from there. I'm always doing a bilateral standing right now. I'm doing them on the pendulum squat actually, which I do like because the hip is really the pressure point. All my, like my, my favorite calves, I would say my favorite calf machine of all time is the Cybex kind of seated, like 45 degree angle one. It's, it's like a little, it's kind of like your, your linear hack squat sort of setup, but it's like a calf raise there. And that's because you can push through the hip and you don't have to worry about like the bracing through the core. or anything like that. It's just simpler, I would say. But yeah, lower rep range, like we talked about, no more than like twice per week. Unless someone really has like a, their calves to grow, you know, we can, they do respond well to volume while you are still performing that volume. But when the volume returns to normal after your like calf cycle, there goes the kind of the notable increased gains there. you can't hold on to them, huh? no, because there was a time where I was training on five days per week, you know, in like 2021, no, 2020. And they actually did grow. was like, holy shit, it's working. And then like once I stopped and went back to a normal volume, like they literally returned to where they were previously. was just accumulated fluids and stuff and like stress in the calves. so when you, I have a question on the pendulum. So does your pendulum have a gap at the bottom and then that's where you're putting your feet so that you can get that full stretch? Gotcha. Yeah. Mine does not have a gap at the bottom, which is unfortunate because I would love to do them on the pendulum as well, but it's like, I can't even get the stretch if I put my foot on. Yeah, the platform. Yeah, the platform doesn't go all way to the floor. There's a cup. mean, probably like eight inch, you know, difference. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if I could cut the bottom of my platform, that'd be cool. Sweet, well I think that's all we got for Cavs and Abs. Yeah, so this was cool. I think we ended up getting way more deeper into it than we had originally thought and planned. But I think for muscles that are typically overlooked, there was a lot of good takeaway in here, specifically the flexion and extension of the trunk for the abs. I cannot stress how important that is and how you can train your abs like any other muscle. Just take it seriously. You don't need a shit ton of reps or anything like that or sets, but just push them through full. and extension and you'll at least get stimulus. cannot guarantee that they're actually gonna grow to a significant degree, but you will definitely get a stimulus there. So as always guys, thank you for tuning in. Brian and I will talk to you next week.