What is going on, guys? Happy Tuesday. Welcome back to another episode of Eat, Train, Prosper. Today is Brian and myself, episode 166, and we are discussing current topics in the evidence -based scene. Now, a bit of a caveat that Brian and I would like to put on the front of this episode is we are not going to be digging into the research specifically on this episode like we do in some other prior episodes. but we are really just going to have a higher level discussion and include some of our own opinions, which may differ, right? Again, fully transparent about just some of the high level things in the space that we have been seeing more commonly and recently. Before we get into the nuts and bolts of today's topic, as always, Brian, can you kick us off with some updates, please? Yeah, that was a perfect intro. That's exactly the way I'd frame it to just kind of having a conversation about some topics that seem to be sparking some interest in the industry right now. So hopefully you guys find that helpful. I have three updates today, so I'll be quick. First one is we just had a huge birthday bonanza the last week. I turned 42 and then my son actually turned seven in early September, but he really wanted a pool party and the pools here stop allowing parties to occur after Labor Day. So we just decided to do his party this prior weekend as well. So he turned seven, I guess, two weeks before he actually turned seven. Super fun. Got to got to do that. For my birthday, we tried to go out to eat as a family on Wednesday to a restaurant downtown here in Boulder. And the kids were like just epically. I mean, I don't know that they've been this bad at a dinner in like a year and we took them out and like the whole thing was just miserable like Trying to entertain them not getting sat initially having a 15 minute wait them throwing a fit Getting sat throwing a fit again not liking the food throwing another fit It was basically a pretty miserable birthday dinner out for me So Kim and I went and had like a proper date night out where we got like steak and potatoes and all that good stuff a few days later And then we had Bryson's party the next day. So big, big kind of social hangout, lots of birthdays, all that good stuff. But more interesting than that, some buddies and I, so me and three other guys decided to bike Rollins Pass on Sunday. So like two days prior to recording this and Rollins Pass is a. Call it an ATV or Jeep road. It's basically double track where you could fit like, you know, an off -road vehicle of some sort or bikes like we're doing. and it basically starts at 9 ,200 feet by this tunnel called the Moffitt tunnel here in Colorado. It's about an hour from Boulder and you kind of meander and wind up this mountain and you literally just climb for the first 2300 feet of vertical. we're starting at 9 ,200 feet, which is already pretty high, almost two miles up. And then we're climbing up to 11 ,500 feet, which is over two miles up. And I've never biked in super thin air like that before. So it was something I was really looking forward to, especially as if you guys have listened to any of our prior Instagram Q and A's, there's always questions about when I'm going to do Leadville. And we've talked about Leadville being this like high altitude mountain biking race here in Colorado that goes up to 12 ,500 feet. And I was always so nervous about this idea of biking at extreme elevation, thinking that the air was going to be so thin and I wasn't going to be able to breathe and all that stuff. And yes, at eleven thousand five hundred, the air was a bit thinner. It was a bit harder to breathe. But I was surprised at how. It didn't affect me as much as I thought it would have affected me, and I was still able to press on the pedals and continue climbing and continue biking, even at eleven thousand five hundred feet. so that was just a really cool experience. The whole ride took three and a half hours. It took us about two hours to get up. And then we kind of chilled at the top a little bit, slowly meandered down and then bombed it down. Once we got about halfway and the terrain kind of, chilled out a little bit, but a really cool experience, something that I think I'll probably do again, if and when Leadville becomes a real opportunity. a couple of the other guys on the trip with us also want to do Leadville. And so. They were saying 2025, I think 2026 might be a more realistic endeavor given that it's 105 miles and none of us have done anything over 50 miles before. So we have a ways to go, but I'm excited to do it, to train for something and have a group of guys that want to do it with me. So that was called Rollins Pass, if anyone ever wants to look that up, it's pretty cool. And then last update here is that, man, resting heart rate and HRV are just something so interesting to me. And I'm still trying to figure out why sometimes they'll just like settle high. And for like two or three weeks, I'll be like resting heart rate at 46. And now for the last like two or three weeks, it's settled lower. And now my resting heart rate's like 37 or 38, almost like 10 points lower. And it does this sometimes. And I can't quite figure out the rhyme or reason for why it does it, but I'll go through. It's not even just like an acute. where it's like, I had an over trained day or I didn't sleep well. So my heart rate is higher. It's like when it decides to be higher, it's higher for like a few weeks. And then when it's lower, it's like lower for a few weeks. And I don't like feel differently or anything. It's just kind of some weird, some weird stuff I can't quite figure out. I don't know if anyone else experiences the same thing, but like right now I'm in a period of time where it's been low for two or three straight weeks. And every morning I wake up and it's in the high thirties and my HRV is insanely high as well, which I think is important thing to note for people I've mentioned on the podcast before, but I've had so many DMs about HRV and people inquisitive about it. And one thing that people don't even realize, I think, is that having a lower heart rate elicits a higher HRV in most cases, because what you're doing in HRV is you're measuring the variability between heartbeats. And if your heart is racing really fast, like then there's inevitably going to be less distance between your heartbeats. Whereas if your heartbeat is boom, boom, boom, then there's just inevitably going to be more microseconds of distance between each of those heartbeats. So as your heart rate is lower, your HRV goes higher. And I think most people don't understand that. So as we compare my HRV when my heart rate is 46 to where it is when my heart rate is 39, like, nothing changes in the way I feel or in my breathing pattern or in anything like all of the variables are the same. I'm doing it at 6 a on my couch in the same position, but the HRV will inevitably be higher when the heart rate is lower and it will be lower when the heart rate is higher, even from 39 to 46 beats. So imagine if your heart rate is 60 and you're not like a super fit cardiovascular phenom. then you will inevitably have a lower HRV just because your resting heart rate is higher. all that stuff has a lot of interplay in between it. And I think it's super interesting. And I'll probably do a post on it at some point. We still probably should have someone on to discuss it in more detail. We've touched on this with Mike Nelson when he was on our podcast, Dr. Mike. maybe a year, a little less than a year ago, but we probably should have someone on to like straight up discuss HRV and some of these intricacies that I'm intrigued about. Maybe Mike would even be a good guy to do that. And then the last thing on HRV is just, I don't make training decisions based off of it. I let it guide me in a sense. And so there are times where my HRV is really poor, but I feel fine. And so I'm gonna train because I'm gonna ignore that the HRV told me it wasn't good. And I'm just gonna say, I feel good and I'm gonna train. and then there's other times, like, for example, yesterday, we just did this three and a half hour bike ride on Sunday. So I woke up Monday and I had great HRV and great heart rate. And I was like, wow, that's so interesting that I biked for three and a half hours in the mountains. And I'm still getting all these great readings because I don't feel great. And so what I did in that case is I didn't work out immediately because I didn't feel like I wanted to. And as the day went on and I had some food and I got to walk in and I did some work and all that, I started to feel better. And so at that point I decided to work out. And so I do think that ultimately your decision as to whether you honor what your heart rate and HRV numbers are saying and make decisions based off of that or not should probably be based more on the way you feel and using that HRV and heart rate data as just like some additional insight. But the way that you feel subjectively should be the primary determinant of whether you work out and I would love to play a little bit of devil's advocate on that. And I'm not saying that I'm right or anything like that by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm in a bit of like a slump, we can call it. I haven't been feeling great. I think I'm going through some, I get these periods in my life where I just feel emotionless, empty. Like not bad emotions, not good emotions, but like there's just no emotions, right? And I'm kind of crawling out of one of those now. And I really have to just like follow my structure and my schedule or I just don't feel like doing anything. And I had a day where I almost didn't train. I think it was Saturday. I just felt like dog shit. Mood was just in the gutter and I was like, no, go in, get your shit done. PRs, like good PRs, not like Aaron returning from hernia PRs, like even beating prior numbers PRs. And I was sitting there and I'm like, man, this is wild. Like I did not, I don't want to be here today. I'm in a pissy mood. And that has not impacted my performance whatsoever. And I just found it really fascinating. And I often do find myself kind of conflicted with that because there's numerous times. I think back to like when I was, when we, when you still had the gym, the first time I put 315 over my head, felt like dog shit. My shoulder was killing me. And I was, my plan was to not even try to do the lifts because my shoulder hurt so bad and I felt like shit. And I by far one of my best overhead performances I've ever had. So I always find this thing like really interesting is it's, I do think it's a good proxy, but I think the word proxy is a good usage because it's not always like causative. So you're saying subjectively, you didn't feel like you wanted to work out, but you actually don't have like heart rate or HRV data to say whether maybe that was telling you like, dude, you should go work out. Like you're in great shape right now. so yeah, no, I mean, I think that's why it's a multifactorial system. Like, like I love having the data because I can see the data, but I don't let that data affect me. It's like when the people use sleep apps and they see shitty sleep, but they thought they had good sleep. And then suddenly they have a really bad day because their app told them they had bad sleep. Yeah. don't let that affect me either. I wake up and I make a decision about how I slept and then I look at my sleep app and I don't let that affect kind of how I live my day. And I think similarly, we can can compare that to kind of what you you mentioned as well in that sometimes the way that you feel isn't always perfectly representative of what you're going to do in in your implementation of it or whatever. So, yeah, like I, I, I relate. I understand that. I guess to push back and play one more. thought experiment here. In situations like that, maybe not this specific one, but in the past, as you think through that, or this specific one, maybe, do you feel like you pay a price for going in and having this incredible performance and this monumental effort on a day where maybe you don't feel the best? Do you feel like there's a price to pay for the next 1234 days after that? Or is it just like you're riding high on this? PR that you had and like everything now is suddenly better because you had this great training session. So that's the thing. And that's why I really went in because like I said, I've been in this kind of emotionless funk where like I was, it was more so like, cool. You know, I was able to progress. Like I like that, but it didn't like change my day. I still had a crappy day. I still was like low mood, those sorts of things. But what I find is I've my feelings will lie. And I say, I say this with clients all the time, like your feelings will lie to you at times. And that's why I really like the structure and the schedule. But if I would have went in and like, hey, I'm supposed to get nine reps for, you know, a rep improvement and I get like five, I'm like, okay, performance is piss poor. We're wasting our time here and I would leave. But it's just not always like super cut and dry, unfortunate. Yeah, I think for you and I, it's also interesting just looking at it from a higher level perspective because you and I are both pretty low affect where we both trend pretty neutral and we aren't very high and very low. And so like I relate, like I understand exactly what you're saying. In many times, I sometimes wish I had more of that emotional grit or that emotional volatility even, because sometimes I wish that I could feel more and feel less. or feel more about certain things like feel highs and feel lows, but I'm always in the neutral state. And so it is kind of hard to ascertain or kind of pick out why or how I might be feeling a certain way and whether that should in fact affect the decision that I make. Exactly. Yeah. All right, what's going on with you? Okay, so first that is a top of my mind while it's here I don't know if I already did this but our cream of rice that we've you Been making over the however many months is up our web store is up only in Indonesia for right now But we have product so this we have here so everyone on YouTube can see it's pretty cool It's very cool to see something come like full circle And I'm very proud of it as is everyone and it's been very what I really like is I know what's in it because I put it in there, you know, and like did it also, I know there's like no, there's no trust that has to go into anything. I mean, don't get me wrong. This is purely for my own selfish reasons because everyone has to like trust me, which I don't really like, I'm, it's, it's a tangible, which feels really, really cool. Like so far everything business related has been, you know, online, which is still, you know, very real of course, but it's less tangible than like holding something in my hands. So that's been cool. We unloaded our first gym order this past Tuesday that came in. It was a hellacious day. Let's just put it that way. It was just like it was just long manual labor, figuring things out on the fly, not being able to communicate with the like workers, which I mean, don't get me wrong. Like it's time for me to learn Bahasa, which is Indonesian. But yeah, and there was numerous like there was numerous times where I literally thought to myself like these motherfuckers built the pyramids, however many thousands of years ago, like we can figure this out. But I mean, it really felt like that. And you just, you have a new appreciation for how heavy some of these machines are with like a calf raise. It has like a, you know, a 400 pound stack or whatever. like half, about half of them were all about 125 kilos or up or heavier. The heaviest being the calf raise, which was 253 kilos, which is literally like well over 500 pounds. Yeah. It was just hell to move. absolute hell. So I'm very glad it's over. And then for the next order, the gym will just be far enough along where we can like use a forklift and like do things properly, at least to get it in and then up the stairs will still have to do it. But an adventure for sure everything it's just been an adventure. Did you have to carry that calf machine up the stairs? we did not get that one up the stairs. like everything that was like under a certain threshold, we carried it up the stairs. And what we literally did was like everything, all the machines were like on a pallet screwed into a pallet and like wrapped, put rope through the corners of the pallet. And then would take like a, I think like a two by four, but like a thicker, stronger version of that. And would like put that under the ropes and then would like lift that. So like a guy on each corner and then people like stabilizing it, but man, it was brutal. Absolutely brutal. I came home just like exhausted and wiped out and just like spent. Yeah, I mean, you texted me and said we couldn't do the podcast. So like, you know that you were worked. Yeah, I came home. had like two outstanding check -ins to do. actually, got up super early to like make sure I got, you know, all my check -ins done. I was almost able to get through all of them. And I came home. I like wrapped those up. was like running on fumes, like showered and. Yeah. So happy that's here and behind us and you the first one down now we'll have two more to do. I think that's it for me today. Okay, sweet. Word up? Well, let's jump in. there's this separated out into kind of six or five, five sections of kind of current topics that we want to discuss that seem to be top of mind in the evidence -based space. So the first one is training volume throughout training age. And so we've... Kind of touched on this one before, but I think it's productive and helpful for us to kind of go in and spend a little bit more time on it. So the general idea, I think, out there of training volume is that it just goes up as you increase in training age. I think most people would say that that's kind of the general trend of research is, you become more trained, you need to do more training volume to continue to elicit the same response. But I don't think it... quite works exactly like that. fact, I don't think it works really like that at all. because in the beginning, when you first start training, anything works. So in that case, yeah, you could start with one set per muscle group and then your line might actually look like for a while it goes up. And I think that that is sort of what happens up to the intermediate stage. So you can start training with one set per muscle group or two sets or whatever. And Because you're brand new and because you have no stimulus from weight training in the past, that one set is going to produce some crazy good gains for you and you'll get stronger. You'll add hypertrophy. And at some point that one set will likely stop working. And now you kind of begin to have to make some training decisions. Is it that you need to work harder? Do you need to work closer to failure? Do you need to do more volume? Do you need to do more volume and work closer to failure? Do you need to change exercise selection? I mean, there's a ton of variables that go into it, but focusing here strictly on volume, I think that the entrance into the intermediate stage is going to have you utilize more volume. And the reason that I think the intermediate stage has this response is because you now have sensitivity to the stimulus. You probably are not capable of going. as muscle specific and what's the word I'm looking for as focused with your exercise execution as somebody who's advanced. So because your execution is now decent because you're an intermediate but maybe not as precise as if you were advanced, you do need to do a bit more volume and you can handle more volume because you're no longer that noob who is getting extreme doms from just a small amount of. so I think intermediate stage starts somewhere between six and six months and two years, really depending on how dedicated you are to the craft. and so I'll hold off on advanced for a second and kick this over to you. But I think starting with a small amount of volume, it doesn't have to be one set, but something small in the beginning is, is probably a prudent move. and then as you kind of get into that six month to two year stage where you would be entering intermediate, The volume generally kicks up at that point. What do you think about that? Yeah, I I think. I think I mean, I agree with it completely to look at it from a slightly larger lens, I think. I know we often speak about the like the, you know, the novice, the beginner, the intermediate, the advanced in terms of like volume, you know, in, execution and stuff. What I also think is still very pertinent, but it's less hard to quantify or the peripheral things in relation to like, you know, training how seriously you're like taking your diet, the priority of this in your life over like, Hey, I'm always hitting my training sessions versus like, I'm dating some girl now, I'm not gonna go to the gym like for two weeks or something like that. Like I do think these things are very correlative with that training age. And it's really just like how important it becomes, you know, to you. And typically with that as those, as you learn more, you start to explore a little bit. And that is typically goes with like, okay, now I'm going to do more because I enjoy it. don't, maybe I do wanna spend more than 45 minutes training because I enjoy being here. You know, for me personally, when I really kind of caught the bug of like loving it, I would I was just down to train for two hours because I was just happy to be there. You know, so I do think that there's likely a few different variables that go into why your volume goes up. But it probably has to do with like enjoyment exploration, some of those like peripheral things instead of just like. someone said, I'm an intermediate now, I should do more. It's likely a combination of things that influence that. Yeah, I think that's a really good point and I'm glad you kind of brought it back to that, which brings up another thought in my mind, which is if someone has that incredible passion and love for being in the gym. Do you think there is detriment or caution that they need to take if they're a novice, like straight beginner and they're like, my God, I'm two weeks into the gym and I'm obsessed with it. And I know volume is so important. So now I'm going to go and I'm going to spend two hours in the gym, four days a week, five days a week, but I'm only like two weeks into training, but I've caught the bug, you know. The people who are like that, right? They're either going to be your, my goodness, Jay Cutler, the Anton dude who just turned pro at 19 years old, like the first 19 year old IFBB pro in however many years or whatever, or they're going to be that person who's like, has the intention span of like a goldfish. Who's like, I'm crazy into training now. And they're all about it for like three weeks and then. They burn out. never lift again in their entire life sort of thing. I think you kind of go one of two ways, more likely than not the latter obviously, but I think if you're super new into it, you just can't, you can't get enough quality information in such a short time period for that I would say to be actually impactful or detrimental. Yeah, that's interesting. And even if they are doing a ton of volume as a brand new novice, it's likely that the majority of that volume isn't even like super stimulative. They're just moving weight from point A to point B. They're not really like targeting the specific muscles. Exercise selection is probably all over the place. It's probably unlikely that they're working close to failure, because if you're doing a ton of sets as you just begin, like the response you're going to get is. crippling soreness and you're probably not going to do that again. So I do think there's some kind of like intrinsic lessons there that apply more globally across the board. But this does kind of bring me into the next part of volume throughout training age, which is that volume differs based on a number of factors, exercise selection being a very obvious one. So saying that I do 12 sets for my quads, It's very different to be doing six sets of leg press and six sets of hack squats versus. seven, eight sets of leg extensions and two sets of hack squats or four sets of hack squats or whatever that is. mean, that volume is not equal. And then other volume that's not equal is how close you are to failure. So imagine somebody is like, yeah, I'm doing 25 sets a week, but they're doing all leg extensions to five RIR or something like that. Like that's an extreme example that nobody would actually do because 25 sets of leg extensions is absurd. But just for this thought experiment, whether you train to failure or not trained to failure and which exercises you're choosing all change the stimulus that your quads receive from what you're doing. And so that's where like, I don't love the conversation when these people DM me and they say, well, how much volume should I be doing? I'm doing six to 10 sets right now. Should I be doing more? And I'm like, what does your volume look like? Like, I can't answer that question for you. Like, are you getting sore? Are you getting a pump? Are you progressing? Like, Those are probably more important questions than how much volume you're actually doing. So yeah, anything to kind of add to that thought. Yeah, I mean, I think that is the golden question that people don't really want to talk about is, unfortunately, and I really wish this wasn't the case, like the answer, like you said, it's not a simple answer. It's not four sets per week. It's not six sets per week. You know, it really does depend, especially once we get into kind of the next little section in terms of like exercise execution, right? You take like someone who has really developed like quads who's you know, built to squat or something like that. The amount of stimulus in probably CNS, like overstimulation or fatigue that they can induce on like one set of hack squats to the house is probably 10 X what that novice could do on a hack squat. You know what I mean? And it just doesn't translate. It's not a one -to -one. There's so many factors that go into it. in the unfortunate reality. I mean, even across, I know we talked about this on a couple episodes ago, the design of the hack squat. If you have like a really well designed hack squat where you can sit on your heels, ass to grass and get that great stretch, that's different than one that's going to force it to be much more like hip driven. Like there's just so many variables and it really is important to truly help someone. Or if you're asking someone a question, give them context as much as possible that's pertinent because It really, really does depend. sure. And then that kind of allows us to tie a bow on this and kind of advance progress into the advanced trainee. So we have this curve where volume can start low as a beginner or novice because everything works and you're just kind of learning stuff. There's a point where you kind of progress into intermediate where you want to refine technique and refining technique requires you to do more because the repetition and just doing it over and over is going to help you become better at doing it. Plus you've gotten through all the crazy doms from the newbie stage. So now as an intermediate, your volume is going up. Regardless of exercise selection, I think volume is going up. And then we kind of get to this point where we're late intermediate and we kind of get into this early advanced stage. And this is where I begin to generally see volume trend down from where it was peaked in the intermediate stage. And the reason for this is a better exercise execution. So you can just create more stimulus to the muscle with less work. You're generally better at assessing RIR and failure. So if you're the type of person that wants to actually go to failure and or train close to failure, one RIR, would say the same, then you won't need as much work there because you're actually dialed in and you know how to get there. And I feel like there's another reason why volume goes down as an advanced trainee, but those are certainly like the two most prominent ones off the top of my head. The one that I really like to use and the one that I find the most pertinent in my personal own life is performance. a set, let's say for example, know, set one, let's talk like a cable chest supported like high row or something like that. And it'll make really simple examples like set one, 100 pounds, I get like 11 reps. That's a really, really good set. Set two, I get like seven, almost can lock eight, but can't, right? That's three, four, effectively four rep drop off, pretty significant. I go into a third set, I get maybe five, maybe six. I don't need that third set, right? Cause like, it's just such a large performance drop off that it's probably not overly stimulative. You're probably kind of maxed out from a, at that kind of threshold of, of at that heavier load. And that's one where if I know I can't, if I'm getting that kind of stark drop off, I just don't perform that set. What I could probably do is maybe put one extra set in of an additional exercise or something like that, or I really just don't need the extra volume. And unfortunately, that's something that you're going to have to kind of uncover a little bit about yourself. And I do think different periodizations of nutrition come into play if you're using an intro workout, if you're dieting, if you're super high calories, like there's other facets at play there, but Performance is one that I really like to lever because it's typically pretty indicative of things. If performance is great, okay, great. Maybe we test out an additional set or something like that. If performance starkly declines, I probably don't need that set. Yeah, that's interesting. It's actually so our final section is the impact of training to failure and rep performance and rep drop off are part of the things I include in there. So we'll get back to that at the end. I do want to take one small tangent on what you're saying and just ask because the general perception in the space is that if volume is lower, you're likely going to see strength increases. or performance increase more because fatigue is lower. The devil's advocate argument to that for someone doing hypertrophy is that we don't really care if your performance is improving that much because volume is going to be more of a prominent driver of hypertrophy than strength increases. So there's obviously a point where the volume is too low, but where is that point? Like if I'm doing one set a week per muscle group and I'm getting progress for many, many weeks in a row. And I'm like, I'm going up a rep here. I'm adding five pounds here. I'm increasing blah, blah. But I'm only doing one set per muscle group per week. am I cool because performance is going up or should I be doing more volume, which may actually impact performance negatively? And so how do we square that circle? Yeah, that's a really, really good point to bring up. think this is where some of those kind of volume landmarks can probably come into play. there's probably, let's call it like a, here's probably like a five sets per week. I would say like a minimum, you know, don't, exactly. Like an arbitrary minimum. It's just really, really hard, you know, because like I say that I'm not doing five sets per week on my biceps and they're fucking growing. Like they're growing more than I want them to grow. You know, like it's just it's not super cut and dry. And I hate that answer. But that's like me being truthful and honest. It's just not in like. But but at the same time, my quads, which are like the thing that I want to grow the most like. I'm now like, gotta find another way to put them, put some sets in and on another day because they're the dichotomy of Aaron's physique to his quads is only getting worse now. And, I don't want that to happen. But like what I'm doing is not sufficient for them to grow at the rate that the rest of my body is. So it's just even within yourself, it's going to vary, which is even more frustrating. Like if you were just following performance, you might just do one set of hack squats because maybe that allows you to be so recovered in your quads that you can improve performance week on week. does doing one set of hack squats at 20 pounds heavier than you were doing one set of hack squats means that your quads grew as much as they would have grown if you were doing more work, but maybe only increased 10 or 15 pounds. It's definitely a mind fuck. So I just wanted to throw that out there as you know. always important to think about the other side of the situation. Yeah, a great point to bring up. So the next one we have is maintenance volume. And this one has been interesting to me recently since the data -driven guys came out with a podcast a few weeks ago on maintenance volume. And the reason that it's interesting is because when you look at the two studies that are really out there on maintenance volume, one shows, well, they both kind of show somewhere between a third and a ninth. of volume that it took to build is kind of what it takes to maintain. The group that we're able to maintain on a ninth of the volume was young. And so I think that that's really important to keep in mind as we think about like muscle protein synthesis and how that changes over training age. You want to jump in and say something on that? Yeah. Yeah. Do you know how young is young in this context approximately? to say it was college age kids. And then the group that took a third of the volume to maintain was more like forties, I want to say. I am repeating what I thought I heard in the podcast. I haven't read this study in a while. Okay. Yeah. The reason I asked was like, wonder if it was the young crowd just has a lot less muscle. So it's, you need much less work to maintain, but I can't say that I would confidently say that the difference of muscle mass between college, you know, university age to 40 would be that different to warrant that. Okay. a great point because I think training age is the factor here that I was going to kind of double click on. Because if you're relatively new to training, like, yeah, just because you're in your 20s doesn't mean you have less muscle mass at base than someone in their 40s. But if you're brand new to training, which would be more likely when you're young versus when you're older, then it is likely that less would maintain. So say you go from not training at all and then you're going to nine sets a week, which I think is what the study did. So you have nine sets a week work sets and you went from nothing to nine sets. So your body still in some ways is still used to doing nothing. Even if you've done eight weeks, 10 weeks, 12 weeks of this training study, the prior 20 years of your life was nothing. So these 12 weeks are just a microcosm in the grand scheme of what your body is used to doing. So when you drop from nine sets down to one set, It's like, hey, you're still doing more than you were doing for the last 20 years of your life. So I think that that certainly can play one factor. As far as the older group that needed a third of the dose, think that that also, like, I'm not sure, but I don't think these people were trained either. So it could literally just be a factor of muscle protein synthesis, synthetic response that's requiring the older people to do a bit more volume. But I also, so this is one of the points that the data -driven guys brought up that I thought was really good is just like how long were these studies where they cut their volume back? Because it's possible that these guys could be maintaining their gains for six weeks, eight weeks, 10 weeks. But what about like three years from now? If you're cutting your volume from nine sets down to one set and you just keep doing one set in perpetuity, Like, do you expect that you're still going to maintain all of the gains that you made during nine sets by doing one or for the older group? Do you think by doing three sets compared to nine that you're going be able to maintain that forever? And we don't know the answer to that either from that study because everything is short term. Yeah, I wonder if we'll ever get an answer out of that. I mean, my theory, which could be complete garbage, by the way, is that the diminishment would be so small and so slow, you wouldn't be able to notice it except over like a year long period or something like that. And it's just like these micro, you know, regressions that you don't notice until enough time has passed. Yeah, well, think so. I think they used ultrasound for this study, for one of the studies. And I think what Josh was saying was something that the margin of error was larger than the possibility of error was larger than what the actual difference in muscle mass was. So we're talking about guys that have like. Like you, go from training, not at all to nine sets. And so you get some change, which you can see. And then when you drop it down to one set, there's even less change. And so it might show that it's a few millimeters or whatever, but that's within the margin of error. So it could just be like the use, the machine was error, right? and so we say, yeah, it's, very difficult to ascertain a whole lot from that. And so where we kind of go with this, like practically I think is, is almost more important than talking. studies here is like, you know, what do we do with clients? And what do we do with ourselves during a period of time? And what do we notice? And so, man, and again, like before I even say anything further, I think it's important to state that proximity to failure and exercise selection and intent, your ability to manifest stimulus in your movements. Like all of these things are so relevant when we talk about training volume. So you can't just nominally say like, I was doing nine sets and now I'm doing three sets because there's so many factors that go into that. What if you were doing nine sets of leg extensions and now you're doing three sets of hack squats like that to me, like, I don't know if I'm doing three sets of hack squats and I was doing nine sets of leg extensions. I'd be surprised if there was any lost muscle. I might actually think I would gain muscle with three sets of hack squats compared to nine sets of leg extension. So exercise selection. and proximity to failure are perpetually tied together in this situation and we can't just separate them. That, I mean, you are a hundred percent correct. And my kind of final tidbit on this particular section that we're talking about is what's the reason that your maintenance volume that you're training at a maintenance volume, it's likely a practical reason for life. Maybe it's a big priority on, on work in your career, or maybe it's you have your stay at home mom with like your three kids or whatever. But regardless, if you're like, Aaron, I, you know, I can only train two times per week. Does that mean I'm going to lose some muscle? And I'm like, wait, potentially, but what is our alternative? our, our, our, Jesus Christ. Our alternative is like training three times per week. And that person might be like, well, I can't stick to that. And I'm like, okay, well, this is the reality of what we have. So maybe two times per week is what we do. And you may lose some muscle mass, but that's just an acceptance of this particular stretch of your life. And when it's over, you can go back. to a higher frequency, a higher volume and reclaim that lost tissue. But it's like, regardless, like you train as much as your schedule allows or your enjoyment allows, and you might just be in a pinch where you can't and you might lose some muscle mass. And that's just the factor of that reality. And that's okay. Yeah, yeah. Last thing on maintenance volume here is the thought experiment as to whether maintenance volume is a factor of absolute volume or a percentage of total volume. And so what I mean by that is say someone's doing 30 sets and they drop down to 10 sets because that's a third of the volume. That is one thing. I mean, they're still doing 10 sets of volume per week. Even though they dropped 20 sets, they're still doing 10 versus if you take somebody that was doing 12 sets and they dropped down to four, they're also doing a third of the volume that they were doing and they actually only dropped eight sets. So in some ways you could argue that the 12 to four person is doing more because they dropped fewer total sets. But when you look at the absolute amount of volume that's being done, the person that dropped from 30 to 10, even though they dropped 20 sets, they're doing an absolutely larger amount of total volume. So where would you stand on kind of looking at that equation and which one you think would be more productive? more productive or less detrimental. However, you want to we want to frame it is fine. Yeah, which would be less detrimental probably Man, I would say the former, the person going from 30 to 10, I would say would probably be less detrimental, but not for the reasons that you would think. I think the reason it would be less detrimental is you're going from 30 sets to 10 sets, you're probably gonna be getting much better sets because I... I'll eat my words. Sure. Show me someone who's doing like 30 really high quality sets for a muscle group per week. They're probably like an IFBB pro or something like that. And then I'm like, OK, yeah, they are, you know, but outside of that context, a lot of it's probably kind of shitty and not great. And if we just chop off a lot of the shitty, not great and just get back to like a 10 cents per week baseline of like high quality work, it's probably very probably much less detrimental to the person who's already doing a lot of quality work, but slashing it by 60 % or 66 % or. Yeah, no, I tend to agree. I think that there is something to absolute volume, even though there's all those contextual pieces that we talked about with proximity to failure and exercise selection and effort and all that stuff. But yeah, I do think the absolute amount of volume probably does matter. And so somebody dropping from 30 to 10 likely will maintain muscle better than someone dropping from 12 to four. And that would just be my kind of overriding thought on that. All right, let's move on to... Rest periods. So I think all of these things have interplays together, right? Like when we talk about training volume, we can't separate training volume from proximity to failure any more than we can separate it from how long you're resting between sets. And so when we look at these examples we've used before, say we have somebody doing 30 sets, but they're resting 30 seconds or a minute between sets, then we already know that the majority of those sets are going to be less effective than they would be if we were resting longer. So I think that that certainly has very relevant impact on total volume loads. And another one of those factors when we talk about, like someone says, hey, I'm doing this many sets. It's like, but how about rest periods? Like, how are you recovering between your sets and all that? and then how that will actually ultimately play into rep drop off, which we're going to get to in the impact of failure in the final section. But I think ultimately when it comes to rest periods, like the research is starting to change its tune. And I think that's why I included it in this segment here, because a couple of years ago, all the research was showing that two to three minutes was superior to one minute. There was, man, we covered this in one of the, I think it was in the nihilism episode that I did, episode 100. We talked about rest periods and kind of some of the data at that time. And definitely two to three minutes was shown superior to one minute in pretty much a couple studies across the board. I think Krieger did a cool analysis of that, James Krieger. But it definitely has an impact into how we construct our routine. So during this period, I think what we should do is discuss practically how we would arrange a routine with varying rest periods, if that's something that we include, for example, straight sets, as well as rest pause or drop sets and things like that, as well as how this may or may not impact our decision -making with compounds and isolations. So if you want to kick that off with any initial thoughts you have on that. Yeah. So one initial thought that I think doesn't get talked about enough is your cardiovascular, you know, output inability. Like for example, Brian and I are training together and doing, you know, Bulgarian split squats. Brian's going to be ready for his set much faster than I will because Brian's in much better cardiovascular shape than me, you know? So understanding where you kind of are in that spectrum, it's often typically correlated to how large of a person you are. and that sort of thing as well. But I think that plays a pretty large role. if you're in really good shape and maybe you're training three times per week because you know that you should, you're just very, very fit, you're gonna be ready and recovered much faster than someone like myself who, I'm just not that fit to be completely honest. Yeah. I think if left to just a very polarized look at rest periods, I think my intuition would say to take longer rest periods and do straight sets. but not everybody has two hours a day to train. And it also is likely a different response, whether we're talking about isolation movements that are significantly less fatiguing or demanding compound movements like Aaron mentioned with the split squat or a pendulum or a hack or RDL, something along those lines. And so what I've found myself doing as we've had more of this research come out regarding rest periods is that I've began using straight sets with longer rest periods for those big demanding compound movements, just resting until I'm ready, which is shit, it could be two to three minutes between legs on a split squat, or it could be three to five minutes between sets of like a hack squat or something like that. And then saving time on the isolation movements, especially short overload isolation movements. So talking about like, you know, dumbbell lateral raise variations, different curl variations, tricep press downs, leg extensions, leg curls, things like that. I tend to use shorter rest periods and use more things like rest pause sets and drop sets. and stuff like that. Because at the moment, when we look at the research, it is beginning to show that using shorter rest periods is not a problem, but that you do need to sort of increase volume to compensate for the shorter rest period. So for example, something like a leg extension, you could do three sets straight of leg extensions where you're resting two to three minutes between sets and boom, you get a bunch of really good quality. leg extension reps, you get some effective reps, you get three sets close to failure, all's good. Or according to the research, you could do one set of leg extensions close to failure and then just rest 15 or 20 seconds between each of your next sets. But instead of doing three total sets, you now have to do five total sets. So you have that initial buy -in set and then you have four more sets, but they're all with like really short rest. And if you extrapolate out the total time that you're spending on the leg extensions from doing three straight sets with full rest compared to one set with four short rest sets, you are going to save time doing the short rest leg extension work. Not a ton. Like it's not as much as people think because you do have to do more sets. But resting 20 seconds between sets is way less than resting two to three minutes. And so you're able to make up a lot of that time there. And for a lot of people, it's just a nice way to change training up to. So even if it's not about saving time, it's like, hey, look, I have this movement where I'm locked in. The only thing bending on my whole body is my knees. Like I'm bending my knees. I'm straightening my knees. I'm bending my knees. I'm straightening my knees. Like the fatigue cost is going to be significantly less than it's going to be across other movements. Maybe we take advantage of that and we use some of these short rest sequences. And in reality, I'm less likely to use that on a leg extension because it's still a lower body movement and it's still quite demanding. But on an upper body movement, I almost exclusively find myself using some of these short rest sequences now, just because the stimulus is great. You get it done in less time and the studies don't seem to show that there's any detriment to approaching it that way. So I know you don't generally do that, but I do know you include some of that stuff with clients, right? Yeah, it depends. like right now I have none of it because I just want my, and this was just what I thought in my head. I'm not saying it's the best way or correct. was like, I want to get my training performance back to where it is with a lower volume. And then I'll start sprinkling these things in. So that was just my thought process. But one thing that I think could be beneficial here, and I think this is the last part on this and then we'll move on, is some of these like shorter rest sequences. It trains you or you're training your body to push through some of the inadvertent discomfort that comes up. So like when you're just doing straight sets on the leg extension, like you're never really having to deal with like that burn or like your body telling you like put it down and it here and it here, but you know you can keep going. But when you when you are doing some of these like incomplete rest methods or something like that, you're going to have that lactate accumulation and you can like it's a skill. to push through that and just keep your mind locked in. And if you're only ever doing straight sets, you'll never be offered the opportunity to really learn at that level to push through there, because you just never be presented with it. Yeah, it's a really good point. And it also makes me think of kind of the slight difference between drop sets and rest pause sets. Because I think when you do a drop set, you're more likely to fail mentally than you are with a rest pause set. Because in a drop set, say you have a hundred pounds on the leg extension and you get eight reps and then you drop it to 70 and you keep going or 60 or whatever. You're gonna get another eight reps or another 10 reps. So you're gonna have to basically do all these kind of easier buy -in reps that are just creating lactate and burning your quads so bad in a leg extension, that you might fail mentally before you actually get to the really important true physical failure, just because it burns so bad. Whereas when you do a rest pause set, which is essentially rest 20 seconds and then do another set, but keep the weight the same. So you're not actually decreasing the weight. I think on a rest pause set, you're more likely to be able to get those really effective reps initially, because if I start with a leg extension set of eight reps as a buy -in, and then I rest 20 seconds, I'm probably doing three. And three is like failure at that point. And then I'll rest another 20 seconds and I'll get two, which is way, like way less daunting mentally than having to go through those easy reps because you decided to drop the weight just to get back to the higher rep. So In exercises that have a high level of mental fatigue, given the burn associated, I will often find myself programming rest, pause, set instead of drop set. Yeah, I would say I use the rest pause much more frequently than the drop set because it's there's there's also the mental component that you're moved. How much do I drop? Did I drop too little? Did I drop too much? Like it's another aspect that comes into it when you're not changing the weight. It's a simpler or it's something with less variables. Yep, for sure. All right, two sections to go. Frequency is next. And so I have some thoughts on all of this, but the first question I wanna pose to you from the nutrition side is do you have any insight into muscle protein synthetic response throughout training age as far as whether it decreases as you become higher trained? The only thing that I feel confident in saying that I think could be beneficial to the conversation is our efficiency at muscle protein synthesis as we age gets worse. So we need more protein. Now that's me extrapolating age to training age, which is typically correlative, but not a not causative necessarily. But in terms of it, you know, all things being equal protein intake being high enough. Do I know if it's shorter? I do not confidently, I can't confidently say that, no. What if we throw out this hypothetical thought experiment where there's a 24 year old bodybuilder and this bodybuilder started training at 15 and he's been dedicated hardcore, say he's like a competitive bodybuilder at this point at 24 versus somebody who's 24 and is just starting training. Like, do we feel confident enough to say that that person at 24 who has nine years of training age probably has a slightly diminished MPS response to training as compared to the person that's just starting training at the same age. from an absolute level or like relative to work done? I would say relative to work done, lower, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I think from my understanding, and this is definitely not like a very thorough read of the research, but what I understand is that as you start training, you're brand new to training, that you generally get at least 72 hours of elevated MPS after a training session. I think that that number goes down to 24 hours or even less than 24 hours as you become well -trained to call it to the intermediate or advanced stage And I would have to go find research to support this I just like that's kind of the common sentiment that I hear amongst the industry at the moment One, the most recent time I remember hearing this is 48 hours MPS is peaked. And where I contextually remember that is that was the argument with the cold plunges of when to time them is MPS is highest peaks 48 hours post the training session. I don't. somebody that was trained or untrained or we just don't know? Yeah, yeah. So I'm gonna operate on what I said, which I don't know if it's fully right, but say it's 72 hours for someone that's novice and it's 24 -ish hours for somebody that's not. So we'll just say that it's diminished. We don't know how much it's diminished, but the fact that you're trained diminishes it in some capacity. Just because there's gonna be less stimulus, less muscle damage, less... less a number of these factors that are going to require your body to elicit a higher level of MPS, right? And so that just, the reason I wanted to frame it that way is because As we've talked about in the prior few episodes with Paul Carter and Chris Beardsley now on this kick of higher frequency training being necessary, the majority of their argument, I think, is based around muscle protein synthesis and how it likely decreases as training age increases. And so if before you could get an MPS response that lasts 72 hours, then now you're looking at basically half the week. So you could train a muscle twice a week and you'd be maxed out on MPS for half the week and then you train it again and you're maxed out for another half the week. So I think that their argument there is that as we now have this MPS response that only lasts 24 or say 48 hours, that training a muscle three times a week now becomes significantly more important than it was when your MPS response was higher. And I don't, like I said, I don't know if that's true. That seems to be the argument and the frame that they're coming from. Somebody can correct me if I'm misinterpreting this. But that's my understanding. And that's kind of the argument for why frequency might need to increase with training age. What do you think on that? My only argument against it, it really comes from like a practical standpoint, right? If we're talking chest, know, lats, upper back, biceps, triceps, quads, glutes, hands, like programming each of those muscles three times per week. I mean, I think it can be done. It's not, it's, it's not trivial, you know? And I feel like you'd be running into a lot of like overlapping issues of this isn't recover. I mean, it just. To me, it sounds like a pretty complex problem, right? That doesn't turn into a very generic full body training program, you know? And I think my, again, argument against that is like, we're talking like advanced trainees, higher training age, how many very advanced trainees, higher training age, or like really great physiques are just doing generic full body training programs? I know very little. And this is, I might be kind of straw manning. I believe that's the term there, that argument. I'm not, you know, completely saying it's wrong. I just don't see it in the real world. And that it does seem like a very complex training. Like weaving that together sounds very complicated to me. Yeah, my issue is with full body training has always been the overlapping fatigue. And so I do think there's a lot of self awareness that needs to go into creating a program like that. And so I wouldn't feel super comfortable putting out like a general generic program of, know, this is the optimal way to train as an advanced trainee three times a week full body. Like it may be for some people. I think another thing that is often lost in that discussion is that like, so they're assuming they Chris beardly and Paul, I guess, and I could be again, miss stating their their stance here. But it seems like they're looking at it on like an individual muscle level. So it's like, if I train my chest on Monday, then the MPS response to my chest is diminished by Wednesday, and therefore I must train my chest again on Wednesday. Whereas I wonder how much of this is actually explained by just whole body stimulus. So like, what if you're following a bro split to use an extreme example and you have like a chest day on one day and then you have another day that's triceps and shoulders. And so on the triceps and shoulders day, you're getting more pushing volume in. You're doing maybe some steep incline pressing, you're getting a bit of upper chest. Maybe you're doing some dips or some like tricep pushups. So you're getting a little bit of mid lower chest through those movements. So now suddenly we've actually trained chest twice a week. even though it's only being hit once as like a primary muscle group. But one would think that that second session that you're doing is still providing a sufficient stimulus to the chest that its individual MPS response would be stimulated again, even though that's not like the direct pursuit of that session. And you get that even more with other muscle groups, like say your delts. Like if you're training chest, you're hitting delts. If you're training back, you're hitting delts. If you're training delts, you're hitting delts. Like, I mean, there's like, you can hit delts multiple times throughout the week without having to necessarily train full body each of those days. And so I just wonder as we extrapolate this out, how much of the MPS response is individual to the muscle group and how much of it is just whole body stimulus of. you're putting the body under load and resistance here. Yeah, I mean. I honestly don't know, right? I really, really don't. And this is an area where I'm sure the listeners can tell by my answers. Like I'm not making any strong kind of statements because I really don't know, but it is, it's hard for me to see it actually all work out, you know, cause I think different muscles are going to have different rates of recovery. we just talked about the delts. You could train the delts probably every single day. I mean, maybe not like seven days, but probably like a solid five days per week. and be perfectly fine from a recovery standpoint. it really comes into the balance of available time, schedule, balancing these different things, having different muscle groups recover at different rates because X percentage of your volume is lengthened bias with an eccentric focus. How much of it is short overload bias? mean, it gets, mean, the number of variables is astronomical that can go into this. Yep, yep, are you here? yeah, cool. Yeah, no, I agree. I I think that that ties a bow pretty well on to, onto frequency there. and then the last question I'll just leave people with and we won't answer it now, but could one volume be maintenance while the same volume with a different frequency could be progress. And the example there would be, you know, could you do nine sets a week of chest on Monday and have that be maintenance? But if you split that into three sets on Monday, three sets on Wednesday, and three sets on Friday, due to this MPS response or whatever other factors out there that suddenly now we're making progress by doing the same weekly volume just because it's split up differently. And so we won't address that right now. But I think it's some stuff to think on, ruminate on a little bit. Yeah, definitely a very good question to think about. All right. And then the last section here, impact of failure on all of the above. So it's basically a discussion on failure, but then we can kind of tie in some of the other stuff that we've already discussed. And so the first question is how important is failure globally? And I don't think that failure globally is a requirement, but it certainly is a mechanism by which we can save time and a great way of calibrating effort to make sure that you are in fact putting in enough effort. to make gains there. What are your thoughts on failure globally? I think failure is very important. I think it's very important to know where failure is so that you can reasonably gauge against it. Because if you do not know what failure is, I guarantee you are, what's the word, sandbagging yourself, right? Like if you've never taken a set of leg extensions to failure, you're gonna be like, okay, here's 60 pounds. Eight reps, I think that's two reps shy of failure. But if I'm there telling you more, more, more, that eight reps turns into like 17 reps. And I cannot tell you how many times I have seen this in person where I'm standing there saying more again, again, because they're not there yet. And what they thought was a failure at eight reps, they have more than doubled the reps. All good, clean reps. So I think it's very important to know where failure actually is so that you can back, you know, pedal from there and know what it feels like and what that actual true three RIR, two RIR, whatever it is, is indeed accurate. That's the importance of it. Yeah, no, I fully agree. So that's failure globally. My most interesting aspect of failure, and the thing I really wanna get kind of some discussion going on here, is the implication of failure in earlier sets and how that affects the remainder of your session's performance. so an example would be, you take your first set of hack squats to the house and you go to failure and say, you get 11 reps. And then you mentioned this earlier. You're, you're pretty fatigued. You worked your ass off and now you only get eight reps on your next set. And then your third set, get six. So 11, eight and six is 25 total reps. Whereas if you would have just done nine on the first set, then you probably could have gotten nine on the second set. and nine on the third set. And now you've done a total of 27 total reps, but possibly only your last set was to failure versus in the other approach, you took all three sets to failure. You got two less reps, but you potentially got more effective reps because all your sets were to failure. Every single rep that you did there was effective. So there's that, that aspect. to consider. so I have another thing to add on top of that. But what do you think about that proposition there? Yeah, and I have a very unscientific answer and I'm completely aware I might be in the minority here. I am just of the belief. I really like the example that you used, right? I think it's a perfect example in the way you phrased it or laid it out. I am of the belief that if you're performing the same amount of reps on the third set that you are on your first set, that you're shortchanging yourself. And I just feel confident, again, this is at least for my own life. not trying as hard as I possibly can at something that I want really, really badly never seems like a better way to get where I want than trying as hard as I can at something. And again, I said it's completely unscientific, but I just, I think back to like a sports coach or a practice or something like that. And there, and the coach is like sprinting you guys and you're taking it at 80%. And the coach is like, why the fuck are you not trying as hard as you can? And you're like, coach, because we're going to run six of them. And I want to be able to give it my all on the last one. Like you would get your ass kicked by the coach if you said that, you know, across any sport. I don't care if that's American football, like soccer, basketball, anything. But in this context of weight training, that's the answer that we give. So again, it's just hard for me to believe that and to incorporate it into my life. And I get the You know, the research is typically indicative of that. It's just hard for me to believe, to be completely honest. You know, I would have probably agreed with you in the past, but ever since I've gotten into this cardio adventure and I've gone down the rabbit hole of practically implementing cardio, but also reading the research on cardio and this idea of sustained effort across intervals, which I think interval training cardio is similar as you're gonna get to weight training. Like you can't compare zone two to weight training, but when you're talking about intervals, you're working hard for a short amount of time, then you're resting, you're recovering. It's much more similar to weight training. All the data seems to show that not blowing your load on the first interval is better than blowing your load and then trying to just tread water and survive for the remaining intervals. I agree. think there's specific context like that one is a perfect example. Powerlifting as well. If strength is the goal, we know that that's very, very correlative there. I think the strength one is interesting. I feel like that's a very close proximity. The cardio one, think, is more of a... The game of cardio is... They're duration based, right? the only cardio... Yeah, it's a volume kind of game. short cardio is like a hundred meter sprint, is, whatever nine seconds or something like that. So I do. I love that you brought that up because that is a really, really good point. But that's the thing with like the hypertrophy. It's a it's it's it's like the antithesis of what I said, and we know that if you train too close to failure, like you, you the adaptations just don't happen like they like they would otherwise. the other devil's advocate argument against what you were saying is that with the predominance of research now on the highly demanding compound movements that are done for sets of eight reps or less, 10 reps or less, something like that, that there seems to not be a difference in response, whether you go to failure or you stop, you know, a couple reps shy. And man, it's tough. One side of me believes that if I go 999 and that last set is to failure, that I'm still creating the stimulus that my body needs for adaptation. And probably with less fatigue, because the 1186 example of hack squat where every set is to failure, that leaves you so cached that like how high can the quality, the rest of your session be? And so my kind of view on failure, especially as it pertains to the bird's eye view of the session is that If I have a number of exercises for the same muscle group to do, I'm likely to more take that approach where it goes 999, where just the last set is to failure, because I know then I need to go to leg extensions and then I need to go to split squats or whatever it is. Whereas if I'm doing a different style of training routine, call it like a full body or some sort of split where it's just one exercise for a muscle group, like I'm doing hack squats and then that's it for quads, then I'm more likely to take your approach where I'm gonna get everything I can out of each set that I have to offer because I know that that's the end of my quad work versus having these additional exercises that are kind of looming in the future. Yeah, I it's, I mean, I agree. It's almost like a never ending argument because then the, then what the next logical phase of the argument as well, why do you need three sets on the, on the, on the like extent or not the like extension, the pendulum or whatever, right? Why wouldn't we just put two of those sets on another day? And then we can take all four of the, all four of the sets of hair. Like it's a, it's like a seemingly never ending loop of the conversation and the honest reality is like, we just don't know, you know, and What I kind of defer to, which is in a very unscientific way, I understand that. What is the goal in the context? Are we speaking about hypertrophy? Sure. What are the people with the best physiques in the world do? Natural or not, or enhance or whatever. They typically are not leaving three reps in the tank on their compounds. And it's like, I will look for some evidence there. And that's, and that could be. It could be we're all just brainwashed, you know, and this is what we do because that's what some people did. And then it, you know, follows through and maybe in 30 years, the best physiques in the world won't train like that, you know, but, but I just, don't have very, very conclusive evidence that's also rooted in practical real world examples of people at the top doing that. So that's where I feel conflicted about. Yeah. No, I agree. I don't know the answer either. I think this conversation is great and playing devil's advocate to each other's points is super thought -provoking. So I am 10 minutes late on my child duty here to get these kids off to school. So I think this is a good point to wrap it up and then we'll be back next week. Yep, as always guys, thank you for listening. I love this episode. I think we did a great job not to pat ourselves on the back, but playing devil's advocate on each other I think is very, very important and thought provoking, like you said. So thank you as always, Brian. Thank you everyone for listening. We'll talk to you next week.