What is going on, guys? Welcome back to Eat, Train, Prosper. This is episode one hundred and eighty four. How to design a chest specialization phase. So in last week's episode, ETP 183 on our February Instagram Q &A, someone asked this question and we thought it would be most appropriate to explode out into its own episode. So here we are. Brian has very generously crafted out a very, good in comprehensive. plan for us to cover and then some pitfalls things to avoid reasons where you may not want to ask chat GBT to do this for you. And I think it'll be a really cool episode. But as always before we dive in Brian, do you have some updates for us? Yeah, we skipped them last week. So I'm just going to spend the whole episode on updates now and we're not even going to get to the main topic. No, but for real. So this last week or 10 days in Colorado has been insane. Like the weather has been immaculate for what you could expect or hope for in late February, early March. So right as we were feeling as if winter was never going to end and we were super ready for spring. It gave it to us. The last 10 days have been like high fifties, low sixties and sunny almost every day. I've gotten out and done like three or four bike rides. got an hour long, like really hard interval ride in outside. I then followed that up with like almost a two hour zone to ride. Really cool just to be out there doing the thing again and also to feel like every year. Over the winter period, I seem to lose less and less of the cardio adaptations that I gained the prior year. And I think that's twofold partially because I'm doing more cardio in the off season to try to maintain it. But also I think that those adaptations are just each year getting a little bit higher, which is allowing me to then start from a slightly higher place. And so now we're entering year four of me being like super dedicated cardio guy. And, I'm still making gains, which is, which is awesome. Like it's, it's been crazy to me, and exciting and invigorating to get these kinds of newbie slash intermediate gains and see them continuing over time. So just another reason that I think you go, you know, when you guys see me talk about cardio a lot and stuff, a lot of it really does relate back to this self validation, self efficacy piece of being able to actually see progress on a weekly or monthly or annual basis, which, know, just isn't happening as obviously in the weight room anymore. So anyway, that has been super cool. One of the things I am considering, I made a note here is just letting my body weight go down. I've been trying to maximize this hypertrophy game for 20 plus years at this point, 27 years, maybe 26 years, something like that. And I just am at a point now where I think a lot of things in my life would be enhanced if I was 175 to 180 pound Brian instead of 195 pound Brian. And I don't just mean my cardio because yes, that will probably improve, but I think there's just other factors around life, like the amount of food or bad food that I end up eating, the quality of sleep, moving my body through space. energy throughout the day. mean, all of these things, I just could imagine getting better at a smaller body weight, as long as I can make that my homeostasis so that it's not as if like I dieted down there and then I'm a depleted 180, but more like that's just the future of Brian at 180. So something I'm considering toiling that around in my brain and we'll see, you know, kind of what manifests over the next few months there. Let me kick it over to you and I'll finish up with my short updates at the end. I am very interested in you updating us around that. Yeah, I could play a lot of devil's advocate. Not that I really want to, but I just want to ask more questions as it goes, right? Because I think it'll be interesting. First big update, Aaron is 37 today, so that is it's my birthday. I'm happy to be since spending it here with Brian chatting with you guys. Anyone out there right? This podcast is going to release a week later, so my birthday will be very well and gone by the time this comes out, by the way. Yes, don't hit him up in his DMs and say happy birthday a week later. That's just annoying. I have a three point X. So not quite four weeks, not quite three weeks until prep starts. I'm very much so looking forward to it. I am so sick of eating so so so over it. And I know it's really funny is in like, I don't know, maybe like 10 ish weeks, I'm gonna be look, I'm gonna be daydreaming about these days with just there was like too much carbohydrate and I felt sick to my stomach. Like I'm so over my intro workout, like sugary drink. I just like want to pound it so I can just get to water. Like like those last little bits of it. I'm just like makes my stomach kind of turn a little bit and I'm just like, I just got to finish this so I can drink my water and it's like actually enjoy the taste. And then I know like when I get probably six weeks into into prep, like that sugary drink is going to be like coveted is like this this flavor that has been robbed of me in it. I'm trying my best not to like hate it right now, but I do. I hate all the Dude, I know that feeling. I know that feeling for sure. I've experienced that on bike rides too, where I bring enough carbs for a two or three hour ride. And by the time I get an hour and a half or two in, I'm just like, fuck, I just want water, but I need the carbohydrates and you just have to turn your mind off and pound them. Yeah, yeah, but I did have a new all time high yesterday at 235 flat, which is still wild meter at my head around a I kind of wouldn't believe it if he wasn't seeing it on the scale sort of thing. Yeah, that's pretty wild, man. I don't think I've ever seen you in person above 210 or 212. When I competed at regionals, I was like 216 to 17, but that was like very, big. No, easily 18 % body fat, maybe closer to 20. Yeah. Last thing for me, I have some coaching spots. I'm really looking to get like a solid roster. Once I get I don't want to be like taking on new clients and stuff in my later stages of prep from a business standpoint. I just don't want to be taking on two more or too much more. So I'm looking to get like a really solid roster before summer, stay through summer, that sort of thing. So if you have been kind of on the fence or shopping around, I'm throw my hat through my name in the hat, I guess. Happy to talk to you guys about that. I also have one off calls that I do if you're maybe not really looking for ongoing coaching, but want to pick my brain about something that's up there on my website. And this is all used most often for other coaches who would like my help troubleshooting navigational things. So I do that is what that gets used for most often. So if you are a coach who's in that position, know that I offer that help for you. And it's always just a one off, nothing formal that goes on going or anything. And those are my updates. Cool. Yeah. So I'll piggyback on what you just said, because that was one of my updates as well. I've had a series over the last two weeks of these kind of one-off consult calls and I've realized that how much I enjoy doing them and how productive they seem to be for the people that are doing them with me. So, uh, I charged $200 for an hour call or 120 for a half hour. I'm also glad to have you do a 200 for an hour and split that into two half hour calls. so that's totally fine. I think they're super valuable and, I just, I really enjoyed doing them. I think they're a great value for somebody that doesn't want to pay the exorbitant fee of the monthly coaching, but does want to kind of pick our brains as Aaron said, and, like I've done like three or four of these over the last two weeks. I'm super down to continue these. And if anyone's interested, you know, you can hit me up on Instagram or whatever, and we can schedule that last two updates here. I took a poll on my IG the other day about people's breath rate or respiratory rate while they sleep. this has been something I've been interested in for the last year or two. since I heard Andy Galpin talk about it on a podcast, maybe two years ago, where he was saying that everybody over-breathes and this seems to be things sweeping through the health space and longevity space at the moment. So the poll I put out was, you know, at night when what does your app show you on your watch or whatever? Is it five to nine breaths a minute, which would be really, really low, nine to 13, 13 to 17 or 17 to 20 plus. And of the hundreds of people that responded to the poll, it was pretty evenly split like 48%. in the 13 to 17 and 48 % in the nine to 13 and then 2 % in the five to nine and 2 % in the 17 to 20 plus. I actually think that's like a pretty good healthy range. Like I think according to Galpin, most people should be around 12 or lower breaths per minute while they sleep. And so that would be those people in the nine to 13 range. But the people in the 13 to 17 range aren't like extremely high above that, especially if you're in the lower end of that. For me personally, I tend to be on the lower end of that. So I'm in that like 13, 14 range and something that I'm consciously trying to improve upon and not exactly sure what to do while I'm sleeping because I'm more or less unconscious while I sleep. Can't really control my breathing. But I think through, you know, lifestyle and cardio and just taking care of a lot of those variables that has sort of gradually come down over time. So yeah, I'm just curious if anybody else has any thoughts or insights on that and whether they've been able to improve it and kind of what they've done to improve their breath rate while sleeping. Last update is another thing I'm just gonna ping the audience for. I've been noticed the last three years when I look at my app data that January and February, I consistently have higher. resting heart rates and lower HRVs. And granted, those are kind of the inverse of each other anyways. Like if you have a higher heart rate, usually your HRV will be lower and vice versa. But for whatever reason, January and February, every year, it's like my resting heart rate goes up five to seven beats a minute and my HRV goes down 20 to 60 points on the two or 300 scale, whatever sort of metrics you're using there to assess it. And I don't... really know why it is. Everyone responded on my DMs and said, it's vitamin D, it's sunlight, it's, it's not prioritizing, you know, outside time as much because it's cold. It's all these things. And I'm like, yeah, but like I take vitamin D, I still make sure I get outside. I get my sunlight in the morning. Like, like nothing's really changing during those times. And other people have responded and said they noticed the same thing. So it's this weird thing that I'm trying to get to the bottom of and figure out like, why is it about January and February that everything goes awry? And then literally March, which we're in right now, it's March 4th today. The last four days, my heart, my resting heart rate has been back down under 40 and my HRV has been back up over 200. And I don't know what it is. Like suddenly March hits and everything changes. So super weird. maybe it is the weather. I don't know, but any other experiences, drop them in the comments. Yeah, my initial thought would I think it would be like the weather maybe not vitamin D. Did you ever get like your do you have like blood work from like vitamin D in the winter months versus like the summer months? I really don't think it would change like significantly but my vitamin D is actually higher in the winter. It's because I supplement with it. So in the summer, I don't supplement and it's in the 50s or 60s. And then in the winter, it's in the 70s because I supplement. So I don't know about that. And then the other thing is, is like, I've traveled to warm places in the winter. So I've gone to Costa Rica, I've gone to Mexico and stuff. And even in those places, maybe there's like a delay. factor, but even in those places, I'm noticing the higher resting heart rate and the lower HRV in those months. But when I go to those places in the other months, I don't notice that. So I don't know if it's like a cumulative effect that's occurring over time and whatever. I really just, I no insight. Yeah, that's really interesting. I feel like you have enough data to be like, this is happening, but we just don't have like a reason why very similar to like the bench, like pressing strength when you're dieting, pressing strength, like everyone knows like it tanks pretty noticeably, but like I've never yet to receive like a pretty decent explanation as of Yeah, yeah, I agree. Well, anyway, speaking of pressing strength, we have an episode on on training chest. So do you want to do you want to introduce us here and then I'll jump in. I think I introduced us in the intro. Yeah, let's just jump in. Yeah. Yeah. that, the way that I want to start this episode is to tell you about this, this chat GPT program that was created. So, I've been having conversations with chat GPT about a number of topics recently. It's kind of one of my good friends these days. And, and so I just naturally decided to ping chat GPT and see what they think about designing a chest specialization program. My first query to them. resulted in a program that was, I think, a hybrid of a strength and hypertrophy program because I didn't specify hypertrophy. That program had chest four days a week where two of the days were heavy strength focused days and two of the days were lighter hypertrophy focused days. And then I queried it and said, okay, great. Can you kind of change this so that it's more specific to hypertrophy? And the program that I got back... is the following. So they proposed 22 to 24 sets of chest three times a week. And that's not 22 to 24 sets split over three times a week. That's 22 to 24 sets every Monday, every Wednesday, and every Friday for a total of 66 to 72 working sets of chest throughout the week. They told you to make sure that you're focusing on progressive overload. time under tension, and higher rep sets. They had you do the exact same workout each of those days, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, no changes, each day for five weeks with a one week deload. And then they suggest that you change the angle of your presses and repeat that through for another five or six week cycle. The movements they programmed were barbell bench press, four to five sets, incline dumbbell press, four sets. Chest dips, four sets. Cable chest flies, three to four sets. Peck deck machine, three sets. Pushups, three sets to failure. So that's the chest workout that ChatGPT suggested to be done three times a week. And aside from all of the glaring problems with this program, there's also a lot of redundancy in there as well. And I don't personally know how I could survive that. How about you, Aaron? I mean, if I had to, I would do it. I wouldn't be happy about it. Like I wouldn't do it for five weeks. I mean, I would do it once is what I'm what I'm saying. Like I would do a Monday. I would not be happy about it, though. It's I don't know. I feel like. In seeing this output, right? I'm sure like when I'm looking at it and I'm sure you as well, like, you know, we're half a lot like many of these parts of it are coming from, like This is not that far off of what like someone will let's call like your early to like middle kind of level trainers like would program. I don't think they're going to give him the same program like three times the same exact program three times a week. But I still see so much of like this four sets eight to 12 reps right this four sets like 10 to 15 reps and it's I don't want to sound like I'm standing on my fucking soap box or high horse here but but you can tell it's not very well thought out and it's very overgeneralized sort of thing. And to be clear, when I was first writing programs and I really didn't know, that's what I was doing because that's what I saw. But it only took having conversations with people like you and CAS and getting access to better information until I was more privy to learn it. That's far from a best way to do things. Yeah, I mean, when I look at this program, call it semi reasonable to say that you could do this workout once a week. Like if you're looking at the old magazines of muscle and fitness and stuff from the late 90s when I got my start, this is what a blast your chest or build a chest that walks through the door before you do type workout would be from the magazines. And it would be Monday. International Chess Day, of course, but then you wouldn't train chess the rest of the week and you would come back and do something similar again the following Monday. In no world, even in the magazines back in the day, would anyone do this three days a week. And so I think it's just interesting because, you know, a year or two ago, and even currently, there's this whole discussion of, you know, AI is going to take over our jobs as coaches and You know, we really need to watch out for AI because they can build these incredible programs now that gets you to your goals and you don't need to pay anyone for them. And I just look at that and I just don't believe it. I, anyone that tries that program isn't going to get the results they want. They're probably going to end up with Rabdo or at least be so sore that the rest of their life is crippled. And they're not going to get the results they want. So I just, it just reinforces to me that our job as coaches is safe. and that intelligence and experience trump whatever AI is scouring the internet for this type of program and thinking that it's somehow suitable. Yeah, agreed. Okay. So now that we know what we don't want to do in a program, we can talk about kind of what we do want to do. And so in this next section, I have a list of seven different levers that you can pull to help you kind of optimize a specialization cycle for your chest or really for any muscle group. I think this applies pretty broadly, but we'll keep it kind of specific to chest today. And so these are not, necessarily in order of importance, but I did try to order them in a manner that I think has some implication on how I would do these in a hierarchy. If, if trying to create a specialization cycle, obviously some of them could jump higher or lower in the sequence based on a number of individual factors, which we can, we can get into over the course of the episode. But I think the most important one to start with here and the most obvious is exercise order in your training day. Obviously, if you're having a day that's just a chest day like chat GPT promotes, that exercise order is less significant than it would be if you're doing more of a evidence based split like something like an upper lower or a push pull legs, where you're training multiple muscle groups within a given session. And so exercise order essentially says that your chest movements should be first. before you do your other movements. This is very, very glaring and obvious for something like a push-pull legs split, where if you're doing a push day and you think you're gonna do shoulders or triceps before your chest, you're going to severely diminish the amount of stimulus that you can get in your chest by fatiguing the other muscles that contribute to your chest work. Like imagine trying to prioritize your chest in a barbell bench press after you've done tricep pushdowns. Your triceps are just gonna be so smoked that you're not gonna be able to lift very much weight at all and get significantly less stimulus for your chest. So exercise order can apply to the idea of just doing chest first, but it can also apply to the order of how you organize the specific movements within your chest session. And so that's why I think exercise order trumps and is kind of the most important variable when trying to create a specialization cycle. What do you think there? I think you hit the nail on the head. mean, that's, it's something that's profound in its importance and it's also like very simple, right? Yeah, so pretty obvious there. We'll put our chest movements first. We can get into the specific exercise selection piece later as exercise selection is one of these categories on levers to pull. The next one I put on the list was proximity to failure. And the reason that I put that second, even though I think a lot of people would say that volume increases are the primary driver of your results during a specialization phase. And I think chat GPT would agree with that if you look at the program they created. I think proximity to failure needs to go first, because how hard you work on your exercises is going to dictate how much volume you can do. And so I've had conversations on consults with people who are trying to do something similar to this, specialize in a body part or whatever. And they're like, okay, well, if volume is the primary driver of hypertrophy, I should be doing 20, 24, 30 sets plus per week for my target muscle. And I say, sure, yeah. I mean, if you're going to be doing the majority of your sets at three or four RIR, that probably makes sense. But if you're going to train a little bit closer to failure or up to failure, that's going to mitigate the amount of volume that you actually can use in your program. And so it's this inevitable inverse relationship between proximity to failure and volume, where you literally cannot do more volume if you're going to failure. You'll just reach a point where you've kind of maximized the stimulus that you can get on a given muscle. And therefore, doing more volume doesn't make any sense. If you're going to failure, if you want to pull back on failure, you can do a little bit more volume. What do you think there? The only thing I'd like to add and because it can be a little bit ambiguous, right? Because especially if you're someone who's maybe like an intermediary or something, it's hard to tell. Hey, was that third set? too much is my stimulus decreased or it can be a little bit ambiguous. One thing that is, I mean, this is a little bit of personal anecdote. When I am doing too much volume for like a given body part, my performance on it tanks from like set two to set three or something like that. Everyone is a little bit different, but for example, we had the question last week around me with the RP app. They just love to add additional sets and it got so bad were like for an example on set one I would get 12 reps by set for I'm at like five or six which is I mean that's a 50 % rep drop off rate I don't need those sets like that's that's pretty evident so that's one that using a performance decrement again it does it is slightly ambiguous because like where is enough performance drop Is it two reps? Is it three reps? Is it five reps? Six reps? It's there's no clear cut definitive kind of point, but that is a proxy that you can use to help you identify. Yeah, totally. And I also don't think that you necessarily have to approach it as saying that every set is to failure or every set is not to failure. It's likely that the best combination is some sort of combination of those two. And we'll get into that a little bit later as we kind of put this whole plan together. So the third level lever to pull, it does involve volume, but I think that My first move here, and I understand why this could be controversial. My first move here is, is to lower volume in the non specialized areas before increasing volume in the specialized areas. Or it may happen, you know, somewhat simultaneously, but I think as far as levers to pull, given that we know that the maintenance volume research is such that you can lower the volume or the stimulus we'll call it of the non-focused muscle groups. and you can maintain that's really your goal when you're trying to specialize in an area. If we're doing a chest specialization cycle, we are not trying to also build up our back and our quads and our hamstrings and our biceps and our triceps and our shoulders while we're building up our chest. We are accepting the compromise that those muscle groups are likely going to maintain their muscle while we focus on building the chest more. And so what we can do by lowering the volume in the non specialized areas is maintain the muscle there. but then allow increased recovery currency to be available for the focus muscle groups. And this is something I've seen across clients over the years is you don't have to increase the work of the area you want to improve to increase the rate of progress. Simply by lowering the total fatigue cost of the other stuff and allowing more recovery to take place, you could actually increase the performance and thus the results and downstream hypertrophy of the focus muscle group. What do think about that? It's interesting. It's a I'm not disagreeing by any stretchy imagination, but it's, it's almost like, hey, if you take your base program, right, and then we just decrease volume on the non muscle group of interest areas, we can then create a specialization that's just less volume, but no additional volume on the on the target area, the chest and this one, we call it, and we get better progress just through increased recovery. effectively. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I understand why that would be controversial. And I understand that like, if you're, if you're able to handle a certain level of stimulus across your entire body and you're recovering fine from that, it might seem kind of crazy to say, well, I'm going to lower my volume below what I can recover from. But I've just seen this like multiple times over and over through clients and through myself over the years that by creating that that gap between how much volume you're doing for the target area versus the non-target areas, you can create this kind of hyper response because you're so recovered. Kind of similarly to what I've noticed in this change when I just in the, you know, in last March, a year ago, when I dropped to these two to three times a week training program where I'm just doing less across the board. I'm not specializing. I'm just doing less, but because I'm doing less across the board, I'm increasing my recovery and I'm seeing performance increases as a result of that. I think when you're looking at it more from a hypertrophy perspective where you're using some sort of split routine, that by keeping the chest volume higher, or maybe there's a slight increase, but it's not like a drastic increase. Initially, I think that's what I'm more trying to get at is that the first lever to pull might be to just see if you can increase your response to the chest work simply by creating more recovery as opposed to just immediately pulling the volume of lever and being like, or pulling the volume lever and just increasing chest at the same time that you're decreasing everything else. Like I think that's a reasonable approach, but my thought would be why not take two or three weeks, try it my way, see if that elicits progress before then engaging in increased volume for the chest. Yeah, there's a phrase that you use semi-regularly. I feel like you haven't said it in a while, but it's something like fatigue, masks, fitness. that what it is? And that's kind of what it is. You know when you're super fatigued or over fatigued, but you may not realize that your baseline of fatigue can actually be a performance inhibitor. And it's not until you like take those like four days off over a long weekend and you don't do any training and then you come back like super fresh and you got like three extra reps than you did last week. And you're like, what the fuck? Where did that come from? Until you can really kind of start to question if that's really true or not. Yeah, no, great point. I really appreciate that input. So the next one in the order, which I think could potentially have moved above the one that we just talked about, is frequency. And so frequency is a great lever to pull. And it's kind of one that I think can work in unison with the prior one. So with this idea of lowering the volume in the non-specialized areas and then just kind of keeping the volume the same on the chest. It's like, what if you kept your volume the same on chest, but instead of training chest once a week, or at most maybe twice a week, like you would see in a, in a standard hypertrophy program, what if you increase that frequency on chest to three times a week, but you didn't actually change your volume. So you took your 12 sets a week of chest that you were doing and you went four, four, four or five, four, three or something like that across the three days, because now you're giving yourself an opportunity to hit your chest in a less fatigue state. So if you think of what your third chest exercises on a day or we'll call it second, we'll call second chest exercise in a day. If we started with a machine chest press, and then we went to a pack fly machine, we're going to see a significant performance decrement in the amount of load or mechanical tension that can be created in the pack fly machine because the bench press was done first or vice versa depending on you know, if you did pack fly first and then went to bench press, either way, it's kind of see the same decrement. But if you then split those movements up and you were like, okay, on Monday, I'm going to bench on Wednesday, I'm going to pack fly. And on Friday, I'm going to incline dumbbell bench or something as my primary movements. Then now you're able to attack each of those exercises when you're completely fresh, potentially use higher loads, create more mechanical tension and more stimulus. So I think frequency is definitely one that you can kind of grasp onto here and harness the power of. and that's one thing that I would say chat GPT did get right. You know, they really screwed up the volume piece here, but, but they did propose a plan in which you're training chess three times a week. And so I do think that that's one of those levers that, that has power to improve kind of your response in a hypertrophy manner. I think frequency is probably one of the most underutilized ones. I think people would kind of erroneously increase volume before increasing frequency. And I think that in my opinion, right, it's just my opinion, I'm not saying it's law, should be flipped if you can really intelligently design programming, right? Which I think everyone should strive for. Now, I would like to kind of play devil's advocate a little bit here or not even really just ask them some additional questions. Do you think that there can be like a do you think that frequency can kind of be like a bell curve distribution where if you try and go too frequent that you start to let's assume volumes the same like let's stick to the same example of 12 sets, right? Like do you what do you think about doing like two sets six days per week, right? Like do you think that would be better than the Four sets three times per week or is there something that was like kind of like a a minimal minimum like net stimulus per a session or something like that? And for the listeners, like I don't I don't think there is like a definitive answer. It's really just a little bit of conjecture and speculation if I'm really being honest. Yeah, you know, anytime anyone asks that question about what about two sets, six days a week type thing, the avatar that I always kind of go back to is Mano Henselman's, who has been known for training this way for years and years. And he talks about it quite a bit. And so he literally trains every day. I don't think he takes rest days, but he only does, you know, two sets per muscle group per day. So he's basically getting 14 sets a week. And that seems to work for him. I've tried that approach a few times over the course of my life, not often with full body, but like the way he does it, but usually, you know, with one or two specific muscle groups where I'll try to increase the frequency to that level and train them daily. And I always run into kind of the same roadblock, which is that lengthened movements to failure tend to make me quite sore. And so, and fatigued, even if I'm not as sore, it's still a sense of fatigue in the muscle. And so then even if I were to design this program, quote, intelligently and say, you know, Monday is bench press, which is lengthened. And then I go to Tuesday, which is a cable crossover and that's short. And then I go to Wednesday and that's another lengthened movement. And then I go to Thursday and that's short. It's like the cumulative effect is such that I don't think I'm ever actually maximizing my output on any of the days after the first day. Cause the first day kind of puts you into this little deficit and then everything is sub maximal to what you're capable of on each subsequent day, because you went into the kind of this hole in the beginning. So I do think there's a point where maybe frequency is too much. And, my, my guess would be that every other day with intelligent programming is about as much as you could probably maximize for a specialization cycle like this. yeah. What do you think about that? I think you're spot on. I think the every other day, which is effectively four days per week, but kind of not. It's four days every eight days is about as high as a frequency as I think you can realistically go before you have to start incorporating exercise variations. It wouldn't be top picks just because they fit a category of like a shortened overload. Like like if we're talking chest, right? And we're trying to if we're trying to do that. like Monday lengthen Tuesday short Wednesday lengthen Thursday short like what would be your third shortened chest exercise of that selection like you're pretty far down the line at that Yeah, I mean, aside from like a pec fly machine and then a cable fly, I I can't really think of what another short overloaded movement would be even. And that's what I'm getting at. we're kind of then getting into variation for the sake of variation, which is typically not a great thing. Yeah. Or you could just do it chat GPT suggests and do the same workout every single time you train chest All right think I'm glad I'm glad I brought it up. I think the listeners will get a good bit out of that. And I think it's I do believe there's an upper limit to where frequency becomes problematic because of the trade off in decisions that you're forced to make just to accommodate the higher frequencies of let's call it five days per week, six days per week sort of thing. Yeah, yeah, I agree. Well, I think this flows nicely into the next lever to pull, which is exercise selection. And so I think this one's like super important. I think they're all super important. It really, like I said, you could jumble up this order. And I think that it's very much depends on the individual and what order makes the most sense for you. But exercise selection is an important one. And exercise selection is even more important based on higher frequency. So like If you are training chest just once a week, like an old bro split type thing, and say you decide to pull the volume lever, but not the frequency lever. And you're just doing a shit ton of volume on one day. Exercise selection, maybe not quite as important as it would be if you're taking this this this approach that I'm outlining, which would be more of like this three times a week approach using frequency lowering the lower volume on other muscle groups, proximity to failure, exercise order, all the things we've already discussed, then I think exercise selection becomes more important. because like on the macro view, it could go to what we just said, where if you're training chest six days a week, exercise selection is extremely important. And as you train chest once a week, exercise selection is less important. So three times a week, exercise selection becomes somewhat important. And so I think there's a number of ways you could go about this. Like a very realistic approach to me might be to have you training chest with two exercises each of the three days. And in that case, you could have a day where there's like two lengthened exercises or a day where there's two shortened, or you could have a lengthened and a shortened. You also can use exercise selection to more specifically target the muscle at the different point that you want to target it. And actually I just, so as we went back to thinking about what the third short overload movement would be, I just realized that we completely forgot about the pullarounds. or push arounds rather the press arounds press arounds. Yeah. Yeah. So like the, N one cast something where you take a cable, you kind of twist your body a little bit, shift your hips, and you're really able to emphasize the short position. If you set your body up in such a manner so that you can get a ton of stimulus in there, without having to sacrifice, you know, a ton of muscle fatigue and soreness and stuff like that. And so, using exercise selection and doing kind of these unique movements like a press around, which can be done for the lower chest, the upper chest or the mid chest. So you essentially have three different variations of press around that you can use on top of using like a standard cable fly or a pack deck fly or something along those lines. This gives you a lot of options to target the chest from different angles and with more short overload exercise selection, which I think is a vital component of specialization cycles and something I'll get into. a little bit later on. But where do you kind of land on the exercise selection piece? would like to put it higher, but I think that's just a little bit of my own personal like bias, but I would like to think it's more important than it probably actually is. But like I said, I think I'm just expressing my bias a little bit. I feel like when you understand exercise selection and stuff really well, like your barrier to great stimulus becomes much lower. Right. You think back to like when we were younger and like you'd have like a chest day that's like, okay, or then you've had like one that's like, man, that's a crazy good like chest. They had this crazy stimulus, a crazy pump, but you could have never really pinpoint like why, you know, like some days were great. Other days weren't. I feel like once you really understand exercise selection, like that the height of the fence to get to a great stimulus gets like much lower. I like that. Can I say that I feel it? supremely confident that that translates into like 20 % more hypertrophy. Like, unfortunately, no, I cannot say that I think I could make that statement. Yeah, I agree. And I think while it's super important, it that's why I put it number five. Like I just think what those levers that you can pull above that are just going to move the needle more. because like, dude, we all got incredible results in the early years of training and we didn't know shit about exercise selection. We were just like, bench press, incline dumbbell bench press, dumbbell fly. Boom. Got it. Go. And like, we still got results. So, exercise selection becomes more important, the more advanced you So we'll just kind of leave that there and say, maybe if you're more advanced, you need to move that up in the sequence. you have more. I was only gonna say I think from a from an experience standpoint, it can be a little bit more enjoyable. Like that's one of the it's like one of the reasons why Undefeated is going to be so cool. Like from an exercise selection standpoint, like I we've really hit like hit the nail on the head, you know. So again, I think it's really cool. I really want to say that I think it matters a lot. I would be lying to people if I think I said that it truly did. but think it's one of those niceties, but I don't think it's like an earth-shattering sort of profoundness. Yeah, yeah. Well, this moves us on to increases in volume on the special areas. And the reason that I have this sixth is because I just think that if you have not tried to pull those other levers prior, then your increases in volume could fall on deaf ears. Like, let's just take it one by one. Imagine if your exercise order is all screwed up and you're doing triceps and back and biceps. and shoulders before you do your chest. No amount of increases in volume on chest are going to make that much of a difference at that point. Imagine if your proximity to failure is all jacked up and you're never going to failure. Eh, maybe at that point increases in volume can compensate for not proximity for not having a good proximity to failure or low enough proximity failure. But if you are training close to failure, that has a drastic impact on the amount of volume you can do. So that's why I had that one first. The lower volume for the non-specialized areas. Again, you can't increase volume on a specialized area unless you lower the volume down for the non-specialized areas first. So why not try and see if you can increase your recovery capacity by decreasing volume in some areas before you go and try to increase volume in other areas. You can always add volume later. Frequency again, like if you're training once a week, Yeah, you're going to have to do super high volumes, but you're likely going to be more effective with slightly lower volumes done more often than just simply using a hammer and saying, I'm going to increase volume immediately right off the bat. And then we just discussed exercise selection and the impacts that that has on on volume, because the exercises that you do dictate what stimulus you're receiving from that exercise and thus impact the amount of volume that you can do for that muscle group. And so That's how we got to this point where increases in volume on the specialized areas has dropped all the way down to F or part six thoughts. Yeah. No, I mean, just that you explain that perfectly. Right. It's it's does not need to be a primary consideration until it's in it's in position six for a reason is what I'm agreeing with. Cool. Yeah, and I think that that's a controversial thing. But I think by explaining it the way that I did prior, kind of elucidates why we are likely going to have to increase volume for the target area at some point in the specialization cycle. But it just shouldn't be the first lever that's pulled. Yeah. And I think there's like, there's a genetic component to it, right? Like sometimes we just have like a muscle group that's a lagging body part that really just doesn't respond well. But more often than that, we typically have like, through maybe sport injury, how we learned movement mechanics, whatever, like we probably don't perform those exercises in a way that's best to grow that tissue. in just spamming volume, you're just, there's something that you also say, Brian, that's like, they say, what was it? Practice makes perfect, but no, it's perfect practice makes perfect. Like if you perform your RDLs really poorly, if you just spam RDLs, you're just gonna continue performing them poorly. Like the answer is to like fix your performance on how you do them. Then you may not need as much volume once you start learning how to do them. properly and get the desired stimulus out of a normalized amount of volume on. Yeah, dude, I love that you're dropping like my quotes from over the years. This is amazing. So practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect and bad practice creates bad habits. And that's just true literally across any discipline that you do. It was originally a quote from my basketball coach when I was in high school and it's always stuck with me. So that's super cool that you were able to kind of pull that one for us. All right, last section here at levers to pull is intensity techniques. And I just think this is last because you don't really need them. They are something that you can use. But when I say intensity techniques, I'm talking about rest, pause sets, drop sets, partials go in that category. Super sets, things like that, like back to back movements, pre exhaust. All of that stuff are levers that you can pull, but they should really be the last thing. I mean, like even increases in volume, which is the sixth one on here, should absolutely trump intensity techniques because intensity techniques mostly are going to be a time-saving mechanism when you look at the research in that, usually what you'll see is four sets of a rest pause or a drop set equal three sets of straight sets. So what that might look like is you do one set of bench press and then... you rest 15 seconds and you go again to failure, go again to failure and go again to failure. So essentially you're hitting the main initial set and then you're getting three of these short rest sets, which gives you four failure points. So you essentially hit four failure points to equate to the three failure points you would hit by doing three straight sets. But because you're getting more rest in there, you're able to, get some I don't want some effective reps. So we know that the effective reps are not just the last five reps. So by doing straight sets, you are getting some stimulus from the earlier reps, even if it's not as much stimulus as you get from the latter reps. So anyway, four sets of intensity techniques generally equals three sets of straight sets. This is a time saving mechanism because if you did the initial buy-in set plus three rest pause sets, you could get that done in three minutes. Whereas if you did three straight sets with rest in between, you're likely looking at eight minutes, seven minutes, something like that. so it does, it does save you quite a bit of time and you still get significant results from that. So this is a lever that you may need to pull depending on how much volume you have to do. So you could imagine somebody who's super slow twitch muscle fiber makeup, especially in their chest, but maybe just systemically across. And so this person can do and recover from a ton of volume. This person might want to specialize on a muscle group, but not spend all day in the gym to do it. This might be a lever that that person needs to pull. It might be a lever that's negligible or something that you wouldn't even consider if you're more of a fast-pitched muscle fiber person who just needs to do five or six sets of chest each session, still getting you 15 to 18 sets across the week. but that allows you to do those in a more time efficient manner without having to rely on intensity techniques to save you time. Yep. I'm glad. Very glad that you brought up the time aspect is that was one often. I feel like that that gets poorly compared without the context of time coming into it when it seems very silly because that is the primary benefit is time. Yep, yep, yep. All right, well that's our seven levers to pull. And so I have three additional categories that I just wanna kind of briefly touch on before we wrap the episode up and put it all together. the first one I wanna just talk about is why there's a good reason to rely on short overload movements in specialization cycles. And anyone that's followed this podcast knows that short overload movements are going to be significantly less fatiguing on the muscle. the stimulus that you receive from them is gonna be more on the kind of metabolite buildup, the lactate accumulation, the burning in the muscle, essentially flooding nutrients to the muscle through contraction. And so you can imagine doing something like a cable or Peck fly where the movement is driven by that feeling of. contracting the chest at the short position where your arms come together versus the sensation that you get from doing something like a dumbbell bench press where you get to the top of the rep and there's no tension on the muscle. You're simply stacking joints and the majority of the tension exists at the bottom of your rep. And so by doing those short overload movements, you can actually increase the amount of volume that you're doing a ton. mean, so much like you can do. If I was creating a program of just lengthen movements or just shorten movements for chest. Like imagine if, you know, it's, it's this crazy world where you can either do only inclined dumbbell bench presses or only like a pack fly machine or like a press around or something like that. I could probably do three times the amount of volume of just short overload movements that I could do of lengthened ones. And thus the short ones become a really great way that we can pull that lever of increasing volume in our training program. without having to incur significant levels of fatigue along the way. Yeah, mean, yeah, like there's nothing more I can add on that. Yeah. cool. Well, we'll get into kind of how we put that all together in the last section. the next one is why there's good reason to consider more variation versus more sets of fewer exercises. So think of a program that say only has three exercises. Like, you know, one day you're going to do five sets of barbell bench. Then the next day is five sets of inclined dumbbell bench. And then the last day is five sets of some sort of fly movement. You're doing 15 sets, but you're only getting three different exercises, which means you're only targeting your muscle from three different angles. The research on hypertrophy has been very confident to demonstrate that more variation is going to produce better hypertrophy and more uniformed hypertrophy. Maybe that's the better way of saying it. It's not necessarily that you're going to get more hypertrophy, but you're going to get more uniformed hypertrophy where the muscle is more well-roundeded and stimulated from each angle. The study that I think exemplifies this best. I don't know that it's Damos. That's the first thing that came into my head, but they were comparing doing four different quad exercises to just one quad exercise. I think they were either squatting or they were doing like lunges, leg press, squats, and deadlifts maybe. I could be totally wrong on this, but it was four exercises compared to one exercise. And the group that did four exercises may or may not have gotten more hypertrophy overall, but they got more well-rounded hypertrophy in their quad muscles where the squats tended to stimulate mostly the vastus lateralis and not as much of the other muscle groups. so this is just another reason why I think instead of saying, I'm going to construct my chest day with one exercise each day, which gives you three total exercises. Maybe it's instead of five sets of one exercise, it's two or three sets of two or three different exercises on each day. and so yeah, that's, I think just like a reasonable place to think about, where your programming should go when you're looking to specialize. Yep. The only thing I'll add on to that one is that is obviously limited towards exercise availability and options, right? If you're in a home gym with like adjustable dumbbells in a barbell, you might end up into some of that variation for the sake of variation where you're doing the like squeeze press or something like that as a variation. But if you or in a gym that's pretty decently outfitted or something like that. Like you have a little bit more of that flexibility to leverage for that. Yeah, obviously the more equipment you have access to the better, but just real quick off the top of my head, like even someone in that case that you mentioned, you have barbell flat incline press. So you have two different barbell movements you can do. You have dumbbell flat and incline. You have dumbbell flies, flat and incline. You have pushups. You could potentially incorporate some sort of banded like press around or banded crossover type movement. So I mean, already you're looking at seven or eight different variations that you have access to just in a home gym. And then if you're in a commercial gym, mean, double or triple that, Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. So then the last section here is, putting it all together. Like, what does it look like? And I don't think anyone's going to be surprised at this point, because we've kind of flirted with this throughout the whole thing. but like what type of split would be best to optimize this? Okay. So we've kind of discussed that we've said, Hey, three times a week is probably the number of days that you would want to train chest. So maybe that's Monday, Wednesday, Friday, something along those lines, make sure you have a full rest day in between each one. what do you do with the rest of the body? It really, it really depends. I would say that the key in my mind is making sure that you're not training muscles that are gonna conflict with the chest on the in-between days. Meaning that if you are going to have shoulder and tricep work in your program, I would probably encourage you to do that after your chest work. on the days that you do chest. And I wouldn't say you need to do like, like pull volume way back on those. Cause when you're doing chest, what are you also doing? You're also training shoulders and you're also training triceps. So I think you can get away with at the end, just throwing in a couple sets of lateral raises and a couple sets of tricep push downs. And you've more or less trained your entire upper body pushing structure with a significant emphasis on chest that then decreases the, then the possibility that those movements conflict with your chest session. Imagine if you'd put your shoulder and tricep work on Tuesdays and Thursdays with your chest on Monday, Wednesday, Fridays, it probably doesn't make as much sense. For me, I think you put those shoulders and triceps on your chest days at the end as an afterthought, and then you put your back and biceps and leg work on the in-between days. Again, pulling back on volume, pulling back on intensity, pulling back on the entire stimulus and fatigue cost of those other muscle groups so that you can optimize the output on your chest sessions. Yeah, I mean, that's everything we talked about. I really don't have anything to add onto the back of that. Yeah. Another thing I'll add is I think there's value in two pieces of approach here. So one being a decreasing RIR approach, because if someone just goes to failure all the time on their chest work, they're going to limit the amount of volume they can do. And we know volume is pretty important for hypertrophy. If someone didn't go to failure ever on their chest work, they could do so much volume. that it becomes time inefficient. So I think using a decreasing RIR approach, something like two, one, zero across your sets. So if you're doing three sets of a chest movement, your first set would be two RIR, your next set would be one RIR, and your final set might be to failure. I love this approach in these types of situations. I just use it in general for a lot of myself and my clients. But the cool part about this is it kind of allows you to just chart target a given rep target. So imagine if you're like, eight is my number, I'm gonna target eight reps. Well, if you get your first set at about two RIR, and then you rest a minute or two, you come back and you do your second set, to get eight reps again, it'll probably drop an RIR and you'll be down to one RIR. And then you rest another, I don't know, two minutes, three minutes, whatever it is. You get to the final set, again, you target eight reps, you get to zero RIR. So by hitting eight reps on each set, you're making that set harder and harder and harder. because fatigue is increasing across. And now you're able to get 24 quality reps, where if you had gone to failure on every set, maybe it would have gone 10, 7, 5. And now you're getting 22 reps instead of 24 reps, and you're causing more fatigue. So I love this kind of decreasing RIR approach. Do you think that that's reasonable, something you would use? I think it's reasonable. The reason I don't use it is because I don't like to provide too many bounds on people because then I find clients get really in their head and then I'm fielding like all these sorts of crazy questions where I'm like, okay, we're gonna remove from bounds from you. I want you to try really hard. know, where someone would be like, I think it was like three RIR but then it wasn't and then I find people's I have seen, right? Of course it's not everyone where someone might be like, okay, set one I did, let's call it eight, right? But then when I go to failure on my third set, I got like 12 and I'm like, well, then that your RIRs are really messed up, right? And there's two in their head. So again, I believe it's reasonable. It requires you to have a pretty good training history to be able to dial it in, right? And I have just had numerous clients just spin their wheels in their head and fucking it up. Yeah, I could see that. I'll just say that the way that I coach that is that I kind of don't care if in week one, that's what happens where they go eight, eight, 12 or something like that. Because that's so obviously points out where their glaring error was that from a coaching standpoint, it's just like, okay, well, we're going to add, you know, five pounds, 10 pounds, 15 pounds, whatever it is to the movement to make it so that that first set of eight that you do feels pretty dang hard, but not as hard as you could possibly go. And then I just want you to hit eight on every other set after that with the final set to failure. Okay. So you take the final set to failure the next week and you get nine. Well now we're getting closer. So then we add some more weight and by week three, we've dialed it in and boom, we're flying. We're moving. So, so I'm okay with that idea of week one sort of being sandbagged accidentally. Because I just think it allows you to get an assessment of where you are and then build momentum going forward, which I would much prefer to somebody accidentally going too heavy where they're like, oops, I went to failure on my first set of eight and now I'm screwed. And now we need to almost like reset this entire sequence next week instead of just being like, okay, you know, we'll add some weight and move forward from there. And then, so the last piece I'll add on putting it all together is this idea of escalating volume over the cycle. And I think this has so much value. And I think it also plays into why I put lower volume on non-special areas as the third piece in my levers to pull. Because if you're starting by taking volume away from other places, this now leaves you a ton of runway to add volume. to your priority muscle group over the course of the cycle. And I think given the research we have on the volume and its impact on hypertrophy and the data from the data-driven strength guys, like they were even on this podcast two or three years ago talking about this idea of ramping up volume in a specialization cycle and kind of using that lever. And so I didn't even want to put this as one of the levers to pull. Cause I think it's just that important that once you have all those other levers in place, it almost to me is like, like you, it's like almost a non-negotiable, like if you are trying to specialize in a specific muscle group and you've done so by pulling back some volume and other muscle groups, it only makes sense to increase the volume of your target muscle group over the course of the cycle. maybe not as aggressively as the RP hypertrophy app had you do it as you referenced. The way that I would generally do this is by increasing the volume primarily on the short overload movements, which we talked about as one of those really important pieces in a specialization cycle. using those fly, not the fly, not the dumbbell fly, but using a pec fly, a cable or a press around movement and increasing the volume on those movements over the course of the cycle. seeing how high you can push those without so much touching the volume on the length and movements that are going to be causing more fatigue. I definitely do not disagree, but I would like to pose a question. If you could, could you maybe conceptualize how much of a volume increase on those short overload movements we might expect or try to aim for? Yeah, I I kind of think the sky's the limit. Like, I think you can push it as high as you can push it. I mean, look at... So the data-driven strength guys showed in their recent work in the last few months that there seems to be no upper limit to how high volume can go as long as you can recover. We also saw the study with the 52-set study from, I don't know, what was it, about a year ago? The interesting thing about the 52 set study is they were only, they were only doing that on one or two muscle groups. So in a sense, it was a specialization cycle, if I'm not mistaken. So it's not like they were doing 52 sets for the entire body. They were literally saying, we're going to bring you into the lab and we're going to train one or two muscle groups. And those are going to be doing 52 sets. The amount of volume that you can handle when you're not doing a lot of volume for the rest of your body, I would guess is, quite high, especially if you're doing short overload movements. So as far as conceptualizing this, let's say we're doing a three day a week chest specialization program where each of those training days has one lengthened movement. So say on Monday, you're doing barbell bench press. On Wednesday, you're doing inclined dumbbell bench press. And on Friday, you're doing dumbbell flies. So you have a lengthened movement on each day. Then maybe you're starting that cycle with, okay, so we'll say each of those movements has three working sets, those length and movements. So now as you essentially will say, have three additional sets per day that we'll spend on a short overload movement. So maybe on day one, it's a cable fly day two, it's a pack machine fly and day three, it's a press around movement of some sort. So we're doing three sets of each of those. So now we have six sets on Monday, six sets on Wednesday, six sets on Friday. depending on how you respond, and this is obviously the magical question is, know, what is your soreness like? What's your fatigue like? Are you able to increase performance week to week? Like all of these variables and contexts need to be taken into account. But I could see adding one set per short overload movement per day, per week for the course of the cycle. literally going from. 18 sets a week in week one to 21 sets a week in week two to 24 sets a week in week three to 27 sets in week four to 30 sets in week five and then deload and recycle and kind of repeat. Because you're increasing that volume on the short overload movements and you have the repeated bout effect of, you know, you're not going to get as sore or fatigued over time by doing the same movement. I I would conjecture that that's a reasonable, aggressive way of approaching volume escalation in a specialization cycle. I love how you outlined it because in the beginning I was kind of I guess disagreeing with you where I'm like, well if we're gonna end so I guess let me back up in the week five, right? We started Monday, Wednesday, Friday proverbially with three sets of the short overload movement by week five. We would end up with six sets that we were getting at. I, yeah, six or seven. Okay, six or seven. So, what is it when in there? My the question that I was going to ask is like, at what point is that? Let's call it seven. Let's let's take the high high example. At what point is, let's call it, so seven sets more fatiguing than an additional set of the lengthened excerpt. However, the way that you framed it is we're already doing three on the length and movement. And I kind of have a, kind of draw my line in the sand that I really don't think you need four sets of like a length and movement because of all the reasons that I said before, I think performance really starts to drop off. Fatigue really picks up. But if you were to say like, let's say we were doing two, two of the lengthened, seven of the short, I feel like going from two to three might be a better option than going from like five to six on the short. But the way that you laid it, we're already doing three on the lengthened. And I do agree going to four, think is unnecessarily fatiguing and would be more so than doing that six or seventh on the short exercise. So very, very good sample. cool. Well, I mean, to your point, I don't think that starting at two would be a bad idea either. Like, you could start at two on the lengthened movement, and then you have a lever that you can pull on the lengthened movement too. So maybe you start at two on the lengthened, and then you go for the short, you start at three, and then you go four, five, six. And then you're like, I really don't think that seventh set on the shortened one makes a ton of sense. But shit, it's the week before deload. I don't care if I create a little bit of extra fatigue, why not use the length and movement in the final week, ramp up a set there. And now it's three and six, three and six or three and seven instead of three. Yeah, whatever. You guys are understanding what I'm saying. Using the lever to pull one extra set into the length and movement instead of adding another set of the short at the end of the cycle, totally makes sense to me. And I think a lot of that comes down to your experience and how much you can get out of the length and movement. So somebody like you or I, I would absolutely start at two sets on the length and movement because I don't even think I need three sets of a length and movement ever. But for somebody that's newer, call it an intermediate trainee, can't go quite into the fatigue cave the way that we can push those sets quite the same, create as much stimulus as we can. Starting them at three might make more sense and maybe even escalating them to four depending on how novice they are and how poor they are at creating stimulus. Obviously all of these different variables and contexts that we need to take into account that are individual based, where you are in your training journey, et cetera. terrible time for me to try and take a sip of water. Yeah, I mean, I agree. I loved this episode. I think you delivered very, very well. I think in my very recent bias opinion, this is maybe some of your best work on Eat, Train, Prosper. So I think this is going to be a very, very valuable episode for everyone. You had me really thinking and contemplating things as well, which I personally enjoy. So wonderful episode, Brian. Thank you. I appreciate you taking the devil's advocate approach as well and kind of pushing me and, and my thought patterns. Cool. So guys, any questions on the back end of this one? Of course, you know where to find Brian and myself and we will talk to you next week.