going on guys? Happy Tuesday. Welcome back to Eat, Train, Prosper. This is episode 185 and we are talking about glute specialization. So on episode 184, we talked about a chest specialization and one of the commenters on YouTube asked if we could do one for glutes and this is honestly something that it's been a conversation. I've had a lot of like back and forth with my fiance Jenny about and she's been Obviously everyone has their like different Instagram algorithms and she had been sharing that she's seeing a lot of girls training glutes like four times per week and getting like really good results from it to which it then typically steamrolls into a little bit of an argument with us. And I just start trying to poke holes and things in question like because I'm generally curious which I thought would be a very very great topic really to roll into a full episode because I think I think I think Brian can really help out with a lot of practical stuff and there's some things in considerations to make that I think really needs to go into if you are going to try and do something like this. So we're going to keep a similar structure to how we did the chest episode because it was very, very well received. We got some really good feedback on that. But before we dive in, it's been three weeks, I think, since we've had an episode with some life going on between between us. Brian had some travel and then I had like a very short like covid-esque sickness one week. So That's pushed us a couple weeks out. Brian, can you kick us off with some updates, please? Yeah, I can't believe it's been three weeks. I think this is the longest break that we've ever taken in like five years of doing this podcast. I had a number of people contact me and be like, dude, what's happening to the podcast? This is my anthem while I work out, you know, what are we doing to me? So I thought that was really cool. But what? Yeah, exactly, exactly. So I took a spring break with the family. We decided to drive to Scottsdale from Boulder, which is 14 hours of time in the car to get there, 14 hours of time in the car to get back. We did a overnight each way in Santa Fe, which was almost exactly halfway. And it was fine. Like, I think the way these this works with four trips for four car rides is the one to Santa Fe. Everyone is excited because we're leaving. That was easy. Then we go from Santa Fe to Scottsdale. Everyone's excited because we're going from cold weather to warm weather. Then the worst leg of the whole trip was the return from Scottsdale to Santa Fe because it's the longest leg and you lose an hour going that way. So you're in the car for like seven hours plus, but it feels like eight hours with the time change. And plus no one's excited to leave vacation. So that leg was like brutal. No one was happy in the car. And, and then the final leg, you you just get home. is what it is. But it was actually like a really awesome trip. We got four days of pool time outdoors. It was 97 degrees on one of the days. Yep. I have a question. Do you do 100 % of the driving or do you guys switch? I did a hundred percent of the driving there. There's, would say, usually I do about 95 % of it or 90 % and she'll jump in for an hour or two here and there. but the main reason that I now did all the driving and may continue for the future is the train heroic that we use for our programming for, for Paragon. I can't do unless I have really elite internet. I realized a year or two ago, I was on a flight and I tried to do programming on the flight and I did like a whole week of programming. And then I got back and realized that nothing saved because of the plane wifi. And then I noticed the same thing happened when I was driving back from the desert to Colorado, maybe a year ago where I was in the car and I was hotspotting and I was trying to do programming and nothing saved again. And so now I'm just hesitant to do any of that sort of programming if it's not like super elite wifi. So I just drove, like I could have done some other non-programming work, but I enjoy driving and she doesn't really, so it just kind of makes it easy for everybody. How about you? Are you the driver? No, this is like one of the, you know, I'm not to like try and derail our episode. You know how there's those things that like it's part of like becoming like being a man and being like the man of the family. I just can't drive that long. Like my hips start getting really like my right hip, like my driving leg starts to like really, really bother me. And I try to like shift around and everything. And I just fucking can't. And I hate it. Like when I remember growing up, my stepdad would like literally just crank coffee and drive us from like Pennsylvania to Florida. And I'm like, cannot fucking become that person. I just can't do it. So. know, this actually leads me to something that I think is super relevant to this conversation, which is that up until this last year or two, I was the same way as you were. If I was stuck in a car or an airplane and I couldn't move for a number of hours, it would be my knees, my low back, my hips. Everything would just start cramping up and I would get really antsy because if I was if I wasn't moving, I would feel as if this like jabbing sharp. pain in my body and like various spots. And I think a lot of that was the result of like back in the day, it was training CrossFit and my body just being destroyed, you know, knees primarily. And then it was doing like higher volume hypertrophy work. And again, my body just didn't handle that even when I felt great before the ride. And I was like, there's nothing limiting me. This should be a really great like six hour car ride by two hours in. I was absolutely miserable. This ride, 28 hours of driving, I didn't even have one moment where my body kind of spoke back at me. It was completely chill and easy, no pain, no resistance. And I can only contribute that to the volumes I'm doing, the exercises I'm selecting, the recovery that I'm getting, the inclusion of cardio maybe, like all of these number of factors. But the first time I've ever really had a drive this long with this many hours with no issue. that was super. Wonderful. Okay, so we finished our Scottsdale trip. Got back to Boulder. Boulder's been awesome. I've gotten a few nice bike rides and runs in and now we're supposed to get like four to eight inches of snow this weekend. So we had a plan with some of my bros here to do something that we're calling a 999. And so this is in one day, you go ski nine runs, then you with your bikes on the car, you then go to a mountain biking. place to go do nine miles of mountain biking. And then you drive to downtown Denver and do nine innings of baseball. And so that was our plan for this Saturday, but with four to eight inches of snow and like 36 degree weather, I think the hardest part of that honestly is probably sitting at a baseball game in snow and 36 degree weather. yeah, dude, fucking nine innings. Like I didn't even watch nine innings of a baseball game and like. years. couldn't even imagine like I think this night watching nine innings of the game is actually the hardest part of that entire 999. Yeah, so anyway, we're rescheduling it. We may just go skiing this weekend, but a little bummed about that just goes to show you know, you never have you never know what's coming in Boulder and then okay moving on final two updates here. My new pod life reflected. I've been meaning to try to get out the second episode which I talked about we're doing with an ultra endurance athlete and really excited to kind of dig into some of the psychology around. why you wanna go run 200 miles. We recorded the entire episode, it was over 90 minutes, it was a fucking banger, I was so amped on it. And then I went to upload the footage and somehow, no clue how this happened, it recorded muted. Which is crazy, because we did a test, I always do a test now before these episodes, we did a test, recorded like 10 seconds, we were talking, jabbing, whatever, it was totally fine. So then I hit record like the real way we recorded the whole episode and somehow it was muted. No idea how it happened. It's driving me literally insane. The first two days I was really beating myself up for it. Anyways, the end result is we now need to just record the episode all over again. And then final update is I've been on this kick of two times a week full body training and how great it's been for me during my cardio season in this warmer weather period. And I just been having an inkling to change it up. And the idea of doing a split training just appealed to me. And so I quickly threw together something which takes me from two times a week full body to a three times a week split. And I think I'm going to just move forward with this because I think it's going to accommodate my cardio quite well. The idea is to have a chest and back day on one day, shoulder and arm day on another day, and then a full lower body day. and then run two cycles of that. So there's like two iterations of that workout. So over two weeks, I've worked my way through the whole cycle and then back to the first workout. what I really like about that is that, especially during cardio season where my legs are getting a ton of volume through running and biking and stuff like that. One day a week of that is great. It allows me to put more like zone two and walking around the leg day. And then I have the rest of the week where I can put the higher intensity cardio or longer zone two sessions around the upper body days. And it also allows me to hit the upper body twice per week for the same muscle groups. So I know I said I have a chest and back day and a shoulder and arm day, but basically the idea being that on the shoulder and arm day, I'll put some pull ups, I'll put some dips, maybe some tricep pushups, stuff like that. So I get a little bit of back work, a little bit of chest work. And then obviously on the chest and back day, there's plenty of triceps, biceps, and delts as auxiliary movements. So I'll be hitting the full upper body twice a week, hitting the full lower body once a week. keep the session shorter, less accumulated fatigue, less systemic fatigue, et cetera. So just started that this week, I've done two of the three workouts and looking forward to kind of trialing this approach over cardio season and seeing how goes. Yeah. I only have one update and that is that my prep has started. So first bodybuilding prep. I'm two days in. I'm very excited. It started because my food has come down which has been a relief. I'm sure in probably six to eight weeks I will be eating those words and wishing I had more food. But that is future Aaron's problem. Yeah, so where was your body weight at peak? Two days before it started, I had a peak of 236.4, I believe it was, or 236.2 or 236.4. Cool, and where do you estimate your body fat at? It's hard to say. I've been posting a photo each day on my story. I think like 12, maybe a little bit less. It's hard because I have like, the abs are like more hypertrophied just by, you know, the PEDs. So it's really kind of messing with my gauge that was so reliable of, you know, 10, 12 years tracking it as a natural. I would say 12, potentially less. Yeah, I would agree with that. It's going be my assessment too. The interesting part about that is I did some quick math in my head. And so if you went from two 36 at 12 % and say your goal was to get down to 6%, it might actually be lower than that, but we'll just say six, that's about 15 pounds of, of fat that you need to lose from two 36. So that would take you to two 21 likely is you're not going to lose all fat. So you're going to have to sacrifice a little bit of muscle. You probably end up at 215, 216, something like that. But that's some good weight, Yeah, I'm I honestly just don't know. So much has been so different, you know, and I hate I hate not knowing, you know, because I felt what felt so confident, you know, but now with everything being different, I honestly just don't know. I'm really hard pressed to think that I would be that big still because let's say like in the Pro League, there's a weight cap in men's physique that's been implemented at end at my height. The weight cap is like 98 something kilos and that's. Like 215 they have 215 to 16 so I've I've I'm hard pressed to think it like first time first show I'll be right at like the weight cap. I'm. I think maybe around 205 or something like that. We'll see. We'll see. But honestly I have no idea. I could be like 199 pounds to what we will see. know, dude. I feel like if you end up getting down that though, you're going to end up sacrificing a lot of muscle. And I just don't foresee that with the PED situation. Like you should be able to hold on to most of your muscle, but we'll see. Yeah. I'm excited to follow it. yeah. And obviously keep some updates in and stuff in the prep or sorry in the podcast as we go. But practicing my posing daily now. And I'm excited that like just have more rigid structure. was I was mentioning to Brian before we started. It's I feel almost silly saying it, but like towards the end of the end of the build, like we had to do all these silly things because like my body was just so resistant to putting the weight on. I was so full. I was drinking two liters of orange juice a day, putting like honey on all my bread and stuff. Not I was only doing like seventy five grams of vegetables per day because it was just an opportunity cost on food. And I didn't I just didn't feel great. I was pushing food constantly. I would eat at seven a.m. I would eat at 10 p.m. And I'm just glad to like my first my diet start is at 3700 calories. That's where like the adjustment has been, which is absurd that that's, you know, the first one. But that's down from 45 where I ended the build. So I'm just I feel like relieved right now. And that's nice enough for me. Yeah, that was actually going to be my next question is where the calories ended and then where you dropped them to. So that's good to know at 800 calorie delta, still crazy that you're having to put 3,700 calories into your body at the beginning of the deficit. And I assume you're back up to eating like, you know, 600 plus grams of fruit and veggies. No, not yet. Still only a hundred and like twenty on the day. Yeah. Yeah. my last question on this is I know you're diligent with your blood work and we have that side chat with Dave where we're constantly discussing blood glucose and HbA1c and all that. Did you end up getting blood work done at the peak of this bulk? No, I messaged the lady who it's a very Bolly thing. You like message some WhatsApp number and then they like orchestrated a message or a couple of days ago and I just haven't heard back from her. But it is like really it's like peak holiday season. So it's Eid or just was Eid, which is like the I'm really stretching the limits of my imagination or my understanding here. So apologies if I get it wrong. It's like the biggest Muslim holiday of the year. We're like at the end of Ramadan and that sort of thing. And then that core correlates with like the biggest Balinese holiday. So we're like all in this period where everyone's on holidays and stuff. So I'm gonna get it done regardless, but I'm probably, I'm not gonna be able to capture like the peak. I'm probably gonna be like a handful of days into my build, or sorry, into my deficit. But I do wanna see how like bad things look at what, you know, should be one of the worst times. Yeah, I wonder how much one week of deficit changes that. Like, I think at least for the fasting blood glucose number, I think you get a bit of a change. But the HbA1c probably shouldn't be so different. No, the HBA1C shouldn't really change at all. Yeah. Interesting. All right. Cool. That's all I got. Cool, let's dive in. So what I think is really interesting and that Brian kicked off last episode with, which was the chest specialization is trying to ask chat GPT to generate us a glute specialization program. let me see if I can fire up my prompt that I use, because I really tried to use a very intelligent prompt and by no means am I a fucking wizard with chat GPT. But I tried to be really, I tried to make it as good as I could, right? So I'm gonna read the prompt. So my question was, I want you to role play that you are a highly respected, experienced and educated bodybuilding coach that specializes in helping women drastically improve their glute development. Can you please provide me a glute specialization hypertrophy program that trains the glutes three times per week? Right, so I try to steer it in a direction. that I wanted. And the response we got out of it was here is a glute specialization hypertrophy program designed specifically for maximum glute development in women. Science backed prioritizing mechanical tension, metabolic stress and progressive overload with a mix of compound movements, isolation in various rep ranges. So what I thought was pretty interesting and I guess not right. It's still picked up on the metabolic stress component, but I would say you have to be pretty in the know and new in the know within like the last, what do we call it? Like two, maybe three years max to be in the loop that like the metabolic stress component is being like less accepted as a mechanism. Would you agree with that, Brian? Yeah, for sure. think, you know, seven, eight, nine, 10 years ago, metabolic stress was highly considered to be one of the three mechanisms of hypertrophy up there with mechanical tension and, what am I missing right now? Metabolic stress, mechanical tension, why, why am I muscle swelling? Anyway. yeah, I think it's muscle swelling. like the pump or whatever. Yeah. I'm pretty sure that was the other one. Okay, so of those three, I think it was considered to be, you know, one of the equal three. So now I think, yeah, it's moving in the other direction where maybe mechanical tension is the primary one. When it comes to glute training and trying to do a lot of volume of glute training, while I don't know if the metabolic stress is going to be the direct hypertrophy agent in the same way that mechanical tension is, I do think that you have to include some exercises that specifically target metabolic stress because you just cannot do everything with the purpose of mechanical tension when it comes to trying to train glutes three times a week. And that's something, you know, we'll get into more as we go. But looking at this program from chat GPT, like I think the way that you queried it made this program slightly better than the chest one where I just wrote, you know, write me a hypertrophy chest specialization cycle. And the way that I think we laid out the chest one was that they gave me the same workout and it was meant to be done three times a week. Whereas in this one, it gives us three different workouts that are each done once a week. So they have a glute strength and power day. They have a glute pump and metabolic stress day. And then they have a glute isolation and hamstring emphasis day. And so I think there's a lot of problems with this program, especially with the exercise selection across the different days and stuff like that. And we'll get into all the nuance there. But one of the things that I like that they did that was in my brain when I was thinking about how I would design a three-day glute specialization cycle, is the separation of a day that is glute and quad focus and a day that is glute and hamstring focus, because this allows you to not have to completely massacre your quads multiple times a week to train your glutes multiple times a week, nor do you have to massacre your hamstrings multiple times a week to train your glutes multiple times a week. So I think this allows you to manage fatigue and exercise selection in a much better manner than it would be if you just had like three nominal glute days that weren't emphasized by quad or hamstring focus. So I really like that aspect. And just to add on the back end of that a little bit, the reason that that needs to be an emphasis is basically because of the size of those muscles, right? And the like recovery, you know, impacts and the CNS impacts on the training, the movements that train like the length and bias movements that train those muscle groups, right? You can't just it's not like a lateral dealt where you can like do it on Monday and then like do it on Wednesday and put three, four sets into it. and have no issues. Like if you put three sets into an RDL on Monday, you're not going to be able to like come back and hit like a really heavy unilateral leg press without any overlapping fatigue. You will have a unless it's like the sole exercise that you're doing right. And that's a note that we have a little bit later in the episode around like full body versus what we were calling an actual glute specialization. But go ahead, Brian. Yeah, so I think like, to that point, kind of by separating out, like the day one where you might have more of that hamstring glute focus. So it's like the RDL is your primary movement of choice, you wouldn't come back on Wednesday and want to then go ham on like a 45 degree hip extension necessarily doing the single leg leg press maybe would be a little bit more accommodating. because one is like a pressing movement with the quad focus and then the other one is like more of a pulling movement with the hamstring focus. So I think in that example, I would be more willing to kind of accept that because the glutes are also like, they're both training glute max in that position, which there is going to be some crossover. But when the glutes are trained through pulling versus through pushing, I think there's a little bit of a different emphasis on there. Could you elaborate on that a little bit for us for for like the listener? Because I mean, not to sound like cool, but like I mean, I know what that means. But I feel like if you ask me if you like glossed over that, like if it was like seven years ago and I listened to that, it would have been like way over. Yeah, so basically, it's just the separation of the idea that there's, there's glute exercises that are driven by the hamstrings, which are essentially pulling movements. So you can think of the RDL where you're, you're literally pulling up, it's like a deadlift is a pulling movement, you're pulling as you go. And then comparing that to a pushing movement, which would be any sort of squat or split squat variation, where you're taking your thought you're you're getting more knee bend. So in like an RDL as a hip hinge where you're more sending your glutes back, your hips back and stretching the hamstrings in the push patterns, you're actually not really engaging the hamstrings at all and you're getting more knee flexion. So it's not as if you're getting knee flexion to the point where it would be like a quad based movement where you're really trying to drive the knee over the toe to emphasize the stretch in the quad. The difference is that as you do the quad, push movement, which does involve the quads, you're trying to keep the shin much more vertical at the bottom so that that knee isn't coming out over the toe and your point of stretch. thing that's getting the most tension at the bottom of the rep is going to actually be the stretch that occurs in your glute, because imagine you're doing that leg press where you're putting your foot like a little bit higher up on the platform. And as that platform descends down and your knees come into your chest, the shin still is vertical. in relation to the platform that you're pressing against. And so therefore, there's actually no hamstring involvement or very minimal hamstring involvement and the movement is initiated through pressing into the movement. the leg press as opposed to like a deadlift or RDL, which would be more of like a hinge in a pulling movement. wonderfully explained. Yeah. So I love that they separated that out into glute and glute with quad and then glute with hamstring. They have another day that's just called glute strength and power. And so the issue I have with this setup, if we're going to just get super nitty gritty and hate on chat GPT, is that every single one of these days has massive lengthened overload movements. So like there's a Romanian deadlift. for three by eight to 10 and a Bulgarian split squat for three by eight to 10 on the first day. And then on the last day, day three, it's Nordic hamstring curls and Romanian deadlifts and step ups with a slow negative. So, I mean, you're getting so much fatigue and so many of these long lengthened movements on all of the days. Like the middle day has hack squat. reverse lunges. I mean, literally across all the days, you have a, you have a single leg pressing movement on every day. Even on the day that's supposed to be hamstring focus, you have a step up, which is obviously a quad movement. It's a pressing movement. Like I just discussed, it's not a hamstring movement. So even just single leg movements, you have a lunge on the middle day, a step up on the final day and a Bulgarian split squat on the first day. So The crossover fatigue that's going to occur by doing heavy lengthened single leg pressing movements on all three days is crazy. Similarly, you have the RDLs on the first day and the third day. in identical rep ranges, and one of them says slow negatives and the other one does not. So I guess that that's the difference. You one of the days we want you to go really slow and cause a ton of muscle damage. but on the other day we're going to go faster. So there'll be a little. muscle damage. you know what? That's the other one. It's not muscle swelling. It's muscle damage is the third element. And so again, like that one is maybe auxiliary to mechanical tension and that you need some damage at... When you create mechanical tension, there will be some damage that comes along with it, but it's not like you're trying to pursue damage as a primary way to increase hypertrophy. Yep. My last kind of gripe with with this, it's. 15 sets every single of the three sessions. Everything's three sets, five exercises, 15 sets. No, I lied. One of them for a seated adduction is only two. Wait, one of the seated adduction in the day two only has two sets. yeah, seated abduction burnout, two by 20. And then we also have barbell hip thrust on the first day with four sets of six to eight, yeah. it ends up averaging out to be over the week. Forty five sets of glutes, which is yeah, a lot of glutes. A lot of especially for a lot of lengthened overload movement. gonna say too, is like, I think you could actually do 45 sets of glutes if you did it really intelligently and you you counted leg exercises also as glute exercises, which is kind of the goal here. But yeah, I mean, trying to do these lengthened, very damaging movements on all three days are really the root of the problem with this chat GPT program. And probably as we get through this, you'll realize that that's the main thing that I'm probably changing when I go to design this for somebody. Yep. So let's let's dive into that part. What do think? Yeah, well, we have the various levers to pull and it's the same we went through with the chest. And so I don't want to belabor it and spend quite as much time as we did on chest because the general framework that was presented in the chest episode is a great framework that we can use for specialization in pretty much any muscle group across the body with slight variations. But if you're looking to build a specialization phase for yourself, I would definitely go check out the chest episode because being that was the first one we did of this, we spent the most time on this section of kind of the various levers you can pull. So the first one in the various levers is exercise order. And I actually think that this one, while it was extremely important for the chest specialization, I think it might be a little bit less important for this one. And the reason being that the upper body is composed of so many different muscle groups that if you were to screw up exercise order, and not put chest as your first exercise on a given day, you're looking at potentially diminished performance and stimulus by doing some other upper body exercises before you get to chest. With the glute work, I think in most cases, the glute work's probably just going to be on a lower body day. And so any lower body movement that you choose is likely going to target the glutes in some manner. The decision then with exercise order is do I want to start with more lengthened movements that are going to be more stimulative but more damaging and then have a diminishing effect on the performance and stimulus that we can get in the subsequent movements later in the workout? Or do we want to start the workout with a short overload movement, create some acute stimulus in the target area, and then bring in the sledgehammer and finish with more of those lengthened movements later in the workout? So any thoughts on that? I do have some thoughts. In my mind, right, and I'm very open to this being changed throughout the course of this episode. If I'm trying to program this three times per week, right, or three times in a cycle, which I think in a perfect world would be about eight days, the way that I'm thinking about it. Yeah, I agree. I would put a lot of the short overload movements in the middle session. Because you I think I think if we're going to do something like a Monday, Wednesday, Saturday, and then you train glutes again, you do session one on like Tuesday. I think that's what would be optimal because you need to have enough time from the third session, which is mostly lengthened to the first session again, which again would be mostly lengthened. I think if we I think we can. be mostly recovered by the time that we would get that mid week short overload session. But because it's a lot of like short overload stuff, we're bringing a lot of blood flow in. Even if we have a little bit of overlapping fatigue by bringing a lot of that blood flow in to the muscle by training it, I think post that session, we'll probably flush a little bit of that. And then you'd be really ready by like the Friday, Saturday to train that again. But if we're doing a majority of those short overload movements on like our session to I don't think there's that many left to do on like Monday or Friday or what I should more practically say in like session one or session three. Maybe we leave like one but I think we're running out of variations and we don't want to go down the rabbit hole of like variation for the sake of variation because we just have worse exercises to do. Yeah, I'm torn on what you said about how to organize those sessions, because I actually think that if you have an eight day cycle like you referenced, the way that you said it probably makes the most sense where you can go lengthened, then a short session, then finish with another lengthened session and still have sufficient time for you to recover before the next lengthened session to start the following week. If we're working on a calendar week, my inclination is to believe that putting the short overload session last might be better. And I think that that only really works if we're making sure to separate out the lengthen days into a quad focused glute day and a hamstring focused glute day. in theory, we can think about this in, OK, Monday is quad focused glutes. So we're doing things like split squats, lunges. You could probably say split squats, lunges. leg presses and other squat variations and step ups, things like that. Like those are going to be the primary focus of lengthened quad day. And then you have the mid week session, which would be lengthened hamstring day. And so say that ends up being on a Thursday. So you go Monday quad glute day, then hamstring glute day on a Thursday. you're doing completely different exercises. while your glutes are still taxed, your, taking your quads out of the equation. So now we're doing things like RDLs, 45 degree hip extensions. You could, yeah, mean, though there's like leg curls, like you can throw leg curls in there, things like that, but you're basically going to make that a more hamstring bias day. And then from there, you can do a short overload day on the weekend, which your quads will be recovered. So if you want to do something like a hip thrust, that would be a great way. Cause the hip thrust is going to include some quads. It's a short overload movement. It could be a glute bridge too. It doesn't have to be a hip thrust. You could throw in a lot of the cable stuff in there too, like the cable kickbacks for the various regions of the glute, whether you go out to the side and you're hitting the lateral glute, you could go straight back and hit the glute max. Although I think the glute max probably gets trained sufficiently with all of the other stuff. And then you have the glute mead where you go out kind of at a 45 degree or 30 degree angle, where it's not quite directly to the side, it's not quite directly back. You can also do a lot of kind of banded. work in there as well. You can hit the AB induction machine. So a lot of different kind of less fatiguing, but stimulative short overload movements that we could throw in on that final day, which shouldn't cause a ton of overlapping fatigue so that once you get back to that quad day at the beginning of the week, you have you're ready to go. And so I think it's as simple as like you said, if you're willing to do this on an eight day cycle, you can just flip those and throw the the the short overload day on the Thursday. throw the next day on the Saturday and you're still ready to go again on Tuesday for the next day. So I think that we kind of deviated away from exercise order here in quite an aggressive manner. But I think that that makes sense as far as the structure of how you would arrange those three sessions across the week. I love that. think. And then, you know, to your credit, I think the seven day is what most people will be much more inclined to do, like even myself. Right. I have all the time in the world and that sort of thing relative. I just don't really like I like being on a calendar week. I do. I feel like it helps me so that, like, for example, Tuesdays are a very, very busy workday for me. When I was working on a non-calendar week and Tuesday would be legs, like what would already be a stressful day goes into like a, I don't even know if I wanna do this anymore kind of day. So I think for various reasons, people like the calendar week, but I do like that. I mean, I think your answer was wonderful. And the whole reason I wanted to do this episode is that I think to do this glute specialization well, it requires a really thought out programming approach. not have pretty significant overlapping fatigue, you know, significantly impairs your performance and then prolonged ability to progress. Yeah, yeah, for sure. No, I agree completely. So as an exercise order here, think given that we've separated these days out into kind of like two lengthen days and then a short day, I think that the exercise order is just slightly less important here because all of those length and movements that you do are going to be quite fatiguing and quite stimulative in their own right. And so whether you decide to start your day with the hip extension or the RDL or you decide to start it with a step up or a reverse lunge or something like that. I don't think that that moves the needle as much as some of these other categories where I think in the chest specialization, the exercise order was quite important. So the next one we're moving on to is proximity to failure. this one is going to be, as always, dependent upon how much volume you're doing. So if we take this model from chat GPT and we assume that similarly we might be doing shit, even if it's not 45 sets a week. call it 30 sets. I mean, that's still a shit ton of volume for glutes. I think at that point, you know, you do have to have some of these sets that or the majority of these lengthen sets that are not going to failure. I had a consult with a guy actually yesterday, and he is a low volume trainee, he prefers to just go to the house and take everything to failure. And even though it's extremely low volume, and And you would expect that because it's low volume that everything needs to be taken to the house. I think that there's just an accumulated fatigue systemically across the body when you're taking every single one of these lower body compounds to, you know, eyes bleeding, ears popping type level of, of failure. And I was, you know, working to convince him that maybe some of these, some of these really demanding movements you can get. all of the benefit or 95 % of the benefit by leaving a rep or two in the tank and not having to take your body to that point. And I think that that applies even more significantly. So here when we're talking about trying to do glute specialization, Yeah, because of it. I don't want to say a diminished recovery capacity. You have a diminished time that you need to be recovered for. That's really the limiting factor. You know, if if you were going to do like a 12 day cycle and you train glutes and then Monday and you train them again on like Friday, you probably could take everything to the house. But by Friday, we need to have we need to be on to recovery for your third session. Yeah. Yeah. I think that this, also is important to, to mention that the glutes are going to be extremely sensitive to muscle damage. When you first start, like we've all experienced that situation where, you know, we've been squatting, we've been RDL and we've been training our legs, but say we have a cycle where we have no single leg Bulgarian split squat or lunges. We've just been doing like hacks and RDLs and stuff. then you throw in, you're like, okay, I'm going to do this new cycle and I'm going to throw in some lunges or some Bulgarians or whatever. And you go and you do one set because you know that that's the right way to start. And you're still crippled sore for like three or four days. Like imagine starting this cycle where you're like, yeah, yeah, three sets of everything totally to failure. Yeah, absolutely. You know, like you would just set yourself up to be completely crushed, be unable to train for a number of days, definitely not within two or three days again. And so This is a point where I think if you're just starting out going from not specializing in glutes to specializing in glutes, you have to compensate somewhere. And so it could be proximity to failure where you keep the same amount of volume, but you just make it really, really easy. Or it could be lower volumes where you're working still pretty hard. But with the repeated bout effect, what we notice is that that one set of lunges that crippled you in the first week, it barely makes you sore at all the second week. so you can add a second set to get a similar level of, of soreness, guess we're not chasing soreness, but you know, it is a mitigating factor. So yeah, you do a second set gets you a similar level of soreness as the prior week, then maybe the next week you can do a third set. whether it's increasing effort week to week, or it's increasing volume week to week, the prudent approach would be to start somewhere that's less and then work your way progressively to something that's more. Yeah, I mean, I think you just have to with this or you'll be so far behind the ball in the program that you might even not be able to stick to it. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, the truth is, like, if you haven't been doing lunges or Bulgarians, even if you decide you're going to leave five RIR in the tank, but you're going to do three sets, you're going to be destroyed. Like, there's just no way around it. Those muscles and that the way they have to stabilize for single leg work compared to bilateral work, it's just completely different because of the single leg nature. There's pelvic instability. And so the glutes are having to work extra hard to stabilize the pelvis in that split stance. And so yeah, you're just gonna get a lot more glute focus anytime you switch a movement from bilateral to unilateral. Yeah, I reverse lunges are always the one that gets me. the soreness from those. my God. Like I can I have like memories of like trying to go up and like just looking at the steps being like, son of a bitch. I do not want to climb up these steps because they hurt so badly. Yeah, yeah. And when you get super duper sore in the glutes, there's like a systemic fatigue that comes along with it. Like that incredible soreness, it's like, man, I gotta go walk to the toilet. and then I need to sit down on the toilet and then I need to get up from the toilet. Like every little thing that you do feels like a monumental task where normally in daily life, you're just like. walk to the toilet, sit down in the toilet, stand up from the toilet, do this, do that, whatever, no big deal. Everything becomes a thought. It's like, Oh, I need to brace for this or I need blah, blah, blah. Like it's just, it's really awful. All right. So the next one is lower volume in non-specialized areas. This is just a given across the board. mean, if you're going to be training glutes three times a week with higher volumes than you're used to training with, especially with the systemic fatigue that comes with two lower body days that are lengthened based. I mean, just that on its own is fatiguing, but then adding in a third lower body day in there, you're just going to have to sacrifice upper body volume. And how you do that is kind of up to you. My thought would be that, you know, a five day a week program probably works. So you end up with two upper body days in there, but likely, you know, you want to keep that volume on those upper body days down. It should be quite low. Like what is, what is our maintenance volume for a given muscle? Eh, probably somewhere between two and six sets depending on proximity to failure, exercise selection, training age, number of factors go in there. But I would say two to six sets per muscle group of non-specialized areas is sufficient. So if you have two upper body days, that could literally be two sets of chest on one day and two sets of chest on another day. And that gets you right into the middle of that kind of two to six maintenance range. Same thing for the other muscle groups too. You could probably ramp that up a little bit on back, but you probably don't have to. So yeah, think having some relatively short to the point upper body days and making the majority of your focus the lower body days just makes the most sense. Yep, it's a little addition there. Allowing for extra for additional recovery capacity helps with that. Yeah. I was telling the guy that I consulted with yesterday about how, you know, there's studies and case studies at least, don't know about proper research, but case studies of power lifters that end up getting injured in some part of their body where they can't do one of the movements. So like, imagine you got a lower body injury and you couldn't deadlift or squat, but you can still bench. The case studies that show the bench performance just skyrocketing through the roof. people that have been training decades finally setting new PRs in the bench, all because they stopped doing other stuff. Not because they started benching more necessarily, but because they opened up recovery resources by doing less elsewhere. And the same idea needs to be applied here to any sort of specialization phase. Next one is frequency. We pretty much covered that already. I don't see a world in which you can do more than three times a week glutes unless the majority of your days are short overload focused instead of length and focused. So I could imagine a scenario where maybe you have one lengthened exercise on a Monday and then a bunch of short overload stuff. And then you have one lengthened exercise on a Friday with a bunch of short overload stuff. And then you have more short overload stuff on Wednesday and Sunday or something like that. like I could imagine a scenario in which you're doing glutes four times a week, but I think that the, the critical nature of avoiding lengthened movements decreases the total amount of quality exercises that you have to choose from. So I don't know that it's worth sacrificing all of these really great stimulative lengthened movements just so that you can train four days a week and do more short movements. So sorry guys, Aaron had some issues with the MacBook's reactions camera feature that completely locked everything up and then I had to get out and things like that. jumping back into increasing volume on special areas. Well, no, I think we're on exercise selection, but, I do think given, given that I don't think we need to touch much on exercise selection. Cause we've been touching on that consistently throughout the entire thing with the balance between length and, shortened and the different days and stuff like that. So, well, I just wanted to note that that is one of the levers to pull. It's not one that we necessarily need to focus on here. So I think we can jump to, like you said, increase volume on special areas. And this again, I think is one that we've been. touching on over the course of this entire discussion, we increase the volume on the specialized areas and decrease the volume on the non-specialized areas. What you'll notice in this exercise order or in the levers to pull order, I tried to put them in order of importance, at least what the importance was for the chest specialization. And they're a little bit different here, but the one thing that's the same between the two is that lowering volume on the non-specialized areas is more important than increasing the volume on the specialized areas. And this goes into what I was just talking about with the powerlifting example, where it's not even like you have to increase your volume on the bench press. If you just stop deadlifting and squatting, your bench press will improve. And so the same thing here, it's like you could just cut everything else in your program, but keep doing the same amount of glute work that you were doing. And it's likely that your glutes will respond simply. by the fact that you're opening up recovery resources. So this goal of increasing volume on these specialized areas, while vital and important, is secondary to lowering the volume on the non-specialized areas, which I just think is very important to mention because we don't want anybody to try and do a specialization cycle like this without first lowering those volume on the non-specialized areas. Yeah, it just becomes a little bit impractical and it ends up being one of those things where it's like where you draw the line, right? Or I'm sure you probably get this request a lot is people will wanna do like a specialization on like glutes, delts and chest, right? Or they try and shove too much into one single kind of training block in that approach. Yeah, for sure. The data-driven guys have talked about splitting the body into thirds and doing specializations that way. So in one sense, you could do two or three muscle groups specialized, but it becomes significantly less specialized when you're choosing multiple muscle groups. we're not talking about doing a... That is not the goal of this discussion. Our discussion here is about specializing in the glutes, and thus they become the sole focus of specialization. And therefore everything else kind of moves on to the back burner. The interesting thing about glute specialization though, is that by proxy, you're almost sort of also doing a lower body specialization because you're having two full lower body days with length and overload movements, et cetera. You, just cannot separate the way in which glutes are linked to the quads and the hamstrings. All right. And then the last section here is, adding intensity techniques. And so I think. If you followed our work here, you know that we are not huge fans of promoting intensity techniques on these big demanding lengthened movements. like imagine, you know, doing a Bulgarian split squat and thinking you're about to do like my O reps on it, where you're going to, you know, do a set of 15 and then you're going to do sets of three until you get to 15 again. I literally like it, it, it makes my brain mushed up and completely unable to process what that would even feel like. so I think intensity techniques, especially on the two days that are more focused on lengthened work, where we have the lengthened quad day with glutes and the lengthened hamstring day with glutes. there's just no reason to do anything but straight sets there. And to even double down on that, we mentioned earlier, avoiding, you know, failure, if you're going to be doing higher volumes of these movements, which just completely eliminates the possibility of even doing intensity techniques on those movements. I think to play a little bit of ball, think on the short overload day, you could probably get away with some. That's where I was going to go next. So I think on the short overload day, you absolutely can add intensity techniques. could, because the movements are short overload, they're a great opportunity to potentially use partials there if you so desire. The problem with doing partials is that you're then essentially taking a short overload movement and training the lengthened range of that movement, which then almost makes the short overload day into a slightly more damaging day. So I almost like prefer to have the short overload day really focus on the short position. So I'm talking about like, you if you're doing a hip thrust, you're pausing at the top of the rep. If you're doing a glute kickback with the cable, you're pausing at the contracted position. You're not trying to overemphasize the stretch of those positions at all. You're doing something like a 45 degree hip extension if that ends up on your short overload day. You're likely going to be pausing at the top of the rep and focusing really on squeezing the glutes at the top, as opposed to the way I would perform that movement lengthened would be more piston style where you stretch at the bottom and then you explode up, but don't pause at the top and waste energy there. This is really the opposite approach here in this glute specialization cycle is for these short overload movements, we want to emphasize the short position. So there could even be rationale for doing short partials. So maybe you even avoid the length and position completely. Like I can imagine a banded movement or a cable kick back type movement where you don't even let the leg come in front of the body at all. You stay everything behind the body. So you're really just oscillating in a smaller range of motion where the short position is emphasized. And so I think that especially if you're going to be training glutes three times a week and you have these two days that are going to be more damaging with the length and movements, it is extra important to more emphasize the short position on the day that's meant to emphasize the short position. actually use the short position like it's intended to. Right, exactly. Instead of trying to make the short position into just another version of a lengthened movement. Yeah, really, really well. So that takes us through the different levers to pull. the next question was, you know, why there's a good reason to rely more on short overload exercises. I think we pretty much just covered that there's really no reason to delve into that much more. the next reason, discussion point is using variation versus fewer exercises. And so, we had a brief, you know, off camera discussion about this before the episode where. We talked about that study in the chest specialization episode where they took four different leg exercises and compared that to a group that was doing just squatting. So I think one group was doing just Smith machine squats and the other group was doing like Smith machine squats, lunges, deadlifts, and like press or something like that. I think there was four different exercises and they found significantly better hypertrophy across the full muscle with the variation and So I think that's kind of a given here as well. Like if you have the choice of doing two exercises for five sets each or doing five exercises for two sets each, you'd probably be better off doing five for two as long as there are sufficient exercises that you consider viable and stimulative. I would really like to double down on what Brian just said, consider viable and in stimulative. I think in pursuit of specialization, people go down the variation tree and end up in variation for the sake of variation. and I think that is an incorrect approach. If there's still additional variation where you have a quality connection, you get a good stimulus. But if you end up doing It's just something you saw just because you need another exercise. I think it's an incorrect and less productive choice in doing so. Yep, yep, fully agree. And then the last section here is just putting it all together. you know, in the chest episode, there were a number of different options of ways you could organize your split, different ways, you know, to create variation through the programming. And I think that we've pretty much from the very beginning been quite staunch. in our position that we believe, you know, the best structure here is the two lengthened days with the one short day, whether that's in the middle, if you have a eight day calendar week, or whether that's at the end, if you have a seven day calendar week. And then kind of the last piece of this is what you do with volume over the cycle. And we sort of touched on that briefly at one point where we were talking about proximity to failure and how you can't just go ham on four sets of lunges the first time you put lunges in your program. So there does need to be some sort of escalation here. And while I think the escalation of the lengthened work, like the lunges example, is really just necessary out of the fact that you don't want to end up too sore. It's not really part of let's grow the glutes by escalating volume of lunges. I think with the lunges and with the length and stuff, you escalate only as a means of mitigating excessive soreness. Whereas escalating volume on the short overload day might serve a bit more of a purpose, which is kind of the same way we approach the chest specialization cycle. And what I had mentioned in the chest is you could two or three times the volume over the course of a cycle just on the short overload movements. So it's a little bit different. on this example, because we only have one day that short overload. So if you're going to escalate volume to two to three times the volume on the short overload day, you're looking at spending two to three times as long in the gym each day. Whereas on the chest day, we were like, you you're splitting that across two different days. Your sessions are only getting, getting half as long if you escalate volume across the cycle or rather one and a half times as long. So here, you know, you do want to be conscious about how much you're escalating volume. And so maybe it's a combination of both escalating volume and escalating effort on these short overload movements. So instead of just being like, okay, I did three sets of glute med kickbacks this week, then next week I'm to do four, the next week I'm going to do five, the next week I'm going to do six. And suddenly you're just doing glute med kickbacks until the cows come home. Maybe instead it's about increasing some intensity too. it's like, you know, week one is three sets to two RIR and then it's three sets to one RIR and then it's four sets to two RIR and then it's four sets to one RIR and then it's five sets to one RIR and then five sets to zero RIR. And so you're kind of combining in some manner the increase of effort with the increase of volume so that you're kind of balancing those and your training days don't have to become two or three times as long. so so well put. Is there anything you think on the back end of this one that we maybe missed, glossed over a little bit too quickly? Or? exercise selection, like the different exercises that you could choose. Because I think that if we're like when we talk about the short overload movements, we didn't really get into the nitty gritty too much on what specific ones you could choose. Like I mentioned, you know, cable movements and banded movements and hip thrusts and stuff like that. But if we're going to actually, you know, go through and create. Provide you guys different options of movements that you can choose from. I really think that on the short overload day, you know, you need to get a little bit creative and you have an opportunity to use some movements that maybe kind of excite you that you see on Instagram or something like that. So I think on the short overload day, the most obvious ones are going to be hip thrusts and glute bridges. Hip thrust just being a longer range of motion, glute bridge. Hip thrust is going to cause a little bit more muscle damage than a glute bridge. So my inclination would be to focus more on the glute bridges with the smaller range of motion focusing on the top of the rep. Um, so I think that's a good choice there. The cable kickbacks I referenced, you can go straight back for the glute max. You can go out to the side for lateral glute, or you can go kind of 45 or 30 degrees for, for glute mead. Uh, the glute mead and the lateral glute definitely get less stimulus unless you train them directly. So when you're doing your split squats, your lunges, your leg presses, your RDLs, most of these movements are going to focus more on your glute max. So by doing some of these more lateral based glute movements that obviously have to be done single leg because you're kind of moving out to the side of your body. I think that's where a lot of value lies when it comes to specializing in glutes, just because that area doesn't get trained sufficiently otherwise. A lot of the same movements can be done with bands. So for people that don't have cables, we've been incorporating a lot of kind of banded AB duction type movements where the leg is moving out away from the body. that works quite well. You can use the ABduction machine if you have access to one of those. If you do not, you can put bands around your thighs and you can ABduct in a seated position, kind of emulate that machine with bands. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, when we get into the short overload options, those are the primary ones that I would focus on. Am I missing any obvious ones? The only thing that came to mind was like the unilateral forms of like the the glute bridge and those sorts of things but the hard thing is so much of the lateral and in mead related stuff is going to be unilateral anyway it just becomes time prohibitive if you're doing five unilateral exercises. Yeah, for sure. And then there's a new exercise that Brett Contreras just put out on Instagram a couple of weeks ago called the dumbbell kneeling hip raise. And I actually thought it looked pretty cool. And I programmed it for one of the programs at Paragon, just to kind of get some feedback from people and see what they think about it. And so it's appearing for the first time on Thursday this week. We just started a new cycle at Paragon. So if anyone wants to jump on, but anyways, that, that exercise, you probably just want to go to Brett's page and check it out, but you're kind of kneeling on a bench with one leg, almost as if you were going to do a one arm dumbbell row. But then once that arm is hanging down long from your shoulder, instead of rowing it up, instead, you just rotate your hip up to the side of the leg that's kneeling on the bench. So the leg that's off is in the same The leg that's off that's planted on the ground is the same leg that is in the hand of the dumbbell. And then you're going to rotate your hip up. It's actually a lengthened overload movement. So even though it's an isolation movement for the glute, it is lengthened overload in that it's almost like doing the bottom of an RDL over and over and over again. So I'm really curious to see how people feel about that. But I think that that has potential to be a really nice addition into a glute specialization cycle as well. I saw that. thought it was like pretty innovative and and looked to be worthwhile of people, you know, attempting to use and put in. I feel like in this day and age, we don't get too many new kind of like true innovative innovations on things like sure. People do like the stupid. Sorry, I shouldn't say stupid. The different way of doing the like unilateral cable row kneeling and stuff, which I wouldn't call nearly as innovative as this. I saw that and. For full disclosure, I'm not a very big Brett Contreras fan, you give credit where credit's due. I thought that was pretty solid. Yeah, I thought it looked pretty good too. So I'm excited to get some feedback from people on that. But yeah, I think that that's more or less kind of wraps up the episode on Glutes here. Yeah, I think this is really, really helpful. Like I said, we got some questions about it. I've had numerous conversations about it and it's definitely being done a lot, but I think it's a lot of people are doing it, but using almost like exclusively short overload exercises to build the specialization. And it's just a trade off in really stimulus per set invested into it. Brian, as always, when it comes to talking about programming, you hit a home run. So hopefully people get a lot of value out of this one, as I do think they will. Yeah, for sure man, great conversation. We'll be back next week with another episode. Yep, see you guys.