What's going on guys? Welcome back to Eat Train Prosper. This is episode 228. And today Brian and myself are talking dynamic double progression. So DDP is a progression model for hypertrophy, uh, mostly. It is my preferred model. It's what I use most with clients. We've covered it briefly in a prior episode, but we're going to explode it into its own episode and cover different situations uh of nutritional periodizations. how things might change, how it might change in uh nutritional periodization for a gain versus a deficit and how to implement it into your own training if you are curious. But before we dive into that, as always, Brian, what's going on? Yeah, I have one quick update. But first, with the dynamic double progression, I actually think a number of years ago, like even three plus years ago, I feel like we were talking about it. I don't know if we did a full episode on it or if I just talked about it as part of another episode. But I went like really hard on it when I had been coached by Brian Minor, who is kind of like one of the people that conceptualized this idea, which is kind of almost silly to say because it's a very intuitive model that I think is. implemented broadly by a number of people that don't even realize they're implementing it because of how intuitive it is. Um, but it's definitely been like kind of a through line of our training and progression models for a number of years. So I think that that context is is useful before we get into the episode with that too. I think from my understanding of it, d double progression wa was what I what had I what I had understood. And then from from my understanding. remembrance over and again we're going back to I think twenty twenty one or or something like that. I remember you telling me about it with with the Brian Minor and the change was the progressing uh sets individually per se or or removing the pressure that everything needs to move at once, which kind of like you said, intuitively it makes a lot of sense now that we're on this side of it. But when I get I still have clients who are rabbit holing themselves, And I realized that, oh, I still need to explain these things better because I had a pretty high-level client and you know he should have reached out a little bit earlier, but he was on the his fifth week and he'd hit no I think the rep range for this context was ten to twelve. And he'd hit twelve for five five, six weeks in a row on set one, and he couldn't get to twelve on set two. And he's sandbagging his set one, which is probably now like a three R A R or something. So to get to to get the twelve on set two. And I said, just let set one move on, bro. Like you you're probably up ten, fifteen pounds bu by now. Maybe not fifteen, but like ten pounds by now and event and then just progress them independently. And it was like a light bulb went off. And he was like, I n had never I wouldn't have even have had thought to do that. And I was like, Okay. Right. So sometimes we I I I'd say We've done it so long and it's so natural to us now, we can sometimes forget that for other people that's a still a brand new concept. Yeah. sure. okay, cool. Well, real quick before we continue with that conversation, uh, my big update is that I started my bro split again like a week and a half ago. We uh didn't have an episode last week, so I wasn't able to update you guys. But I have been so sore, like debilitating sore, considering that I'm literally only training one muscle group at a time. my chest, I did. What's today, Thursday? I did my chest on Monday, and my chest and front delts are still sore. Uh, that's from I guess you would call it eight working sets. or nine, eight or nine. And then I did back and lats the next day, and that was nine or ten working sets, depending on how you count it. And I am So sore in my upper back and lats. And we talk about how often like you don't get sore from back movements because they're short, overloaded, and all this stuff. The amount of soreness that I have through like my entire upper body right now is so much that I'm supposed to do quads today and then shoulders and arms tomorrow. I put shoulders and arms together now for a couple of reasons we'll talk about in the future. But I just like I don't even want to train. Like I just feel like my my whole body is crushed. And I just want to like take a day off and do nothing. and so obviously, you know, the the total volume is a huge catalyst here. And uh I've realized that when I was not doing the bro split, I was doing about 30 to 40 percent less volume than I am with the bro split. Even though I was hitting upper body twice a week on the other program, the total amount of volume per muscle group was still like 40% less than what I'm doing with the bro split. So I was doing like six sets or seven sets for most of the main upper body movements and like four to five sets for the smaller muscle groups. And now each of those is up to like, you know, nine or ten for the big muscle groups and six or seven for the smaller muscle groups. And uh I'm feeling it. It's uh it's kind of weird because like we also talk about how volume is the number one driver of hypertrophy and all that stuff. And it's obviously arguable. But I do notice that in these months where I do the bro split, My physique tends to look better. And it's it wouldn't fit with the science necessarily that I'm only training each muscle group once a week and that that should enhance my physique. And yet maybe because of the increased volume or the increased specificity and focus on the muscle group, it's producing that result for me. So I always just find that so fascinating and interesting when I make that change just by upping the volume a little and kind of what happens to the way that I feel throughout. I would agree with that. One of the things, ha have you changed your nutrition or anything? Are you just keeping that at pretty much baseline to keep your body weight approximately where it is? Yeah, I have finally begun to lose a little bit of weight since the increase that I got from the TRT. So since when I got the TRT, I initially shot up and it was actually a lot of work for me to maintain 210. Like I I my body wanted to keep going up in weight and I had to kind of like hold myself back so that I could stay at like 209 or 210. And now I'm feeling like I'm not having to work as hard. Uh and my body is actually starting to to drop some pounds. So I'm not, I'm not. going to bed hungry or really in my mind changing my eating habits per se. But I think just following my intuitive appetite signals, um, I must be eating a little bit less because my body weight is starting to trend down a little. I was like two five, two six the other day. Okay. One of the thing th and the reason I asked is I I was in Vegas this past weekend for the Olympia like we were speaking about before starting to record, and I really only got one really good training session in on I forget, I think it was Saturday, maybe it was Friday. And just by the nature, it's a it's a couple things. A it at my current body weight, which is like two hundred thirty-three to two thirty seven, I require six hundred and fifty grams of carbs per day to keep my body weight there. forty like forty-two, forty three hundred calories. It's more food than I want to be eating and the Not to derail the conversation, but I'm supposed to be gaining, and it's been a slow-moving product. Because it's hard to get that much food in unless I'm just drinking a ton of my calories. But anyway, we're in Vegas, and my step count's a lot higher because we're walking, you know, through the hotels and things like that. And I trained. It was a very normal training session. I did an incline press, a fly. one set of a flat press, two sets of overhead press, and two sets of a tricep superset. Just a simple push down, turnaround, you know, over cable overhead, uh lean forward cable overhead. And I probably only got maybe 300, 400 grams of carbs in that day just through we had dinner with with our friend John who competed in our first Olympia and things. And I was brutally sore the next day. And in what's f funny is the only thing that changed was my energy expenditure was up, um, but my the total amount of food that I could get in. Uh and of course, lo and behold, when we got back from the Olympia I was down like six pounds 'cause I just could not get enough food in to keep my body weight at par. so I think it's one of those things it it it really does play into fueling performances and just when your body requires like X and recovery capacity goes into that when you reduce a large aspect of what that recovery capacity is, you're gonna get sore. if your training intensity and proximity of failure and all other things remain equal. So that's what the reason I I asked. Yeah, I mean, I think that's super relevant and it's a really good point. Um yeah, it would be interesting to see if I could have a a separate uh situation that occurred exactly like this, but eat an extra five hundred calories a day or something if the the soreness would still be as debilitating. I just kind of naturally uh applied it to the fact that the volume is going up and it's much more in a per session volume. Whereas before that volume was split over the week. But yeah, I mean that's certainly a possibility. And that's actually one of the things that we're going to talk about in this dynamic double progression conversation is how the progression itself will change whether we're in a surplus or a deficit as well. And so uh that'll be interesting as we get to that. But do you wanna just quickly Maybe we we we kind of alluded to what dynamic double progression is with the each set moving individually. Is there anything else you'd want to add to like clarify that or or anything before we kind of continue the conversation? I'll just use the really simple example so that everyone can understand it. And what what the double progression is is we can progress in either reps or we can progress in weight. And using a very simple example, let's say we have a rep range of 8 to 12. In let's assume that you select an appropriate working weight and for your first week. You are going to land somewhere in the eight or nine rep range. So the lower half of that rep range, let's say you get nine. In week week two, you come back, now we can get 10. In week three, let's say we have a really big performance jump and you go from 10 to 12. We have now topped the end of that rep range in the third week. So in week four, you will add weight. That's I I generally do somewhere around three to five percent. And then in week four, with that three to five percent weight increase, now we are back down to eight reps. And it's very, we walk up the rep range, we bump load, which puts us back down at the bottom end of the rep range, and it's this very straightforward uh climb and cycle approach that makes progression very, very straightforward because you earn the progression. What makes it dynamic is let's say we are doing three sets. Sets one or set one, you're obviously going to have much less fatigue. And let's say we're using 100 pounds and you can get 12 reps. If you stay at that 100 pounds for set three, you might only get seven reps, right? A reduction of uh a rep per set. Um, well, that would be technically be eight, but you get what I'm saying. So you can progress sets in. because uh like I said earlier in the episode, I don't think it's probably in your best interest to hold set one at 12 reps until set three can also be at 12 reps, because by that time you probably can do set one for about 15 reps. And based off of the goal, the exercise you have programmed, and the rep range you have programmed it for, it is probably in your best interest to increase set one to stay within the rep range. So that's where the dynamic aspect comes in, is each set can move independently in its progression. Did I miss anything, Brian? I'll just try to clarify things in my uh my communication a little bit in the way that I we I usually would talk about it. So I think you said the exact same thing, but uh one kind of overriding way I would think about looking at this is that with dynamic double progression, you can essentially target the same R I R on every single set as well. so if that's a goal of your coach, um by manipulating the reps and the weight individually like that, you can speak like I want every set at two R I R. Whereas If you're doing a regular double progression where you're getting 12 on the first set, 12 on the second set, and 12 on the third set, that might also have utility, but that would be under the coaching tutelage of somebody that would say, like, hey, maybe I want you to go three, two, one R I R. And so in that case, you're like, okay, cool, first set of 12, three R I R, boom. Well, then if I do 12 again, I'm gonna be fatigued. That time it'll be two R I R and then I'll do 12 again, it'll be one R I R. So maybe in that case, like the 1212 12 method is great because the coach wants you. To decrease or decrease your RIR, work closer to failure each set. With the dynamic double progression, it doesn't have to be that you're keeping the same RIR each set, but that's often what ends up happening when it's programmed, at least when I program it. So you would have potentially three sets. One set is say 11, then you get nine, then eight. And you're say you're using the same weight at this point, you're getting the same RIR in each set. Eventually that set of 11 gets to 12. Say you were using 100 pounds for all the sets, like Aaron was saying. When that set that was 11 gets to 12 at two RIR or whatever the RIR prescription is, that set then goes up to 105 pounds. And maybe the reps drop down back to 11 or 10 or something like that. It's unlikely that you're going to have some RIR left and then you add weight and suddenly you're getting eight again. That's probably not realistic, but some number like that. So now you're at 105 pounds for 10 or 11 on the first set. But you're still at 100 pounds on the second set. But now because you lowered the weight, that set might get 11. And so the third set then might jump up to like 10 or something like that. And now, like Aaron was saying, each set is on its own individual path. So while that first set is at 105, eventually that second set might get to the top of the rep range at 12 reps. And then now that second set also goes to 105, but we're still using 100 for the third set until that third set can also get up to the top of the rep range. So it gives you a number of different programming options to utilize. And like Aaron said very simply in the beginning, you can manipulate weight or reps to kind of achieve the goal. That's a really good point that you brought up with the with the RIR. And one part that I don't want to say this complicates it, but it can be helpful to know. As a uh lifter, you're going to have certain muscle groups and exercises where your repeatability and performance varies drastically. For example, mine is leg extension. I drop off terribly from set one to set two. Um, especially if I'm doing something higher up, maybe let's call it 14, 15, and above. So for something like that, I need to modify that load more substantially for a set two. Whereas if I was following a standard double progression without that, and let's say I did want to keep to the same RIR. I don't know if I'd ever make it. Honestly, I could probably run it for four months and and and never get there because my drop-off is so bad. Uh it's generally the the larger the drop-off is probably going to be larger muscle groups, larger compounds, but that that a is a very practical example of of where you may want to purposefully deviate the ah the the load selected per set from the get-go because you know how much drop-off you may have uh per exercise or for certain exercises. Yeah, unless you're using like a twelve to twenty rep range or something super wide like that, in which case you then could uh do it similarly. It just depends really what you and the coach want. but yeah, I noticed the same thing with the drop-offs on higher reps specifically. I almost exclusively train in the five to ten rep range. So I very rarely get drop off more than like a rep or two. but I can definitely see how anything in that higher rep range would be like that. And I think of pull-ups as an example. Where if I went to failure on a set of bodyweight pull ups and I did like twenty two or something like that, it doesn't matter how long I rest. I'm probably getting like fifteen on the next set. So that's a pretty big drop off. Yeah. Now uh I th now that we have it defined, I think we can talk into I made a post about this the other day, which kind of sparked the the episode here. And one of the questions that I think is is very helpful for us to cover is what happens if I get s eight on set one and then next week I can't progress? Do you want to take a stab at that, Brian? Or I I know what my answer was, obviously. I didn't read your post. So you're saying if the rep range is eight to twelve and you're only getting eight on the first set the first week and then you don't progress the second week, while keeping RIR the same. So you're not saying like, you know, I didn't progress and I was working closer to failure or anything like that. Yeah. I honestly would keep the the same weight for at least a few weeks and see. Cause I think one week is not enough to kind of say, I didn't progress, 'cause there's too many variables of preparedness and recovery and blah, blah, blah, all of that stuff. So I would keep the same weight on the first set, but obviously I would try to keep the subsequent sets at a lower weight so that I would be within that rep range and possibly even get toward the higher end of the rep range because the first set was on the lower end of the rep range. Yeah, that's a very good response. What what I think and what I said was either A, weight's too heavy to begin with, right? You selected a weight that's too heavy and you got eight reps, but it wasn't a great eight reps, you know, which which we've talked about before here, like the quality of your reps. and let's say it is a a true stall. Right. It's not just a one-week fluke where we had a poor night of sleep. Let's say I got eight reps on week one, nine reps, sorry, week two, eight reps, week three, eight reps. I have four consistent weeks at eight reps. From my standpoint, what I'm going to recommend is we need to look into your indirect impacting factors. Your sleep. Are you actually fueling your training sessions? Are we trading fasted or something silly there? Um What is our hydration status? What is our nutritional periodization at? Which kind of leads us into the next part of the conversation. Because it is. If we're in a diet and we have lost a substantial amount of body weight, but how do we define substantial? I would say at least a 5% decrease in total body mass. Your progressions are going to start to dry up. And then eventually, if you continue your deficit for long enough and body fat gets low enough, or you've lost a substantial Maybe I think I used the term substantial before. So let's use extra substantial amount of total body mass. Let's call it 10 10% of your total body mass, 12.5% of your total body mass or greater, your progressions will likely dry up completely. And you are fighting to maintain your performance at this point. It's not because the program is, you know, wrong or whatever, it's that your recovery capacity. Is extremely diminished because of the pursuit of substantial fat loss. Um, contest prep, a really, really good example. We are fighting to stay within one to two reps of what performance was three months ago or something like that. So I think it's important to Not dismiss or downplay the importance on the other factors in your life that contribute generally indirectly to this endeavor, like sleep, like your recovery capacity, your total caloric intake, your carbohydrate intake, whether you're training fasted or not, how many meals you have in you before you train. Because let's say we are in that deficit and you're training at 6 a.m. and you have a slice of toast, honey, and 10 grams. Of EAA's, that's a lot different than training at 2 p.m. after having three you know full meals, even in your deficit. So there's a number of contributing factors, indirectly contributing factors, that go into it, but it's unfortunately just not progressions forever, no matter what other facets of life are contributing. Yeah, so in that example of the person that chooses the weight that's at eight reps in week one and then has that for three or four straight weeks without any change, if we assume that this person is in a deficit, do you look at that as, you know, that's just great. You know, they're maintaining performance, they're getting eight every week, there's no reason to change anything. Or would you or if I guess that that's question one, and then question two, kind of related is. If that person then loses a rep and drops down to seven, are you apt to tell them to decrease the weight so that they get back into their rep range? Or do we keep the weight the same so that we're still working against that same uh the same load, mechanical tension, whatever? And it gives us a more accurate assessment of how much we're actually losing throughout the deficit. It's a really good question. If I generally don't want anyone dropping reps below seven, uh six. I uh it's six. Once we are pro in a prolonged deficit, Because I find that we start compromising for performance, right? It's like the what we've talked about in the past with if you're doing five reps on a pendulum squat, you generally don't feel it too much in your quads, a targeted stimulus, because you're just trying to use whatever you can to get the weight to move. which generally means some degree of of compromise for other muscle groups to contribute. And if we're in a deficit, recovery capacity is low, I and and we're talking about a compound, I don't want someone compromising. form for performance because that lead the that's just a higher risk for injury in in that context. So I generally have like six is about a cutoff. If someone drops from eight to six and it's starting to look bad, I'll say okay, reduce weight by ten percent and let's bump us back up just so that we can try and target the desired muscle group a little bit better. So that's that's the second part or second my I answer the second part. The the first part of it If performance is is stagnant, I because we say in a deficit, which is we're talking about it like it's a light switch, but it's really like a spectrum. If we're in the third week of your deficit and you're down two pounds, it's not the deficit. It's something else contributing. If we're in week 10 of a deficit and you're down 12 pounds, probably because we have a substantial. Delta in in body weight and energy bounce loss. It's the same way that when which we could talk about this in a different podcast episode, when people say, Well, have I been dieting for two well how how long can I diet for? It depends on how successful the diet is. If you've been dieting for three months and you're only down four pounds, it hasn't been a very successful diet. So you haven't been dieting for three months. You've been attempting to diet for three months with many weeks unsuccessful. So it's there has to be the the time is really a secondary characteristic to the depth of change or how the how much change has happened. If we have again five percent reduction in total body mass, I I think we could start to say, yeah, I think it could be the the the deficit contributing to a lack of performance because we have result of the deficit. Mm-hmm. Theoretically, how long would you expect somebody to continue being able to progress up from eight reps forward if they're just starting a deficit? So that person now in theory is hitting that eight rep set on set one in that same example we've been using. How long, or would you expect progression right off in the beginning? Because I think you would. And then how long would you expect progression before you would say, Okay, now it's fine that we're hitting the same number of reps for multiple weeks in a row. I hate this answer. It depends. Right? Yeah. So let's assume we're talking about a natural, right? A complete a completely natural person. I think the progressions will start to dry up earliest because the deficit impacts uh I indirect impacting factors like your hormonal profile that contributes to things like performance. So let's say let's say we're doing a 16-week deficit, right? Four months. I would expect straight progressions for the first at least four weeks, the first month, month and a half, probably. Once you get to eight weeks, I would expect maybe progressions become every other week, every third week. And then once we're into that fourth, fourth month, you're fighting to maintain. Mm. Performance with an expected drop-off of at least two reps. I and then different exercises have different drop-off profiles. Something like a pull-down or a pull-up. Let's use the context of a pull-up. You're getting lighter. You may progress that the entire time if your body weight changes enough. Things that are short overload, I find have less of a drop-off in performance than things that are mid-range or or lengthened overload. And then With that person who's in a deficit, what what are the contexts of our deficit? Is this like an energy flux person where we're doing fifteen thousand steps per day and keeping food intake really high? I would expect less of a performance drop-off because we're able to continue to feed you pretty well. Is this someone who's willing to sacrifice starchy carbohydrate at dinner so that I can give them 30 grams of intra workout carbs, I would expect performance to to be elevated a little bit longer. So how the deficit is structured also I think plays a role in it. If this is one of those people, like the best example I have is I had a client once who was a radio radiologist who sat in the x-ray room for like nine hours a day. His step count was absolutely abysmal. Your performance is gonna dump because I you can't move enough for us to keep your calories at a decent level. We have to diet you almost purely off of a nutritional deficit. They're gonna I'm gonna expect them to their performances to drop off much more soon. And then if we move into like the the the hormone replacement person, as we get really lean, you don't have to worry about hormones uh decreasing, impacting your performance. So that can stay elevated a little bit longer. And then let's, you know, go to the far end of the spectrum, someone who's you know maybe an enhanced competitor. I don't know if performance will ever drop off. I I I in mine, I set PRs in my peak week heading into my pro qualifier. Not on every single exercise across the board, but That was sixteen weeks into my into my diet. So at week sixteen, I I literally set a couple PRs, that peak week. so it really depends, but the more natural you are, or the closer towards natural or natural, you can expect performance degradation earlier on because there's less, you know, contributing factors that can artificially or hormonally, I should say, k keep your elevat keep your performances going. So you uh just correct you said generally that you see three to four months of progression in a natural from the start of the diet to the point where they're struggling to maintain performance. At l uh a at least two month eight weeks, yes. Month three things start to become uh not completely dry, but not as not week over week. You might go three weeks and then get a rep. Th so something like that. Yeah. somebody in that point is like dieting, you know, pre-show or something like that. Like it it's it mean it just it depends where you start, of course, and all of that. But that seems like a a a pretty long diet if like you're going at a rate in which you're still seeing progressions for two, three, potentially four months. I've noticed the drop offs for me when I was I guess I'm still natural-ish, but when I was really natural, I think I noticed the drop-offs occur a little bit before that, especially for lengthened movements. Um, but that also is really good context that you mentioned about training fasted or whether you have intra workout and how many meals are before and like kind of all of these aspects too. So that obviously changes the paradigm a little bit. One thing I think is important to add that you that you brought up, it it's the really thing it's how lean you are. And for you, you're starting these diets at 13, 14%, maybe something like that. Okay. So it's but if you're starting this diet at twenty-two percent body fat and your goal is fifteen percent body fat. Right. hormonally we're not we're not your hormones will should improve as you diet because we are dieting you toward health. Going from fifteen percent to seven percent, we're now dieting you, you know, a fact health improves a little bit in the beginning and then it it doesn't. Um so it it's really the body fat is what delineates where that performance drop off because once you get lean enough, you're just too lean and things start to suffer. But if we're only dieting two maybe twelve percent or something, you I I would expect that progressions longer because we have additional substrate that can fuel performance, even if it's not optimal, but there's still just sufficient body fat there to allow performance to continue. Yeah, that's a really good point. I find that once I even like, once I have a couple weeks of feeling hungry in me, it becomes really hard for me to to to see any performance increases on the like hard lengthen movements. whereas I think I actually start getting hungry like relatively soon in a diet, like within a matter of a couple weeks, I'm always like, man, like I'd love some more food right now already. which maybe isn't the case for people dieting from like higher body fat percentages. okay, so with this in mind, like, okay, we'll see progressions on a deficit for some number of weeks into potentially three or four months, depending on where you're starting and depending on a number of other factors. What are we seeing in your clientele with the dynamic double progression on people that are in a surplus? Um, how quickly are they progressing? Like, if we take that example of the person who chooses a weight that only gets them eight reps on set one. And you're like, ooh, maybe that's a little too heavy, how long are how how long is it taking them to get to twelve reps and adding weight and being like, Okay, like we're we're on track and everything's good here? If the weight is truly too heavy, what I think the right answer is is you reduce your weight by ten percent so that we can be more honest and not turn our progression into a A strength-seeking pursuit, right? Because strength is really just a byproduct of hey, this is how we work through the rep range, and you get stronger. But if we're focusing too much on the strength, we compromise form and and target stimulus. So let's assume weight is appropriate and we get a good, clean one RIR at eight reps, and it's not, and there's no compromises in in other muscle groups needlessly over-contributing, and it's a really honest. Good baseline. If we're starting a caloric surplus, I wouldn't expect it to change drastically in the beginning. So I like one one rep performance per week because we have to establish what is a good rate of change and then what because normally if if we have someone who's lean, who's insulin sensitive, and who chooses an adult like approach, Oh maybe call it a mature adult, right? Because that's let's I'm not even talking about like your twenty-three, twenty-four year olds, right? Because like what we were doing there is that age was dumb. What they're still doing at those ages are generally pretty dumb. Once you're mature, let's let's call it that way. we establish a rate of of rate of change that we were looking for, a rate of increase. But what's gonna happen first is you're gonna saturate muscle glycogen, so we're gonna get a pretty a pretty a jump to a stable body weight, which is just saturated muscle glycogen. So I would expect performances to be adequate in the beginning, but you might have some two rep jump weeks, but I don't think you're gonna go from eight to twelve in a week, anything like that. And then once we monitor our rate of body weight change, is hunger still in a good uh a positive hunger relative to the goal, which is increasing body weight. Are we getting small the the desired rate of change increase, you know, week over week? Is sleep good? Uh is nutritional selection good? I I would expect months of progression because we just work that in an iterative approach. If yes. Yeah, I think one important contextual thing I just thought about is that this whole conversation needs to discuss the training age of the person we're talking about. Because when you talk about like, they should be able to get a rep or even two reps for many weeks in a row, um, I I think of myself or somebody with similar experience to me, and I'm like, that shit ain't happening. There ain't no world where I'm going to one RIR on a hack squat and then for many weeks in a row, keeping one R I R I man I managed to add a rep every week for multiple weeks. It's just it's just not happening. so I think that context is maybe important as we kind of talk about some of these examples of progression. Yeah, late stage natty. every two to three possibly uh if everything else is can is in a very positive is cranked positively hydration status exer like qu uh intelligent program design so you're recovered aptly uh food is is there and I think with those ones this is a really good point to bring up You can still make substantial progress, but you need to run things probably a lot longer than you really care to to really see it. So the example that my favorite example is my final year as a Natty, I kept the hack squad in for I think seven or eight months. And I'd have to go back and check my notes, but I made significant progress on that over those I think I went from Two and a half plates per side for for eight or nine to four plates per side for eight or nine. But it took me like seven months of weekly with that in there. Um, and my body weight changed, which I think is you have if if you want substantial performance progression, oftentimes we need a substantial change in body weight delta. If you're up three pounds or four pounds, and let's assume late stage natty. Half that's gonna be body fat. Unfortunately, probably even more than half that's gonna be body fat. So f we want probably 16, 17 pounds or something like that. Uh that's that was the example of mine. I started at like 198, 199, and and we pushed body weight up to 216-ish for me to be able to do that. Um and that was again slow, incremental. We're not just dreamer bulk or anything like that. Let's talk intermediate. intermediate running moderate volume, because I I would argue if volumes get too high. too high. Uh it's hard to delineate what exactly is defined as too high because you can recover. You might not be brutally sore, but it might be too much volume to drive the progressions that you want. Would you agree with that? Yeah, for sure. I also think that while high volumes do work initially probably slightly better than lower volumes, they tend to catch up with you much faster. And then you either end up getting, you know, sick, have to deload, lose motivation, any number of other things. And so what you and I have both found is that that kind of low to moderate volume range is where you can progress, make Make progress both strength wise and uh physique wise, but also uh keep motivation high and be able to recover and do it for a longer period of time. Yeah, I'd say I I do truly believe the line gets a little bit blurry because you can recover if the let's say like again, let's say the volume is you know, quote unquote too high, you can recover from it, but it's just a a little bit too high for you to have consistent progressions, which then muddies your ability to to decipher if you're actually improving or not. And that's where I think uh back in the day that if your volume isn't high enough and you're still making strength progress, then your volume needs to go higher so that the fatigue is high enough for the hypertrophy stimulus that you're not really actually making strength progress. So it's kind of like this chicken and the egg thing where he would prioritize volume over strength progressions. But I think most people at this point are realizing that you need to use volumes that are sustainable and So that you can see progress because strength progress is still going to be the number one sign that you are actually achieving hypertrophy. especially as a a natural because things move much slower from a from a pu pure tissue accrual uh standpoint so you need to look at a things that are a little bit more better proxies is a good way to put it if I'm again natural inner let's call it late intermediate if body weight is going up if food is increasing and performance is increasing I those are three pretty decent proxies that when you put them all three together are indicative that hypertrophy is occurring. Whereas myself or an enhanced person, I can just train really hard and have a bunch of volume and not pay that much attention to my progressions. But body weight will change more rapidly. I can feel clothes getting tight mu much faster. It's just a different the rules of the game are are are changed. So as as in natural, you need you need better what's the word I want to use here? Like bet better metrics or cleaner metrics because it's not as obvious and things move more slowly. I think that's really important. I think at my stage and kind of what I alluded to earlier with not being able to keep up with like weekly progress on the dynamic double progression, that's sort of why, at least toward the very end of my like caring about my progress as a natural, I gravitated more to that. kind of mesocycle to mesocycle progression, where I might take a movement at like a hack squat and go like four re R I R, then three R I R two, then one, then zero over like a five or six week cycle, and then recycle it the next cycle and go back to four R I R and expect that my four R I R set would be five pounds heavier six weeks later than it was six weeks prior. And then kind of keep that five pound progression across each of the R I R weeks. And I found that that like kind of six week progression model almost worked a little better with where I was in my my training status. But it's important, I've realized, not to extrapolate my own needs as an advanced trainee to somebody that I'm coaching that might be more along the intermediate timeframe and how they might go about achieving progression. Yeah. And one little caveat that I do think is important to point out, if you purely if if you only seek performance improvements as a metric, you can have too little volume as well. Because it's it's it's a sweet spot. And it's a and I feel shitty saying that because it's makes it seem like I'm giving a an unhelpful answer. But if you just reduce everything to one set You will probably pr progress because your fatigue is so low, but it's not sufficient enough of a hypertrophic stimulus for the adaptation of new tissue accrual to occur. Yeah, for sure there is a sweet spot. And I think that's where like what Israel was saying isn't necessarily fully wrong. He just took it like a little bit too far, just like the low volume people that are only looking at the proxy of strength progression are taking it too far, and that the reality and the truth exist somewhere in the middle. Yeah. So to to kind of take it back to originally with the gaining phase, if all of the other contributing factors are in place, food is adequate, body weight is changing, you are up a significant amount of body weight, ten pounds, twelve, fifteen, twenty, something like that, I think it can go on for quite some time. However Things generally start eventually to work against you. Appetite may really start to slow down. Maybe we start losing insulin sensitivity. Maybe our partitioning ratio really starts working against us. We start getting fatter than you care to be. Or it's been eight, ten months, or l and you've made significant changes in in strength performance improvements on certain exercises. They generally do not go on forever, right? Or what you find is you start caring about another aspect more than the immediate continued strength progressions because you might look at yourself and say, I'm kind of fucking fat and I don't want to look like this anymore, which is very fair, and then it may be time to change program, change nutritional periodization and priority. Yeah, sounds right. Yeah. And one of the things that I I f see when I get questions from younger guys now aesthetics and th what the physique looks like right now. I'd say is that a higher priority than it ever has been in the general culture. This is this is my opinion. And that higher priority limits the rate of progression because the environment is not as con as positively contributory as it can be. So if you're like I'm not progressing, but you're also very, very lean and you're doing a bunch of cardio for physique management purposes, not for uh cardiovascular output or cardiovascular output improvements, it's very likely parts of your lifestyle that are contributing to the slow progressions uh to again have a different priority, which is the physique being super, you know, aesthetic and presentable right now. Yeah, I've noticed the same too that the young I'm training a younger guy right now, who's like twenty or twenty-one, and uh he he acts like he wants to care. He's like wants to do the hybrid thing with the running and the the lifting, and he acts like he really cares about the performance. But at the end of the day, most of the questions he asks and stuff are about like the physique and how it's appearing. And so that does kind of change the way in which one needs to go about kind of communicating and implementing the program. And there's nothing wrong with it. It's just your priority. But if it's your priority, but you're trying to act like it's not your priority, that's where that's where you end up thinking that I'm doing everything right, but it's not working for me. It's no, your priority is just what you actually look like right now, again, which is fine, but that will slow down how you progress. And again, perfectly fine, but it's just Both priorities don't work at once when they're performance improvements or hypertrophy improvements, I should say, and staying as lean as possible right now. Cool. Well anything else to kinda add before we wrap this thing up? I don't think so. The one thing that I I will say that's really comes to a program design standpoint is certain exercises make more and less sense at certain rep ranges. So also take that into account. for example, if we're doing super high rep leg press, right? Let's say you're doing a widow maker or something like that. Your volume's gonna need to go down. Like no, I don't I don't think we're doing two sets there, three sets there. If you're early intermediate, you probably can, but once you get to late intermediate or truly advanced, fatigue costs way too high. Performance degradation from set one to set two would be absolutely gigantic. I'd say greater than fifty percent of rep loss from set one to set two. So take that into account. Certain things make more sense in certain rep ranges uh ro and and for how many sets you will do for that exercise. Yeah, I'll also add that like I I've used dynamic double progression with two sets too. Like there's no reason that it has to be three sets or four sets or any magic number. Um if it's one set, then it's not dynamic double progression. It's just double progression. But like but like yeah, I mean with two sets, like absolutely you can do that. So I'll often use like a five to ten or six to ten rep range, and my first set I'll usually be heavier and the second set slightly lighter, all within that that same range. So it might look like top set back off set in a way, but I'm progressing it like a dynamic double progression. So there's a number of ways in the different rep schemes and progression models all kind of interact with each other and kind of become the same thing. But um using that framework of understanding that you pr can progress sets individually, I think is the overriding precedent that you all should take away from from this whole Yep, I agree completely. So cool. Hopefully this episode helps. Any questions, as always, guys, fire them over to Brian or myself, and we'll talk to you. Cannot guarantee it's next week, but shortly. Sounds good.