Question of Strength 89

Christian Thibaudeau talks training and answers viewer questions.

All right guys welcome to question of strength uh basically where I talk about training stuff that interest me stuff I tried this week stuff I’m planning to try in the future or just topic that I find uh either uh interesting or something that need to be clarified so that understanding of training nutrition

Cation and so forth I will also obviously take a good portion of this presentation to answer your questions that’s always the most fun part of the presentation at least for me because uh the adrenaline that is generated when I have to quickly answer a question without having uh time to think about it

Before it really amps me up and that gives me often times better answers than actually if I had time to think about it so it’s always interesting and obviously the quality of this program depends entirely on the quality of your questions so the more questions we have the more interesting this presentation

Is going to get now before we get to your question which you can always Post in uh the chat room on the right of your screen uh I want to talk about the train a training topic that has always been of great interest to me and on which I

Confess I I’ve moved back and forth uh between two different viewpoints and that is trading frequency H why am I talking about trading frequency uh because of something I just started doing is something I’ve done before mostly when I was competing and training as an Olympic weightlifter but also when

I for example wanted to specialize on the Strat group high high Poole or on a bench breath uh which is basically doing one lift that I really want to improve and do it pretty much every single day sometimes even several times a day and that’s not a novel Thing by any shape or

Form of course it might sound novel to you if all your social information media that’s friendly or not but it’s actually something that’s been around for long first of all because high level weightlifters as in Olympic weightlifting that’s pretty much how they train they are squatting in some

Form uh often times six days a week five six days a week could be front squat could be back squat they’re also doing a variation of the clean and jerk and snatch pretty much every single day maybe they have like Sunday off that’s pretty much it uh so it’s been going on

For a long time and they are even like people in North America not affiliated with uh Olympic weightlifting that actually have published work on the squat everyday program Matt pamman comes to mind now it’s something that I personally did for a long time as I mentioned when I was training for

Weightlifting I would squat pretty much every day and that’s when I was my strongest on the squat I squatted 600 uh for a single and 550 for five and I also front squatted for 85 actually could have front squaded 500 what actually happened is I had 500 in my shoulders I

Squ it down and halfway up I blanked out so I had to dve the bar even though I knew I was a would have been able to do it anyway the point is that I got my strongest squat when I was squatting uh every day sometimes twice a day also

When I wanted to focus on my snag group hle I increased it by uh well close to 100 pounds if not even more than 100 pounds uh by essentially training a high high Poole every single day for four weeks uh and when I did my best bench breast which was

445 uh I also would bench breast at least four times a week okay uh contrast that to more I would say current information about hypertrophy which founds that there is no huge advantage in training a muscle or a lift more often to trigger muscle growth provided that the overall volume the overall

Weekly volume is the same matter if you’re in okay effect of hyper seems to be more correlated with volume and effort level than the frequency of training the muscle okay uh why am I squating every day then well because for strength and performance I do believe that higher frequency is better uh because

Hypertrophy is just about making a muscle grow larger okay whereas performance yes there’s a muscular aspect but there’s also neurological aspects and Technical aspects and you can gain strength by improving any one of these three factors okay now when it comes to hypertrophy and I talked about

This in a previous video um when you come to hypertrophy it seems that the muscle protein synthesis response so basically when you are uh training you are triggering triggering an increase in protein synthesis and the higher the increase is the more muscle you’re going to be building okay and a recent study

That was uh not published but was um given or or explained on social media presly show that uh if the period between two stimulus or stimul is too short the amount of protein synthesis resulting from the second bout is lower and it could have been so basically if

Had let’s say less than 70 hours between two workouts for a same muscle you get a smaller increase in protein synthesis therefore maybe less muscle growth okay and that doesn’t mean you get no muscle growth it’s still effective but if you wait a bit longer you probably get a

Stronger response from that workout from a muscle building perspective okay now the argument could be that if you’re training so frequently that even if you have let’s say you have like five or six sessions a week uh even if you lower protein synthesis increase on a

Day-to-day basis and the end of the week it can still compound to a large amount of stimulus but regardless of that for hypertrophy I I would kind of agree that frequency is not as important as it is for strength but strength here’s the thing Contracting your muscle producing

Force uh is motor skill just like doing a movement is motor skill and the key to motor skill acquisition and perfectioning is the frequency of practice if you want to play golf for example and you are only allowed to hit let’s say 700 balls per week would you

Get better at golf faster if you hit 700 balls once a week or if you’re hitting 100 Balls every single day I would argue that you would improve a lot faster if you practice every day eating a 100 Balls you probably would get even better

By eating 50 ball twice a week uh twice a day but that’s because first the quality of the practice will be better better but also because if you have six or seven days before doing a pattern again the programming is not as efficient and as permanent as if you do

It every single day you always need some refresher okay and now of course once you have truly mastered movement frequency might become less important okay but but still to develop the neuromuscular capacities the capacity to increase that that signal to activate the muscle but more importantly the capacity of the muscle

To respond to the signal will improve faster if you do that movement more often the second point is important there is something called the neuromuscular Junction uh which is basically the part in the muscle where the nerve connects to the muscle and where the information sent from the brain to the muscle to

Fire reaches the muscle and triggers the contraction process and that is what’s called synapsis the synapsis or what’s transmitting that in information now you your synapses can become more or less sensitive they can also increase in numbers and what has been found is that if you train a little more often you

Your synaptic connection is is better it’s more efficient you require less newal drive to get the same strength production so you become more neurologically efficient okay furthermore over time you can even start adding new abses making the connection faster might be one of the reasons why Olympic who don’t look like they can

Lift 500 pounds overhead can because at the synaptic level they are just so much more efficient so they can use a much greater percentage of their muscle strength potential at a much lower neurological cost okay and that’s kind of weird because the the the more efficient you become the more you can

Train an exercise without draining yourself so that’s kind of why the reason why why Olympic weightlifters can train so often even on simly complex movement because they their neurological efficiency is so high because of years and years and years of high frequency practice that for them doing a a snatch

Is no long not more demanding than doing a curl for you not okay so so that’s one of the benefit of a higher frequency is that you can develop neurological efficiency much faster and the faster that increases the more you can use your full potential to produce Force another

Benefit is that well when you’re practicing a movement more often you are obviously practicing that skill and the more often you practice a skill the more permanent you make it which is important that if you’re doing high frequency work technical efficiency is super important because if you practice bad motor habits

You’re going to ingrain permanently those bad motor habits and going to be really really hard to correct okay but but if you practice iing proper technique the more often you practice the more efficient you become at the movement so you are more efficient at the movement and the nervous system is

More efficient which are is two of the biggest portion of what’s needed to gain strength so and you will still get some muscle even though the protein synthesis might be lower so the point is that if you’re training for hypertrophy frequency doesn’t matter that much I

Mean I think that there’s a large part of personal preference there I when I’m training for I still prefer to train each muscle twice a week uh rather than one that that’s just the way I’m buildt and because of that I’m more motivated and train harder when I do that but you

Can get Fine Results for hypertrophy by eating a muscle once a week provided that the stimulus is sufficient but when it comes to strength I believe that there is a disting and significant advantage in doing this more frequently doesn’t mean you have to squat every day but you can certainly increase your

Frequency to twice or three times a week most athletes I’m training and I’ve been training for a while squat but not just squat but basically do the the big moving patterns the key moving patterns three days a week the way the training is structured for them is that

Monday Wednesday Friday we have our main strength workouts and they our whole body workouts typically uh with four maybe five exercises so big compound move to be as efficient as possible covering the whole body to extent and then on on Saturday it would be what’s called a gap

Workout is a smaller session lower stress session that is often times used mostly hypertrophy so your whole training program is based on big compound multi-joint exercises there’s a good chance that some muscles will be under develop under stimulated because on the big lifts you will always have more dominant

Muscles experience so on and so forth so some muscle might not get fully developed and maybe you want to develop those muscle and that would be done on the Gap workouts also workout where you are focusing mostly on big compound lift it’s kind of hard to fix weak points so

The Gap workout is where you fix weak point okay as far as the muscular development is concerned so so and at first I will confess that when an athlete starts working with me and he’s not used to squatting or lifting uh bench pressing three days a week the

First two or three weeks the performance decreases just because they are not used to that amount of stimulus but very quickly they just blow up the strength up uh like and I’m doing the same thing why am I doing that for my squat uh first of all it’s always a goal

Of mine to Squad 500 to me like 500 on a squad I’m using a safety bar Squad so that’s equivalent to like a 550 back squat on the safety bar Squad you can use roughly 10% less weight than the regular barbell Squad because the bar is higher so from a leverage standpoint uh

Uh it’s much harder because the more you lean forward the higher the bar is the more it increases load at this time it’s harder to maintain that anyway so uh I’ve always my goal has always been to always be able to squat 500 now sometimes I do get away from squatting

Because I have other goals in mine so but as soon as I get back to regular training I I want to bring my squad up back up to 500 um and I want to Squad 500 until I’m 50 or 60 okay I’ve seen that I’ve seen former clients of mine do

That or maybe not 500 but like pretty impressive lift so that’s certainly something I want to want to do and for me the best way to do that is for a certain period of time is to focus on increasing my Squat and to me that means training the squat between three and six

Days a week depending on my recovery capacity now one thing I noticed since I started squatting every day uh is that oddly enough my lower body aches a lot less like I was starting to have like hip pain and I walking upstairs was kind of hard

My knees and hips um when I was doing my martial art session was all over my hips um and I figured well maybe I’m just getting old and it’s fin finally catching up to me and as soon as I squatted started squating every single day I don’t have dose pains anymore that

Might just be uh like something that happened like that but I’ve read the same thing from other people who’ve done that type of program and when I go back to when I was uh squatting every every day I never had lower body issues of course I was younger but still the fact

That I’m painless now it’s a nice change uh also my performance is improving quickly how I I do I do it now I’m GNA tell you how I do it but understand that my goals might not be your goal okay uh I don’t want legs that are too big right now I

Know it sounds weird but I have I have short legs and long torso and I’m super quad dominant doesn’t take much for my legs to look out of balance and also having some shaing between my legs so it’s it’s uncomfortable walking or or running or stuff like that which I’m

Doing a lot more these now nowadays uh so I’m doing exclusively sets of one or two reps it’s only singles and doubles I’m gr every day I ramp up to my training Max for that day the difference between a training Max and an allout Max is that a training Max doesn’t require

You to get amped up a training Max is something you all you probably have like 10 maybe 15 pounds in reserve it is very challenging it is done with perfect form so it’s probably the heaviest weight you can do without breaking form and without cying yourself up okay and that can be

Repeated pretty often most people their training Max will be roughly 90 92% of their actual Max okay so I’m ramping up to a training Max and every day I’m doing it slightly differently for example on day one I will hold a 3 second pause in the bottom day two 2

Second pause in the bottom day three 1 second pause at the bottom day four no pause at the bottom then I start the cycle over again uh sometimes I will even do for example reps 3 second pause two two sorry two second pause two reps three

One second pause rep no pause two reps I’m going to do the same thing but uh so the lower volume of Reps for me means that there’s very little soreness happening because even though I’m sweating every day and I’m going up to a a very heavy weight I might have a total

Of 10 repetitions in my workout and maybe five of those are CH challenging so the amount of uh calcium ions that get leaked which causes the muscle sess is very at each workout so I can actually Rec fine in fact on two days ago I actually squatted three times a

Day I did my morning workout and I did an afternoon session then my son trained so I trained with him I did SP again and on all three workouts I was able to work up to the same training I was able to recover so that’s something I’m doing

I’m doing high frequency Squad not to blow up my quad actually to become as efficient as possible and develop my nervous system as much as possible all right good we have decent number of questions already but never hesitate to post your question in the chat section first question uh for intermediate lifters is

It better to use concurrent programming or specialization if specialization is the best way to train how do you like to structure frequency volume Etc it depends on the goal okay are you training you me tring in find is it for performance is it for hypertrophy is it for because my answer might be

Different also it will depend on their priorities like I just use my own example my priority right now is to bring my squat up so I’m using a what could be called a specialization approach because I’m squatting every single day the amount of squatting I’m doing greatly uh exceeds the work I’m

Doing for other muscles or other movement pattern okay but I have a goal and my goal is to bring up my squat if your goal is to be an overall lifter or if your goal is an athlete or a bodybuilder want maximum muscle specialization is probably the last

Approach I’m going to be using I’m I’m a big fan of specialization but the goal of specialization is to continue progressing either in strength or in size when more traditional programming has stopped working okay so for example if you have your powerlifter and for your your squad is going nowhere well

You might do squ specialization squatting three days a week one day focus on Ecentric one day focus on St Dynamic one day focusing on concentric for maybe four weeks that will just boost your neological efficiency and Will Wait will make you go up as far as far as hypertrophy is concerned same

Thing if you have like you’re at a point where you’re not growing anymore because well the more advanced you are the more adapted you are to tr training right and the more adapted you are to training the harder it is to cause further adaptation that’s how the body works you impose a

Stress on the body if the body deems that stress sufficient to cause a threat it will adapt Itself by making itself more resilient to that stress in the future but if you’ve been trining for a while for a long time you cause a lot of adaptation your body is lot more

Resilient stressors so it’s it becomes harder and harder and harder to impose a level of stress that will actually force your body to further adapt so you might need more volume more frequency more advanced method could be many things problem is that you also get stronger

When you are more advanced you might be holder so that means that you might have harder time recovery the heier you lift yeah your muscles can handle it but the tendons system all that stuff is pretty much the same as it was when you were weaker a 400 pound squat will be more

Stressful than a 200 pound squat even if both or 80% see what I mean uh so the more advanced you are the more trauma you can impose the more resilient you are the problem is that if you have to increase training stress significantly to keep progressing then because you’re

Stronger because you might have a harder time recovering because of AG or whatever and increasing overall vol volume might not allow you to properly adapt to your training you going exceed your capacity to recover so that’s where specializations comes in we in the den fter you need a very strong stimulus to

Keep progressing in some regard but you can’t do that for the whole body at the same time because doing so for every muscle or every big lift would just cause an excessive overall amount of stress which would make positive adaptations like might just drive yourself down so that’s why

Specialization is a useful tool is if you reach a point in your career and your development that you either absolutely need to use a dramatic increase in training stress to progress but you just can’t do that for the whole body you specialize on one or two

Muscles or one lift okay and you can rotate those uh or you might be in a situation where for some reason you need to bring one lift up as fast fast as possible maybe a bench press contest spot contest personal goal whatever then it might be a a good approach even if

You’re at a point where you can still make things insirational way so specialization is one of my favorite tools but it needs to be used when you need it either to get a quick boost in the lift because you need that for an event or personal goal of yours or

Because while you have stagnated hopy wise or even strengthwise by training everything equally so you know I’m going to just boost the stress on one lift or one muscle or two muscles then decrease the rest because that’s the important thing when you specialize it’s not just about increasing volume or frequency or

Training stress for two muscles or lift it’s about decreasing the training stress for other groups so that you don’t reach an excessively high level of TR stress what are your favorite neotropic product well I I really love uh Candy by Biotest in fact I can’t wait for the new

Uh out made uh I’ve always responded very well to that product I remember that first time I was in Colorado actually patter owner came down with a glass and said shink this what’s in it just drink it tell me how you feel drink it I didn’t notice that much I mean I felt

Happy felt good but to me me perception of your own mental state is kind of hard to establish but when we when I went to uh to dinner with my wife she could come she said she asked me well are you on speed said why because you can’t stop

Talking like you and you normally when I’m literally not emiting a s i just eat and then I’m really poor person to have dinner with h but not just went from one St to the other and with like super high energy dude that’s that’s brain candy

And it it really works for my brain chemistry one thing I want to make uh clear is that neut Tropics or anything that targets the nervous system will not work equally well for everyone because how effective specific neut Tropic is will be highly dependent on your own neurotransmitters balance so for example

Like me the reason why brain candy work so well is that my dopamine level and acetycholine levels are pretty low okay uh and if you know my neurotrans my neurotyping system you know how to evaluate that so my I’ve always had like L dopamine when NE transmitter very high

Adrenaline so to me brain candy which focuses most on dopamine and ESS choline brings me up to an optimal State like I already have high I already have high adrenaline I already have high serotonin already have pretty high gab the only downside for me is uate and dopamine and and acetycholine by increasing

Acetycholine dopamine you’re bring up my weak points neurologically speaking but some people with higher dopamine and higher cine might not notice the same benefits as I do other neut tropics I like I like no pep uh I it increases the speed of neurological transmission I use

It only when I have a very heavy workout so if I want to like perform optimally I’m testing my bench I’m testing my squat or it’s a very heavy session I’m going to take my brain candy in the morning and let’s say 30 minutes is before workout I’m going to have like 20

Milligrams of no and that normally to me leads to the best performance I can get but again just NE neotropics as I mentioned uh it really depends on your own neur electrical balance and which neurotransmitter you need and all right high intensity low volume training seems

To have really beat me up I feel like I’m still recovering from it month later could it switching exercise could not switching exercises enough be the cause of this not likely uh if anything changing exercises more often is more neurologic demanding than sticking with the same

Movement first go back to the the squat portion when I talked about the high frequency training earlier today uh doing a lift more often becoming more technically efficient in that lift reduces the neurological power required to do that lift so the more often you practice a

Movement the better you become at it the less neurologically costly that same exercise becomes if anything sticking with the same movement for longer decreases neurological stress and should actually reduce fatigue actually noticed that when I was training um an Olympic track cyclist like you those who running

Like Drive in circles with the huge legs anyway I was training this guy and at first I would rotate the type of squat that he was using every four weeks maybe like block one we might use front Squad block two maybe box Squad block three maybe safety bar Squad just rotate the

Lift and what we notice is that the first two weeks of each new block is performance on the track would go down like feel like crap not perform well the moment we stop changing the squat movement and you just stuck with B squat because that was the movement you was

The most comfortable in then is performance on track Never dipped down when any block so so I I believe that the contrary the having too much exercise variation especially if it’s in the form of big compound lift or multi- joint movement it can actually increase the logical stress not decrease it so

It’s probably not that now that being said going to failure uh and if you’re really good at going to failure not faking yourself out it is very draining it is very draining don’t let the low volume fool you okay uh lots of people who are training that way are reporting

The same symptoms that you are and I would say that those who who have those symptoms are often those who are less structurally built for heavy lifting what I mean by that is that those who are like big jointed like thick forarm big head big neck they don’t seem to be

As impacted by going to failure with a low volume approach but people with let say longer limbs smaller tendons smaller bone structures for some reason they seem to be uh a lot more impacted by uh the very high intensity TR to failure even with low volume and often times

Will need more DS than people who are not of that structure that might be it or it might just be the fact that the overall stress in your life might be might have been excessive but yeah like going to through failure task fa when you actually fail to complete a a rep is

Extremely hard on the nervous system and on the muscle that’s why I like uh ey effort training or effort Based training but I don’t use it all the time I prefer to cycle it let’s say a four to six weeks block than a four to six weeks of

Higher volume and so on and so forth I believe that it’s a lot safer and less demanding for most people that’s why I don’t like to be married with one single training approach because it’s never it’s never the answer for everyone all the time all right thank you for your advice and this

Podcast several weeks back you gave me some advice for starting of my 14-year-old Al daughter on lifting your game improve I don’t know if it’s the strength or the confidence uh that comes from going to the gym but thank you anyway well I appreciate that by the way I’m I’m

Working on a new project I’m going to start working on that I don’t want to say too much because I don’t want people to steal my idea but I want to create a resource that would be called something like Elite kids or something like that it’s going to be an onine resource for

Trading kids it’s going to cover strength training it’s going to cover like all the progression all the exercises going from six years old to 18 uh it’s going to have also uh speed agility work it’s going to have uh conditioning work and it’s GNA have nutrition advice all that stuff any

That’s that’s my new project that I’m super motivated about I’m really glad that you’ve seen Improvement now uh I think that the reason why she improve is likely a combination of both like she probably has improved her physical capacities because if she’s never trained before okay uh the neurological

Adaptations will be very fast you can actually have somewhat decent neurological Improvement in as short as little as two weeks and what I mean by that is that the nervous system becomes better at sending a strong signal to the muscles okay so when you have that you

Can apply that same increased amount of neurological activation to sporting movement so the sporting movement that you already mastered now you can apply them with more Force more power more speed just because your capacity to send a strong signal is increased and that can happen in as short as two weeks with

Beginner lifters so so I I would definitely see that it’s one of the causes for improvement uh the confidence should never be underestimated either uh I mean it’s been well established that at Le the the mindset how how much you believe in yourself makes a big difference I’m gonna use myself as an

Example when I was uh playing High School football uh I I was not very skilled I mean the first two seasons I didn’t do much but the moment I started lifting I I believe that it would give me an unfair advantage and I played like

It and I I was dominant then once I got to college everybody lifted even though I was in the high average when it comes to strength I did not see that as a uh an unfair Advantage because everybody liftt in high school back in my day nobody lifted that gave me an advantage

But in college everybody lifted so I did not have that psychological advantage and I crumble under pressure so that there’s a big component there but there is definitely some actual physical capacities Improvement at that age when you’re starting to lift absolutely my girlfriend is a typical type three and is a typical overthinker

Especially after work would you recommend Gaba or Rod Rosia or both to calm or down afterward okay first I don’t like to make specific supplement recommendation uh even though they are over the counter to me and not as obviously not as powerful as medication you can still have negative

Effect you can still have produ that will have individual variances so I’m not comfortable saying that you need to take this or that especially since Gaba can actually be really hit and miss with different people even of the same neurotype also the moment you start playing with neurotransmitters you

Always have potential drawbacks okay for example everything that boosts dopamine will decrease serotonin everything that increase serotonin will decrease dopamine so yeah you type three so that person has low serotonin lowish Gaba High glutamate High adrenaline and mod gold depending on the person for those who don’t know the type

Three in my neurotyping system is like the the the typical overthinker routine based person borderline OCD doesn’t like variation doesn’t like change work according to a scheduled etc etc okay and that is all these habits are actual conscious strategies to reduce the level of anxiety because type three there are

People with naturally high or elevated um anxiety level anxiety is nothing more than your neurons caring too fast for you to fully control your thought process okay that that’s all it is so the neurotransmitter that would calm you down that would reduce anxiety are the neurotransmitter that slow down the

Neurotransmitter they are called inhib viory neurotransmitters so it’s serotonin and it’s Gaba mostly okay so if you have some if you’re someone who has anxiety issues then you areow Gaba and the way the body will subconsciously protect itself against more anxiety is that it will seek to only do things that

It knows will not harm them so that’s why they always follow the same routine that’s also why they will overanalyze every single point because by overanalyzing everything they make sure that there’s no unknown variable that can come in and arm them okay that’s also why they don’t like to try new

Activities uh Etc okay so uh Inu your strategy to reduce anyway so yeah increasing Gaba could help okay but more often than not it’s mostly serotonin that’s the issue but certainly you want to uh help her reduce neurological activation I would not go with gabo right away again because it’s really

Miss and some people have really bad reaction to it I would sh with something more gentle the combination I would recommend is either magnesium okay uh magnesium could be magnesium glycinate magnesium diglycinate uh magnesium tonate which would be the best choice or magnesium torate okay uh now

The the torate the glycinate the tonate that’s called a shate or Kate and it’s basically a molecule added to the Magnesium to change its absorption but but once the Magnesium is absorbed that substance will also have effect your body that’s why for example magnesium glycinate is something that will calm

You down magnesium tonate is something that will calm you down while also improving neurological function uh something like magnesium um magnesium toate will balance you if you’re too high it will bring you down if you’re too down it will bring you up so magnesium by itself will also help because it dislodges the

Adrenaline from The mederic receptors so the adrenaline amps up your neurons too fast which is one of the problem of the type three so magnesium would decrease activation by reducing the activity of the adrenaline and if you had the glycinate if you had a tonate if you had

The Magnesium Tate that will help that so for example during the day I would probably go with something like 250 milligrams of magnesium torate um and that would be a good product because it would it would C down slightly reducing anxiety but will not shutter down completely and in the

Evening you could either go with a magnesium glycinate magnesium b glycinate or magnesium tonate um so that that would be my first that’s the first thing I would try because well first of all most people are deficient in magnesium so so even if that doesn’t solve her anxiety issues completely you

Know what it’s still going to help her physiologically in many many many different regards and there is really no side effect for magnesia except if you have like high doses and you might have like stool issu with like between 250 and 500 milligrams there’s no issue at

Twice a day that’s perfectly fine by the way is one of those things that smaller doses to absorb better than bigger doses so I I like to have like two or three intakes of between 250 and 500 milligrams per day now one thing that she could had is glycine glycine is an

Amino acid but it also act as a neurotransmitter and it inhibits the neurotransmitters the the the neurons so it slows the neurons down it calms you down it also increases serotonin so for a type three by increasing serotonin but by also helping gabin serotonin do their job at cing down the nervous system

Glycin is a very interesting product uh so I would go with again you will use it with your magnesium so during the day let’s say you have 250 milligrams of magnesium Chate then you could have like three grams sure with two two grams of glycine you can increase it to three or

Even four grams and in the evening you would have your magnesium let’s say glycinate in that case it would go with tonate and then you would have five grams of glycine glycine is something that you need to try titrate up to see your your tolerance to it from a gastric

Perspective but but glycine is super interesting because first again it comes the brain down directly second it increases serotonin thirdly it also act as a protein synthesis stimulator like the amino acid that the most directly increase protein synthesis or muscle growth is lucing the second most is glycine plus glycine is very important

For for uh the fabrication of tend tisue so for the Lucine helps rebuild the muscle the glycine helps reild the tendance so that’s also a side benefit of glycine so it’s something I’ve been using for like 20 years and just research has been published recently showing all the benefits of glycine I

Would go with that magnesium glycine both are very mild very gentle and they are very likely to help her with with her issues much more so than using a more aggressive gabar approach Rod is a good product uh it rebalances all those neurotransmitters so it might be a

Second line of AO second line of attack that I would use I would deploy it after if magnesium and glycine is not sufficient I would deploy Rola and Gaba would be uh like a last last approach nothing else works all right having think long arms uh 2 MERS wingspan for

Wingspan 15 cenm longer than height that is long I always have a hard time improving my chin up performance what would be the best three strategies for someone like me in fact you know longer arms typically are better at pulling movements it’s pressing movements that

They’re not good at it might not just be your wingspan it might be your lower body weight because like everything when you’re doing a Turnin up you need to lift everything below your below your elbow everything below your elbow you actually have to lift it up so

If your body weight is if you’re tall uh you’re fairly tall it’s much easier to be heavy that makes sense uh but that’s still weight you need to pull up that weight so if you’re let’s say 190 centimeters and 100 kilos it’s going to be much harder for you to do a pullup

Than someone who’s only 70 kilos because they have less weight to lift and yes you might have the muscle to do it or you might not but but body weight is the first thing I would look at at your height not so much the harm length because most of the best pullers I’ve

Known have long arms uh it’s better leverage then the second thing could be uh the the ratio between the forearm and the upper arm uh again that might impact it a lot more than Li range so really I would not think it’s mostly arm length I would think it’s mostly the body weight

Thing because well again if you’re 100 kilos I don’t know what which you weight but uh if you’re 100 kilos right from the start you lift you have to lift something like 80% of your body weight within your chin up without adding any weight so if you’re 100 kilos you you

Have to lift 80 kilos so you might not have the strength to lift 80 kilos with good form which is why you have problem with with chinups not because of your long arms so you need to assess ping strength so I I would really focus on on increasing pulling strength in movement

That are somewhat specific to Chups could be lat pull Downs if you cannot do a very strict lat pull down with body weight it’s gonna be kind of hard to do chin UPS okay because you’re lifting your body weight what I mean in in a that pull down you are doing that say

Your body weight but in a very stable and fixed position which is much easier than doing a pullup in an unstable position you need to be stronger than body weight on pull up on pull Downs you do have pull-ups that’s kind of a rule okay uh second if you have long arms you

Will probably need to focus a bit more on forearms and bicep strength then people with show their arms would need to focus more on that okay so that’s certainly something I would do now as far as specific strategies for U building uh improving the chinups uh first would be the high frequency

Approach okay just be you might be limited by how efficient you are at pups so one method I could recommend and I’ve used that with a CrossFit athlete you went to the CrossFit Games and his weak point was his strict and stand pushup not not using a Kipping and he could do

11 and which is for me pretty good but if you’re at a game level you need to be able to do something like 20 or 30 to be in the game okay so we used an approach where every single day he was doing sets of sub maximal

Uh strict ends and push-ups the way we selected the number of reps and ET is every Sunday it would test is maximum handstand pushup let’s say on Sunday he did let say 10 handstand pushup then for all the following weeks you would do sets of seven to eight reps you would do

Set of 70 to 8% of his maximum by the way all those reps when you did 10 for example need to be perfect ly clean reps no cheating no change in body position because that’s going to screw up the data so we were doing 70 to 80% work so

It’s every single day he would do three to five sets of let’s say seven to eight reps if he gets something like 12 reps then you would do between eight and nine reps every if you did five reps on Sunday then you would do three or four

Reps you see what I’m saying uh and that would be done every single day and it for him because he worked at the gym he would just do sets throughout the day just to practice the movement but for you you can simply start each workout with that just start each workout with

That you can even add one or two sets at the end of the session if you want but the goal is to make those sets sub maximal compared to the test that you did on every Sunday okay and that would be movement practice the more efficient

Just again if you go back to what I was talking about earlier when I talked about my squatting every day you become more neurologically efficient at the exercise become more technically efficient at the exercise which dramatically boovs performance how that call that greasing the groove just practicing your movements as often as

Possible to a non limit level okay so first get stronger on pulling movement I mean if you cannot strict very strict l pull down let’s say over body weight for 10 reps you can do proper chin up for 10 reps so that’s the first thing you need

To look at second because of your longer arms you probably need more focus on biceps strength not just size strength biceps strength and form strength and then you need to practice those movement up all right to spare my lower back and avoid the barbell back squat I need to do five

Sets of six to eight reps What alternative do you suggest I don’t understand the question spare your lower back okay I’m assuming you have a lower back issue and avoid the barbell back squat I need to do five sets of six to eight so are you saying that you keep doing the back

Squat with with sets of six to eight or you don’t do the back squat then you don’t mention the exercise it’s not clear you want to just rep what are you doing and what are you exactly are you asking sorry if I can’t be moreful right

Now but if you give me more information I can help you is it possible to increase Sprint speed with neural charge workout uh that you do uh that you do you more often okay that little last portion didn’t sound right is it possible to increase Sprint speed with

Neural charge workout I’m going to stick to that part because the other part doesn’t make sense um yes and no okay uh neural charge workout essentially the way it works is by increasing the state of activation of the nervous system so your neurons are firing faster that will

Help you create a stronger more powerful muscle contraction which helps you push harder on the floor and also having a faster straight frequency that helps however you need to understand how the I want to say activation and tension relationship Works let’s say that your brain is completely relaxed you’re either

Watching Netflix or you’re just waking up in the morning your nervous system is Chill it’s inhibited your neurons are firing very slowly so if you work to test your maximum speed or strength at that point it would be very low okay because you don’t have the Nal state to

Send a very strong paral signal for the muscles okay now if you gradually amp up your nervous system you wake up your nervous system your neurons furing faster and faster and faster you do increase muscle tension yes look at yourself when you are calm relaxed inhibited your muscle tone will be

Softer okay notice that and when you amp up your nervous system to get more ready for action and your muscle tone will increase your muscle tone increase because a higher muscle tone makes you better at quickly producing Force you are in the state to produce maximum

Speed and force so at first you increase your neuron activation neuronal activation neural speed you do increase strength potential you do increase power potential you do increase speed potential but if you keep emping yourself up even more now instead of having a higher muscle tone your muscles become tight there’s a very strong

Correlation between neurological activity and muscle tone okay if you are for some reason like super tight it’s often a state of neurological activation you have several people who have mobility issue on a squat entirely due to anxiety they do a body weight Squat and it’s perfect just put a are on their

Shoulders they they have inner anxiety and their ifp flexors and ifp flexors tighten up and they can’t full squat okay because the thing is that that anxiety that overactivation of the neurons will increase tension mostly in the flex your muscle so yes amping your brain up can increase strength and power

And speed but amping yourself up too much will decrease it by making flex your muscles tighter lexture muscles mean that when you’re pushing down against the floor to produce Force you’re fighting against your hi flexors that are tight that reduces Force application on the ground you also are fighting against tight hamstrings which

Means that your your hip your your straight length will be shorter so you are actually losing speed I was training this Bob slay guy and uh because of a his work schedule could only train three days a week so we did did both the speed and the string sessions on on the same

Day so on Monday Wednesday Friday we do b session each day and um so at first we started with a strength workout we do a strength workout and every two weeks it would pull a hamstring I fig well and he he would always tell me I started my sprinting

Session it was awesome I felt super powerful but I I I I would put my hamst stream when we reverse the order started with the Sprint session and then the string session later these hold stop because the the lifting session did Amp up as resisant which increased muscle

Tone made him tight during the Sprint and he just would P muscle so yeah in theory activating the nervous system will increase speed but if you increase it too much you will actually make it worse and the problem is that it’s kind of hard to gauge how much you respond

Unless you’ve done it before so you need to find out for yourself uh if you’re someone who’s already amped up all the time then doing a neural charge session might not be a good idea because it will just put you in that overactivation uh thoughts on trying to

Overhead press in a scapular plane and antagonistically vertical pole in a scapular plane do you have a power push pull leg program to buy buy um I mean I’ve I seen people do that okay uh I’ve used it a bit with not overhead I did it with uh more vertical

Or horizontal pulling horizontal pressing with at the same time uh but mostly to work on H for example when you’re striking you need to pull one side when you to help you punch factors it was really a specific thing using the front pull to potentiate the push okay I

Haven’t tried it in the uh the vertical plane uh vertical pole so I could not tell you it’s not something that I really like unless it’s for a specific purpose okay I think it’s just overly complicated for for no reason um that’s not and again it might work it might be

Fine but it’s not in my toolbox it’s not something that I use I really can’t comment on that uh you have a power push pull leg program to buy ah not really because I I’m one I use the push P leg program it’s mostly for hypertrophy I don’t it’s for mostly

For me it’s mostly hypertrophy when it’s for power I typically use my Omni contraction training system so it’s it’s whole body workouts one day isentric Focus one day is STO damic Focus one day is concentric focus and of course the programming will change from block to block to include parametric explosive

Work stuff like that uh but the push pull leg for me it’s I use that for hypertrophy uh not not for strength or power I use a variation for strength in which I would train a lift specific approach for example Squat and its assistance work on one on one one

Session bansch and its assistant work on another session deadli and its assistant on another session and then military press and its assistance for other that’s the closest I would get to a push pull leg split for stral performance but for power it’s not what I use

Personally all right guys uh we’re up on the questions oh one more right okay that’s a question about the back squat that I saw earlier what what can I rep replace my barbell back squat is the heavy part of my leg that I do six sets

Of six to8 well first okay do you have pain when you’re doing squat or is it just because you’re afraid of of of hurting your lower back uh if it’s just you afraid of using of rning lower back then just focus on technique a bit more

And not be that bad um if you’re having pain then yeah it might change it then what is your goal is it mostly hypertrophy getting bigger or is it getting stronger and if it’s getting stronger is it getting stronger on specific lifts so in other words do you

Need to be strong and good at the back I’m a big fan of the back squat again I’m saying at the beginning of this presentation that I’m squatting every single day okay so uh but it’s not mandatory if you don’t need to test your squat strength for

Competion or whatever if you just want to look bigger or having more muscle or just be overall stronger you can certainly use other exercises than the back squat uh now if it’s strictly for our pery just building Muscle Machines will work just as well as the squat just

As well as the squat for hypertrophy standpoint if we’re talking about strength I still believe that doing multi-joint movements uh is better overall than doing machine exercises at least for one lift so if you don’t want to do back squat you might want to do a

Front squat you might want to do a trap bar squat or trap bar deadlift with the low handles not the high handle that could actually if you’re doing your your trap bar deadlift with the low handles and the high ones and you’re using more of a squad motion so keeping your hips

Low in the start that will mimic pretty much what you’re doing in your squat that might be slightly less challenging for your lower back again six set 6 to eight rep might also be volume load thing mean six set of 6 to8 reps if those six to8 reps are

Art sets so if all of your six set are work set that just might be too much work that just might be too much work but that is that would be uh like 40ish hard reps heavy reps that’s a lot of load maybe if you just do three sets

Of eight or if you do six sets of three to five depending on your goal that might be a better option but certainly six sets of 6 to8 reps if those 6 to8 reps are hard sets uh that will be too much for most people uh because fatigue

Will set it in lower back in other region that will DET trct with technique I will personally not do six sets of six to eight reps and I’m someone who can squat every single day okay so I I find that six work set of 6 to8 would be a

Lot more problematic than the back Squad itself so the first thing I would just just try doing less work sets let’s do three work sets after a good warmup to see how it feels if it doesn’t feel good then then try using CR Squat and if you

Absolutely can do that do do trap bar deadly but certainly the the volume load is probably what is the main issue if it’s not technique it could be technique but assuming the technique is good then the volume load the number of sets hard sets for a very heavy pretty

Heavy weight H is what will you do you in hopefully that’s somewhat helpful all right guys thank you for tuning in a good variety of questions today that’s always fun because it’s more stimulating for me hopefully you enjoyed it and you guys have a good Christmas and we’ll see you next week