Speaker 1: What's going on fellas? I just messed up and I deleted this video. I actually had a good take just now. Had it saved, somehow click delete. So as frustrating as it is, we're going to try again. I don't know, maybe we'll clean it up this time, but I'm not letting myself go to bed tonight without making a video. We're going back to the daily videos. I know some of you have expressed concern and saying, Oh, well, you should make videos less often. That way they're higher quality. And that just doesn't end up being how it works. I find that like anything else, it's a skill. If you do it more often, you get better at it. And many of my best videos were when I was in the habit of making videos roughly daily. So we're just going to get back into that. And as I get more practice, the video quality will hopefully come back up. But we're going to get into another installment in the training concept series today. Basically, with the training concepts, what I want to do is sometimes I'll give you like a unique look that you maybe like never heard before. But a lot of the information itself isn't novel. It's not advanced stuff. There's a good chance that if you have found my small channel, you've heard this before. But I don't think that just because you've heard something before, it doesn't hold value. I find that lots of intermediates, when they're kind of in that I know everything phase, I know every difference between me and an advanced guy is just genetic. And the fact that he's been doing it longer in steroids. And it's like they don't quite realize how much there still is to learn. And they're very confident because they're still in a phase where if you're passionate and you're trying hard, progress is inevitable. I find with people like that a lot of the time, the thought process is just because they've heard a piece of information before and they could recite it back. They're like, OK, well, this isn't new. This isn't for me. I'm advanced. This video is clearly for beginners. It's not for me. And there's definitely a disconnect there. I see a lot of the time when I go to the gym, I'll talk to someone kind of in this intermediate territory. And they'll be able to recite back to me a talking point. They'll kind of brush off what I say is like, oh, you think I'm a beginner? I'm not a beginner. I already know that, but I can watch their training or I can scroll through their training log and they are completely failing to apply it. So while they know it, they don't truly understand it. And that's kind of where I like this training series to just give you different lenses. Maybe you can take a look at your training and you can say, OK, oh, cool. Through this different lens that I hadn't thought of before, this is why this is working or one of the reasons why it's working. Or you could view it through this lens and say, oh, I've identified a potential deficiency in my program. Let me fix that up real quick. So that's kind of what I hope to do with these. Even Max kind of says he doesn't watch a lot of my videos because he feels like they're for intermediates. And I don't necessarily think that's the best thought process. I like to try to sprinkle in as much little like nuanced training takes into the more broad training takes that to hopefully keep the interest of those of you that are more advanced that are watching. Because the respect of my peers is something that means a lot to me. And I would also like to make videos that you guys think is interesting. So today, what we want to talk about, just a little training concept I thought would be worth mentioning, which is identifying exercises in your program as performance metrics versus developmental tools. Let's just kind of define these really roughly, really quick. A performance metric is something where like it's either our competitive motion or it's something where like we really care about the numerical outcome. We care about the numbers, whether that be because it is sport specific or whether that be because your own personal definitions of your goals and training are related to numbers on a specific lift. Example being maybe the bench press. You care about your 1RM, your 3RM, your 5RM. You want to move a lot of weight there. On the other hand, we have something that we could coin a developmental tool where realistically, we don't really care about the numbers. We are looking for the effect of the exercise, not the numbers. Right. So while something like a bench press, we care about what our 5, 10 RM is. We probably don't necessarily care how much weight we're lateral raising on our squat. We care about the numbers. We don't necessarily need to be the strongest guy on leg extensions. And that's kind of like the key identifier is just looking as to whether the numbers matter. And I was at a phase in training as probably many of you are where I thought it was the shit to just try to be moving as much weight as possible on every exercise. If I'm the guy who's moving a huge weight on laterals and the rear delts, I'm going to be just absolutely massive. But the technique that you're going to use to move the most weight on the laterals is probably going to take away from the actual intention of doing the exercise. Presumably you're doing lateral raises to grow your side delts. And the technique to move the most weight from A to B on a lateral raise is probably not the same technique that you're going to use to maximize how much you're taxing those delts. So asking like what's the intention of the exercise? Do I care about the numbers? Should I care about the numbers? There's a bunch of people at our gym in town that leg extension more than Max. And me and Max always chuckle that there's some guy who like scoffs at Max doing his three plates and throws another plate or two on there. And we're always looking at each other. It's like, of course, Max could move it to point A to point B. But it's almost a show of how advanced he is that he can get really good work out of less weight. And so that's kind of the practical takeaways. Once we can kind of coin something as either a performance metric or a developmental tool. And actually, before I get into that, there are a lot of things that are going to be performance metrics that also function as developmental tools. Just want to get that out of the way. Right. If we are doing a high bar squat and that's our primary squat, there's a good chance we care about the numbers. But it's also a great developmental tool. We care about the muscular effects that exercise is going to have. So it's kind of a two for one. Sometimes you can get into such specialized techniques for specific goals that actually loses value as a developmental tool. The kind of marquee example being a wide grip high arch bench press is a great way to display strength within the constraints of the power lifting rules. But it actually loses its potency as a developmental tool. And maybe further away earlier in a training cycle, we might need to allocate more of our volume to close grips, to inclines, overhead presses, to close grip feed up benches, which are going to be better developmental tools. So sometimes something is going to be a hyper specific developmental tool that we need to practice. Sometimes it's actually going to kind of serve a double purpose. Right. If that person is doing those high bar squats or the benching with a smaller arch and a closer grip, our early training cycle might just look like doing a lot of volume on that main lift if it is also a good developmental tool. But once we've kind of identified these things, the big impact this is going to have is going to come into our mentality when approaching our technique and our execution. If it is a performance metric, we are going to look at trying to get our form as efficient as possible to achieve the goal. Whether that's putting something over your head, moving up something from A to B, we're looking to find the technique that allows us to maximize the result. Sometimes there might be a little discrepancy. If you're training for a bench 1RM, the technique that lets you bench the most for a single might not be the same as the technique that lets you hit the biggest 10RM. And so if you say your goal is the bench 1RM, don't select the technique that's going to lead to an inflated 10RM. Instead, use the one that's specific to the actual performance metric we care most about. A common example of this is some people find that they're actually pretty strong with like a medium grip bench. But when they go wider, their 8RM, their 10RM, maybe even their 5RM is higher. But it's probably better to do the 8s, the 10s, and the 5s all with that grip that's conducive to doing the singles. And that's going to lead to a better result at the end. All that aside, that's kind of the lens we're looking through is efficiency. Whereas if something is a developmental tool, whether we're trying to have it carry over to a performance metric, or whether we're trying to have it tax a certain musculature as much as possible, or a certain motor pattern as much as possible, we're almost going to look for inefficiency. We're looking to, like, let's say it's a hypertrophy-focused motion. We're trying to make that lateral raise as hard on the deltoid as possible using the least weight we can. So being able to get really quality work and destroy your delts with a lighter dumbbell than guy B, that's our sign of being really good at this movement. Or if we are doing it as something that's meant to carry over, it's not about doing, let's say, the high bar squat in the way that is going to let you high bar squat the most weight. Maybe that involves rounding your upper back a little bit as you stand up. That's not the purpose of the exercise. The purpose is to carry over to your low bar. So we're going to execute them not in the way to hit the highest 1RM high bar possible, but in the way that's going to carry over the most and the way that's going to develop the parts of our low bar that we want to develop the most. So kind of whether it's trying to tax something as much as possible or whether it's carry over, the goal isn't efficiency A to B anymore. The goal is either that carry over or to make it as taxing on the target musculature as we can. A perfect example of this is something like a glute ham raise. I don't give a damn how much I'm doing on glute ham raises as far as added resistance or reps. Oftentimes, if someone reports back to me that they did a set of 20 on glute ham raises, I think that's just a sign that they need to get better at doing the glute ham raises in such a way that they're taxing. If I fail a set, like physically fail a set of glute ham raises at, let's say, 6, 7, 8 reps partway into a workout instead of 15, if anything to me, that means I'm getting more advanced at the exercise because I'm learning to make them even more demanding on my hamstrings, which is presumably the reason we're doing it. We're training that knee flexion motion. We're getting better at taxing it. So I would say that in that case, doing almost less and getting still hard work is going to be important. That being said, a lot of people, when they take the whole get more out of less weight thing too far and they think about it too much, they end up just training like a bitch, to be perfectly frank, and they're just going and grabbing a 20-pound dumbbell for their curls and really squeezing it. You still need to train hard. The idea is that we're making something that is less weight or less reps harder. So we're getting that hard work out of less reps on the glute ham raise, but we're still working really hard. First and foremost, training is about creating difficulty. There's lots of ways to create difficulty, whether we're doing lots of sets, lots of reps, limited rest. We're doing something really often. There's a whole lot of ways we can create difficulty, and if we create difficulty, we'll probably have an adaptive response, and then we can have all this nuanced conversation about at different times we should probably create that difficulty different ways. But the bottom line is there needs to be difficulty there if we're expecting anything to happen. So we still need this training to be hard as hell, but how we're achieving that difficulty might look a little different. That being said, you do need to use some weight that's relevant. Don't take this too far and be the guy that's Kai Greening a 15-pound dumbbell saying he's got a great mind-muscle connection. We're probably robbing ourselves of the benefits of the exercise at that point. But if you could get great work out of a 30-pound dumbbell or a 40-pound dumbbell going all out, but the form is cleaner with the 30, I would probably go with the 30 because we don't really care how much we're doing on that at the end of the day. That would be the lens. Just take a look at your program and say, okay, I really care about the effect this exercise is having or I really care about my performance on this exercise, and that's going to determine kind of the focus going into the exercise. I don't necessarily care if I hit the most impressive set of hamstring curls. I care that I walk out of there with my hamstrings absolutely pumped up, cripplingly locked up and ready to grow when I go home and eat and sleep. So that would be my video for the day. We're going with the every day. If I don't make a video, you got to wait until later in the day for me to make it because usually I try to get through most of my work first. But if I get it's midnight and I haven't posted a video yet, start harassing me. Get on me about it. Bully me. I'm signing up for this. Keep me accountable.