Today's podcast takes a deep dive into training. How should you be training? Can you activate specific parts of different muscles? Our thoughts on internal vs. external cues for hypertrophy and bodybuilding. Last, we discuss the role of science and how do we use data from research subjects and get them down to an "n" of one.
Find Kassem Hanson on IG: @N1.education, @N1.training, and coach_kassem
Websites: n1.education and n1.training
The Flex Diet Podcast is brought to you by the Flex Diet Certification. Go to flexdiet.com for 8 interventions on nutrition and recovery. Enroll now (Jan. 18, 2021) or join the waitlist, which puts you on the daily newsletter, and you’ll be the first to be notified when the certification opens again.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
exercise, people, hypertrophy, cue, tissue, training, motion, muscles, coach, studies, research, client, move, creating, patterns, intent, based, movement, terms, body
SPEAKERS
Michael Nelson, Kammen Hanson
Michael Nelson 00:00
Welcome back to the flex diet podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Got a great show today an interview with Tyson from n one education. We did a deep dive into training, how should you be training? Can you activate specific parts of different muscles? Everything from internal cues versus external cues, even for hypertrophy and bodybuilding? So our opinions on that will probably be quite different than what you expect around the role of science. And how do we use data? How do we take data from research subjects and means and averages, and get them down to as his educational name implies they're of his company, and and have one so that it is useful to you as an individual. So check out this interview, we had a lot of fun, I was super interesting to talk to him. And I appreciate him sharing all of this time with you. As always, this is brought to you by the flex diet certification, go to flex diet.com, you'll be able to get on the waitlist for the next time that it opens. You know, there, you'll be able to learn all about eight different interventions to maximize your nutrition and recovery. Everything from protein to fats, carbohydrates, to exercise to walking such as neat, even things like sunlight exposure in the morning to help regulate your circadian rhythms, which is in the sleep area. So go to flex diet.com, you'll be able to sign up to the waitlist, which will put you on the free daily newsletter. And as soon as it opens again, you will get access to that. And of course, my daily email will be there too. So check out this interview. If you're really down into the weeds on training, I think you will really enjoy it. Hey, what's going on? It's Dr. Michael Nelson and the flex diet podcast here with Kasam from n one education. So thank you so much for being on the program.
02:21
My pleasure, Mike.
02:23
So for people who may be living under a rock a little bit and are not familiar with you, what is kind of your, your goals of the education platform that you have there.
Kammen Hanson 02:35
So our brand and have one is just kind of a play off of the end of one principles. So I mean, we're basically trying to take individualization to the most extreme level that you possibly can from everything from a biomechanics to a physiology perspective. So all of our education and stuff is very wholesale, very theory based at the end, then shifts into a practical application of how do you take what we typically would learn in like a university setting in terms of physiology, biomechanics, then actually take that and apply it as an N one setting. Oh,
03:12
can you give us an example of what that would look like for someone listening in?
03:17
Yes. So for biomechanics, for example, we're looking at how to maybe say, take somebody's individual rib cage shape, and you know, you would set them up in a in a press machine and understanding like, well, wherever the seat happens to be set, like that angle, may hit a different division of the pack when they do the motion versus when somebody else comes in. So being able to actually look at an individual and see how would I adjust that person to hit the actual portion of the muscle that I want to in an exercise, that's an ambiguous you know, chest press, you know, machine, that's kind of one example. And then on the, the programming design side, we're kind of we use a system that we call trainability, which is basically, you know, we do an assessment to kind of look and see like, what stresses does it seem like a person would benefit from and what stresses are they probably overloaded from at that point in time? So at any given point in time, somebody may be, you know, really ready to do something that's very metabolically taxing, or or not, depending on kind of how their bodies already know currently handling those stresses.
04:21
And how do you evaluate some of those stresses? I assume you're looking just general programming principles of load? Or do you look at load per body part intensity? Or do you look at response by using like heart rate variability, or resting heart rate? or What does that kind of look like?
04:39
I mean, it's kind of a combination of everything. So usually, what we're trying to do through our assessment process is maybe eliminate for sure the things that probably aren't a good idea, and then we'll we'll have like a basket of things. It's like, okay, it seems like if we added more stress in these buckets, that this person With positively respond, so if somebody HRV is out of whack? Well, it's like, Okay, well, what does that take out of like the possible, you know, training, you know, issues. But we look at sleep digestion, a big part of it is actually just what have you been doing? And how long have you been doing it? Because, you know, we deal with a lot of people that have very physique oriented goals. And so their training is usually been very similar, you know, they've been going for a purchase, it's like, well, what we've been training for, for the last 12 months, like what what every block has been some form for per trophy. And often, it's like, well, I bet we can cut off like the majority of the hypertrophy style training things is the thing that would do you the best good right now. And so sometimes, that's actually the easiest approach versus going into all the assessment stuff. But we use everything, you know, from basically every metric that we can get that seems reliable in terms of bloodwork, and then everything we get from biofeedback, we try and kind of put that into, essentially, you know, our own mental algorithm and figure out, okay, where do I probably have the best opportunity of success of a positive adaptation? You know, in terms of which dress that I push on somebody? So should I put them in a Vince gironda? Eight by type method? Or should we do like, you know, heavy sets of six.
06:13
So you mean, there's more to the world of programming than the old school, alarm three by 10, is what you're saying. I remember, like the algorithm and date myself, but like, long time ago, the the poligon principles came out his first book, and I remember him talking about, I think it was in there that it was a 10 by three. And he had all these listings of, you know, Bill, Star five by five, and all these other loading, you know, parameter techniques. That was probably like, right, when the book first came out, mid 90s, maybe something like that. And I remember reading it going, Oh, my God, like, you can program stuff that's not three by 10, and three by 15. And my head like exploded, and now I'm just like, Well, of course, this makes perfect sense. But, you know, you only know what you know, at that point. So
07:05
yeah, actually, Charles was a huge inspiration for for what we do the Polycom, like, the original principles, I
07:11
think, are the most valuable principles.
07:14
Yeah. So I actually have like, you know, what you're talking about, I have the, the giant poster version of that. It's like two foot by three foot. And it's just like, it's got its it goes from everything from relative strength to, you know, to a robot capacities, you just got like a list of like, 20 programs under under each of these little faces.
07:33
Yeah, Polycom is one of those guys not to go off on a tangent, but you look back, and you're like, I did so many things that I think were really beneficial for the industry. I mean, to my opinion, he was like the first guy who charged a lot of money and had coaches who charged a lot of money and made it like an actual profession. Like, this is something you can dedicate your life to, and actually make a good living out of it. Not just, you know, part time working in the gym counting reps, and, you know, a lot of his training stuff, I think was super useful at the time. And then he had some other stuff like, by bio SIG, and stuff that you're just like, what, what happened? Like, what is that? So there's like, super, I don't know, in my brain is like super bipolar with one end to the next end of the spectrum.
08:18
Yeah, being being really deep in that world, you could see where there was the attempt to bridge the science and business and sometimes the science was sacrificed for the business or the simplicity model. Oh. And that's that. I mean, basically, if you ever had these conversations with Charles in private, you know, he would always be like, Well, you know, trainers are stupid. So you just need to, you just need to give them give them something that helps them make a decision. And the fact that they could make a decision automatically just moves them forward on the continuum, whether it was the right decision, at least they're making decisions. I don't know if I agree with that. But I can see the value in having something like that, especially for young trainers.
08:58
Yeah, and it's hard because as you know, like, Simple Stories. So right, if you're saying, Hey, 10 by three is the greatest thing for strength development, there's kind of some truth to that, right, you're probably gonna get stronger by doing that approach. Is it? The greatest thing ever? And should that be the hammer you're using to run around in the world? I'm not convinced of that. But it's, but that sells, right? Because then you can say, this is the thing you need to do. Oh, you're weak, you need to do 10 by three, Oh, cool. There's a solution. I just need to do this. Right. And people feel nice and secure and warm and fuzzy with that too. So
09:35
a net to stay on this topic, but for what we do from like the trainability standpoint, like a lot of the questions that kind of provoked me kind of going down the deeper rabbit holes of physiology and biochemistry actually came from being in that like, I did the bio SIG and I did functional medicine and you know, you had the protocols with the bag supplements that you would give your clients and stuff like that, you know, apologies To all of them. But there was a you know, there was always those scenarios where it's like, Man, this worked really well, I must be on to something and then the next person would come back. Well, crap, it didn't work. And so it was the like, why did this thing this intervention works so well for this person, like it did exactly what I thought and this other person. It didn't do anything, right, it was a complete waste of time, or money or whatever. And so that was like, okay, there's got to be more to this. It's not like, well, this supplement is magic, it's got to be like, no, for some reason, this happened to be a very good thing for this one particular person at that one point in time, how do I figure out who that person is, and when that time is, so that I can actually be so much more prescriptive with what I recommend?
10:46
Yeah, that was like the first blog post I ever wrote in fitness was like 2003, on blogger or something like that. And it was basically the, the black box model of fitness, right? It's like you have a black box, I put an input in here, and then this output comes out. And if I always put this input in here, and I always get the same output, I can kind of deduct that, okay, I put this thing in this thing comes up. And on some level, like knowing what works, and doing 10 by three, someone gets stronger. Cool, that's great. And then that's wonderful. Until like you said, it doesn't work. And now you're like, Oh, well, this thing worked for like 99 out of 100. Other people, it clearly didn't work for this person. But I think that also gives you permission, then to look at the what is in the black box, which is kind of more of the research and mechanisms and investigating stuff. Because I think a lot of times in fitness, there's things that probably work. But the reason that we give the why they weren't may not be correct. But at the end of the day, the action was still correct. So I think that's always where there's this discrepancy between research and you know, practical world experience, or however you want to want to word it. And I think they're both related, right, you know, at some level, knowing the mechanisms that should enable you to get a better input. And I think if you're a hardcore mechanistic research, you get rewarded for just figuring out more mechanisms of how they work, like you don't care that much about an input. But if you're a fitness professional, to some degree, you need to know what goes in and what comes out. And if that doesn't work, then you probably need to look inside the box and see what's going on as best as we can understand it, that you can give a better input to get that output because you're paid for the the output, even if your mechanisms are not necessarily correct.
12:38
Absolutely.
12:43
Like, I'm a huge fan of looking into the mechanisms for the why I'm trying to I'm sitting here pausing, because I'm trying to think of whose quote this is, because I would love to give it to them. But it's a, it was a coach, and it's the the job as a researcher, is to figure out why what I'm doing is working. You know, and so I think that's, you know, for people in the field, obviously, what we have to be getting the end result, whether we know why it works or why it doesn't. But I think our success, right that last like, you know, 10 to 20%, you know, improvement in success rate happens from knowing why, why what you're doing works, because then you waste less time doing something that works for you know, 80 to 90%. With that 10 or 20%
13:32
that it doesn't work for. Yeah, I like the line. I don't know who actually said it Originally, it was that research gives you the general direction, but research gives you the answer, right? Because everyone will argue all day about, oh, no one isn't scientifically valid. And that's 100% true, and I agree with it. But it's like if a client came in, and one they're not reading an exercise physiology textbooks to if there's 17 studies that showed them they should not get this result, but they got the result. They don't give a rat's ass about those 17 other studies? I do, because I'm interested in you do and people like us are interested in what is the mechanism? What actually happened with that. But I think it's also such a fine line of understanding the research and knowing what the limits of it are. How do we translate that into what we're actually doing with the person that's sitting in front of us, who in essence is paying us for the process and the upcoming results into
14:31
you? I think that's an interesting, kind of, you know, we'll say like two sided story that we have in the industry right now is that lot some people will be like, well, there's evidence base and then there's bro based or whatever. And, like, a lot of what we try and do is to be like, well, there's, there's, there's truth in everything, right? So anecdote. There's probably some truth there. observations are important, especially from an f1 perspective. And the research is also important in basically the way the The way that we try and get people to use things is like, Okay, what we currently have in research is population based, should hopefully get you to the point where that gives you a higher or a better first guess that what's going to work for most people, then understanding how to actually evaluate an individual, you know, from an assessment perspective, from an observation perspective, that narrows that down even further and can, you know, occasionally help you find an outlier, that somebody that's not going to fit, you know, in that population. And that's kind of our whole approach is, we try and teach as much of the science and the theory and everything that exists in the research, but then add on top of it. Here's kind of our observation as coaches and things that we've seen, and here's how we've been able to basically dissect that research into smaller pieces, to fit individuals. You know, like, the volume thing is a huge one, because you have so many studies that are population studies based off like, well, how much should you train? And that's one of the things there's such a massive, individual variance on the amount of bike, but you know, every time I do a q&a on Instagram, or something, somebody's gonna be like, well, how many? How many, you know, training sessions per week? Or how many sets per body part or whatever? And the answer is, course will always it depends. It doesn't matter that the research says this, or whatever Plus, the research is like, the window is like, basically, it's like, well, if you go into the gym, you know, it's pretty hard not to hit within the window of what the research says, it's like, well, it's okay. You know, it's anywhere between, you know, six and 40 sets, it's like, well, that's a big, that's a big area be really nice to know, you know, maybe at least by a factor of five or something, you know, where you should be within that six to 40. And I think that's where I think that's where, you know, there's so much more information from coaches in the field on how to take what we what we read in the research, and then actually say, okay, but what does this mean, in terms of how you should apply it on the floor?
17:04
Yeah. And I think that one is so hard to when you look at, especially I think hypertrophy is even more difficult than strength. Because it's super hard to measure, right? You're not jamming people in MRI, you're not taking muscle biopsies, look at fiber differences, you know, strength, you can be like, Oh, yeah, you would did five pounds more than lastic. Cool, I got stronger, right, you can measure it to very finite amounts. And then I remember talking to the doctor Eric Helms about this too, is that I think hypertrophy is just a side effect. Right? And this is probably his idea. So I don't want to steal his words. But the more I started thinking about that, I'm like, I think you're, you're right. Like it's, it's more of a byproduct of what we do, where strength has more of a specific thing to it, where I mean, just look at the variables of where you can get hypertrophy from assuming someone's in a caloric surplus or sleep is good if we just focus on training. Yeah, volumes probably going to drive it but like you said, how much volume you know, 30% of one RM may be enough for hypertrophy 85% of one around may be enough given other parameters. And yeah, I think just the volume question related to hypertrophy is not something I expect research to have any good answers with for a long time.
18:21
This is this is where I think what with what we're trying to do with biomechanics is going to be hopefully very valuable for the research community. Because what I would like to do is almost like create like a standardization for exercises and research because strength, it's so much easier to measure, not just because hypertrophy is very difficult, but also because hypertrophy is just specific to the activity. So if you have like, you know, 10 studies that do a squat, but they coach the squat differently in all 10 studies, they're still going to make improvements in the way they coached the squat. But that may it but then from a hypertrophy perspective, those might be one study might have been more hip dominant one was quad dominant one had wider feet, narrow feet, so there's different glutes or abductors. So for the amount of specificity you need in the exercise protocol to really evaluate these metrics for hypertrophy. There's so much more discipline that needs to be done on the standardization of the exercise than strength because, you know, whatever you happen to do that, could that be measured as strength? That doesn't work for hypertrophy? So not only is it more complicated to measure, I'd say it's also much more complicated to do study design for because what I do not see, at least in my experience in the research field is actually a lot of these studies being done with enough technical proficiency in the lifts to be tissue specific, you know, they might be like, okay, we standardized the amount of knee flexion or hip flexion squat, but it's like, okay, but did what about the stance width, you know, and what about the degree of forward translation of the knee versus the hipot different sites like how well did you actually standardize that squat amongst all of those individuals? So we're work from hypertrophy, I feel like all of the meta analysis data we have is like, well, I don't know that we're actually doing a meta analysis of the same thing. We're kind of just saying like, well, we're just looking at a collection of results, but they may not. But they're not results testing or looking at the same things, because the exercises are not standardized enough. So you add that on top of how difficult it is to measure. And that's where I'm like, man, we know, we have so little confidence in the actual data we have on our purchase.
20:35
Yeah. And would you agree that even when we try to standardize it as best we can, let's say we, we do this mythical study where we enroll all five foot eight people, they all high bar squat, we limit knee flexion, we try to put as many constraints on the system, right to reduce the amount of variables? Do you think that their intrinsic recruitment pattern may still be different? related to external fatigue? What day they come in, like other factors that are harder to control within a study, even on an individual basis? Like taking the same dude, like measuring them? Monday, and then Thursday? And then Saturday? is he using the same recruitment strategy each day? Or do you think there's other factors that may change that?
21:24
So this is actually kind of parallel some of the stuff that we've been looking at with our own lab work, which is, you know, how, how much control can we have over over what is recruited, and, you know, so when that takes into effect, like somebody's pre existing kind of like motor patterns based off of their other activities, there may be, you know, and this is the problem with the, you know, using trained lifters or experienced lifters is if you put them in an exercise, they intuitively have an idea of like, well, what's this exercise supposed to be doing. So they may add intent into that muscle that isn't necessarily required by the exercise setup. So you could, I could take somebody and I could put them in a poorly setup, you know, exercise for, you know, just for, we'll say, it's for the sternal division of the chest. And they come in knowing that this is a chest exercise, so they squeezed their chest inherently in that exercise. Whereas if I had somebody that had no, never trained before, and I put them in that, they're just going to push on the handles in the direction, they're just going to act on the force with no and no internal intent. Other than that, and so the outcome for them, actually gives me a better display of what the exercise is demanding. Whereas with a train lifter, they're bringing in not only what the exercise is demanding, but they're mixing that with what they think the outcome of the exercise is supposed to be. And what we found is that there's a certain degree of precision that needs to happen with your, your setup and the vector of force to basically make all of that other stuff a non factor, meaning that if you are able to isolate a tissue very well, which just simply isn't logistically possible everywhere in the body, then a lot of that other stuff becomes a wash, it just has such a low magnitude that regardless of whether the person is trained or untrained motor pattern, we get consistent results. But as we start to deviate from that precision, then there becomes a lot more variants. So I think it's possible for us to get basically reproducible results across a variety of trained untrained individuals with different intense on different days of the week with it a bad day, whatever, to a pretty high degree, but we have to be really close to perfect in terms of how that that those exercises are set up for that individual, right, because it's like, man, once we get like, after 10% off, the magnitude of all of those other things starts to really distort the data.
23:59
Yeah. And that's what I've always wondered to is, what are the effect sizes you're playing with? Right? If overload is progressive overload, just the main thing or like you said, there's different recruitment patterns, people are using internal versus external cues. And yeah, I always just wonder, like, how much does this system change day to day rather than seeing a little bit of this on Moxie and again, it's just no one for myself primarily right now due to testing but some days it looks like it saturate really well in other days, not as good but the Watson the rover, all the other stuff is is similar. So then I'm like on off ship, what am I really looking at now is, you know, is my body just going screw it? I'm gonna figure out a way to hold X amount of watts. And I may use a little bit different strategy depending upon the day and other factors and like, what do you said, Can we try to reduce that maybe by using different type of cueing and making sure your setup is Same and trying to get as close to reproducing that as we can.
25:06
Yeah. And then when it comes to Moxie, I think there's going to be a little bit more variance than you're going to have on, say, an EMG pattern. And what we use, we use what's called a coordination report, which basically takes the area under the curve on the EMG. So if like you'd you're doing a set we're looking at the concentric, the eccentric, any ISOs, or whatever that may be in there basically takes the area under the curve of all the tissues. And it creates a ratio of participation. And we use that to compare rather than looking at absolute magnitudes, or means because those things are subject to a lot more error and variance. So one thing with the Moxie is now you're also introducing all the cardiovascular factors. And that gets amplified based off of like, any small changes, so maybe, maybe you're using a little bit more compensation or whatever. And for one person, that might actually desaturate more, depending on the movement, and this is the thing that we're playing around with a lot with democracy. Because, I mean, traditionally, it's used on the quads, right? Like for aerobic studies, we're putting this on delts, glutes brachioradialis, like, all over the body
26:14
and put it wherever you want. You can the pros and cons of that. But
26:18
yeah, the validity of that is still is still in question. I mean, it's just, I mean, it's a it's a radius space sensor, right? So the specificity is limited. And the area we're actually having the most trouble with is the glutes. And I think I'm curious if something about the shape of the pelvis is actually affecting the refraction of the light compared to putting it say, like, you know, around a femur where, you know, it's the opposite shape, that that is destroying the data, or if it's just simply demand, that's just an area where between the amount of arteries and veins and you know, body fat, like all that stuff together is just making it a lot harder to show it a change in magnitude.
27:00
I think your tissue estimations that you use in the background to calculate it, my guess is they may be completely different for something like the glute, that's a different shape. Probably higher amounts of fat, the bone is farther away, it's just very different than even like the bicep compared to the quad. Right? The I don't know if that's just my thought. But
27:23
yeah, and I mean, we're also I mean, I don't know if you've seen some of the stuff and we're doing this on guys that are you know, 250, like near 300 pounds, like lean individuals, right? So, you know, I could throw this on a tricep that's as big as the most of the quads that, you know, yeah, I'm in the study. So when I throw it on one of their quads, man, it's like, you have to wonder it's like, Okay, how much different is this compared to that when we look at the research that we have on the aerobic studies, right? You know, cuz, like, you don't you don't see a lot of you don't see a lot of endurance runners with 30 inch quads. Yeah. And so it's like, man, we're looking at that set different. And I'm curious, especially, I mean, this gets into, you know, PDS and all sorts of stuff. It's like, you look at some of these guys that have that much tissue, right? Like the the change in their vascular tissue is also very different.
28:14
That's different. Yeah, yeah. And I just wonder if you're using PDS do the amount of and I don't want to use like the word extra tissue. But that's the only thing that's coming to my brain just gets into hold, you know, sarcoplasmic hypertrophy is a thing, is that not a thing, but you just think of all the external structural stuff that's not just actin and myosin that has to be in there to support the loads and the force and everything else, too. I just wonder if you're on that part of the curve where it gets to be more exponential, where the ratios just get more skewed than what we would normally see. Does that make any sense at all?
28:58
Yeah, I mean, it's, I mean, it's almost like it's a different organism when, just because of the amount of organelles and substrate that's needed to support that, right. Yeah, so I mean, we're in uncharted territories. But our hope is that, you know, maybe the the magnitude of the data is a little off. But if we can, if at least moves in the direction, the way that it should, that still gives us the ability to get what we want out of the data, which is to be able to know is this better or worse? Or how does it compare to this other thing? Because ultimately, that's our goal right now with what we're doing in the lab, is we're trying to acutely say like, Okay, can I actually come up with the best position best path of motion to train a given tissue and then can we figure out then what exercises match that best and be really targeted? And we've been like, we've been able to separate the heads of the bicep, significantly with the you know, with the Moxie. Same thing with the tricep We haven't run the labs yet, but I'm pretty sure we're even going to be able to separate like the individual rectus muscles. So if you if you needed to take it to that level of detail, you could obviously, you know, you got somebody coming in there looking at losing 20 pounds of body fat and feeling a little bit better getting, you know, their aerobic capacity up a little bit, we're probably not going to be like, well, we're going to try and left fourth rectus today, like that's probably not in the program. But from an orthopedic perspective, that may be very valuable to some people, right, in terms of, you know, stability, you know, improving respiratory patterns, etc.
30:34
Yeah, one of the craziest things I saw was I did the bodies section through Tom Meyers and Todd Garcia in southern Colorado now, but I've done it three times, and you get, you know, fresh tissue not involved. There's, I don't know how many, usually four to five, maybe six people, seven people per body, do all your own pro sections, whatever. Like the second time I did it, the the guys dissected a window into the quad. And they took acupuncture needles for markers. And they stuck them in different parts of the quad. I think they stuck one and kind of the IT band area, rectus and Morris and the muscles below that. And what they did is that cadavers laying on its back, and they bend the leg up, so like a 9090 position. And they held it there, and they just basically moved it across the knee. And what you saw was the rectus, femoris, one another needles at the lower quad. They moved about like I think it was like two to three inches apart from each other. So each one of the five or so it means not moving rectus and Morris moves a little bit and the ones underneath move all differentially different as one of those crazy things where you're like, Well, yeah, that makes sense, right? rectus femoris, crosses the hip, it crosses the knee, the other quad muscles only cross the knee, they're not crossing in the hip, it man's running, the whole length is not actually involved in the movement. But when you see how much they're sliding over and past each other, my brain was just like, what the hell. And then you're like, oh, because almost all my mental images are formed from static cadaver, you know, you know, formulas based type stuff that doesn't move, even though you know that it moves. But I think, at least for me, I forgot how much that subconscious images just got burned into me from anatomy and physiology one to one years ago. And to try to translate that into movement. And to see what is actually all moving, is something I'm still working on. Like we did this other one where we took a cadaver with all the skin off of it later, it's on its side, and just did the simple thing of moving the arm out to the side. And I remember looking in the elbow, or I'm sorry, in the armpit going Holy shit, like the pectoralis. And the lat are like identical, like the muscle structure where it comes up and where the insert is a little bit different. But looking from that angle, with all the skin off and multiple cadavers, you're like, Oh, my God, that's way more similar than I thought. So stuff. When you describe it to someone else, you're like, yeah, that's not really earth shattering. But when you actually see it in, in movement, you're like, wow, that just reframes a lot of your, your month, at least for me, like my mental models of what I have and stuff.
33:27
Yeah, I think visually is the only way to really appreciate anatomy and biomechanics. Yeah, you know, I don't think it's one of those things. And you can, you can look at the ratios of, you know, changes in angle across different tissues in architecture, and you can get an idea between the muscles length at its pronation angle, how much it's going to move versus another one, and you can get some pretty, you can get some pretty good insight to what's going to happen, but I think most people that that doesn't click until they see it visually, you know, and that's, I mean, so what we do is we do, we do like demonstrations using a skeletal model and actually will like put like elastic muscles on there and kind of like show these things. But we will also take a live human, you know, we'll either draw on their skin and we'll put them in white spandex and actually draw these tissues and take them through the motions and show how the length tension relationships change with their antagonists and stuff. And so they can really kind of see the 3d marking motions, and I think that's what most people's always like is, in applying anatomy knowledge to exercise is that they don't understand the how it would move in 3d. Using all of like, basically all of the structures in the body like so for instance, the pecs and the lats. They are very similar because they both basically use the rib cage, right? That's, that's how that's how they function. Right as they use the rib cage as a fulcrum, so if you look at them on a picture, most people will design exercises that are based off of that 2d picture. And there's a zero application of the rib cage that Yeah, which is why we you know, we the the wide grip pull down, you know, which is called been called the lat pulldown since the 16th, or whatever, right, basically, the first time that somebody made that bar. That is technically what we call Atlas pulldown, because it takes your arms away from the rib cage. Right. So that is it. That is an exercise that is designed on to day Plus, there's a lot of bodybuilding exercises, where I think the function is just whatever happens to look biggest while you're doing the exercise. Yeah, right.
35:42
Yes. Like literally, this.
35:43
This is a width exercise because I look wide when I do it. Like Okay,
35:47
no, that works. Yeah, no, that's, that's super fascinating, too. And I agree. Like the other part I left, especially the first time I did the dissection was, I just wonder from an athletic performance standpoint? Yes, I think bilateral exercises are helpful. But how much movement like you mentioned is three dimensional, it's torques. It's multiple things moving in multiple, different ways. And how much I know, I didn't appreciate that. And I'm not saying everyone needs to go out and do the craziest batshit looking thing ever, because that may not be the solution. But I think you know, you can make an argument, especially for training athletes, maybe not necessarily for hypertrophy, getting people out of some of the sagittal plane stuff is probably going to be a benefit. I don't know what your thoughts are on that. I know, it's a little bit of a side topic not necessarily related to hypertrophy, per se.
36:46
Yeah, in terms of in terms of how much we'll say, you know, how much of this rotational torque through like the fashional, planes and gait, play and gait patterns that we have, you'd be surprised at how many muscles you can take through a complete full range of motion, without having to manipulate any other area of the body, if you know that specific range of motion. And so from a hypertrophy perspective, you can get a lot done without needing to incorporate any other aspect of the body. But then yeah, we're working with athletics, it's about coordinating that stuff in a way that actually prevents you from getting to end range at any at any point, right. So if you look at people that study gait mechanics, they're looking at running. If you follow gait mechanics, basically, what you're doing is you're moving through the pattern at which you have the most redundancy, and you never take any tissue to an extreme range of motion. That's efficiency for the body from an energy conservation in relationship to force production, which is exactly what you want and performance. But it's not at all what you want in training for adaptation. So I think for athletes, they need both. For her personally, people, they may not need to do much, if any of you know a lot of, you know, integrated exercises that include like, you know, gait type mechanics, but they probably should do integrated stuff where at least they're loading across joints. So you shouldn't just do chest supported rows you should occasionally do on supported, you know, rows like that's where I think the hypertrophy athlete will benefit benefit from integrating across joints with load. First, the athlete needs to integrate across joints with motion.
38:25
And how do you balance that with? Because at some point, I think hypertrophy training diverges a little bit from human motion to some degree to try to, quote, isolate a muscle. But do you think there's a cost at being able to move efficiently as a human being and potentially not having a large amount of pain? Does that make sense? Like because we know that bodybuilders, for example, are probably not known for their best gait patterns and super efficient movement. That's not their goal, either. Their goal is to add as much lean body mass as possible. But do you ever get too far on that spectrum? Where at some point, if you're not moving as efficiently, do you run the risk of starting to develop injuries and pain at that point?
39:16
So I would say it's two different two different categories of things that we could discuss there. One is you know, we're talking a bodybuilder we talking about bodybuilding a trading or a bodybuilder because it's just unnatural to have like, the amount of muscle mass that you know, like a, you know, a Romney has about 100%
39:34
agree with 300
39:36
pounds of steak on your skeleton, there's certain there's a certain
39:39
physical limits. Yeah, no longer beach, right. Like,
39:42
I mean, the day old question is like, how do they wipe their butts? Right. And, but from a training perspective, I think it really actually comes down to the quality of training. So I think if you did what we would call body, building style programming in terms of sets and reps, stimuli etc. But you did that all with good biomechanical patterns, and you don't like just completely neglect certain parts of the body, I think you can maintain tremendously good function, doing that style of training, okay, you may not be a high performance athlete, but you probably can still run and jump and be agile and mobile, okay. But when we go away from, like, optimal mechanics, and then we just pigeonhole bodybuilding training into what is stereotypical bodybuilding exercises that may not be the best biomechanically, they're just exercises that maybe people can put a lot of load on, and they're just like, you know, like, for instance, barbell exercises, I've repeatedly made the comment that like, I would be perfectly fine having a gym that doesn't have a barbell. At this point, like if I had all of the machines and cables and dumbbells or whatever, like, I even do rdls with the trap bar at this point in time, because I find it better for the shoulder and the T spine and, and whatnot. So literally, there's nothing in my personal training that I do with a barbell at this point. But most people will still say like, well, you got to do the, like, that's your mass exercises, you know, the big, the big compound lifts. And I'm like, Well, if that's kind of what you're looking at, then yeah, I'd say you're gonna get dysfunction because you're not hitting, like even remotely close to full range of motion and a lot of tissues. And you're actually just leaving out a lot of things like your training is very unbalanced. And so if you're doing movements that cover more range of motion. So for instance, if I'm doing more chest movements with, you know, cables, where I'm getting actually full humeral reduction in the plains of the three different divisions of the pecs, I'm also going to be getting more Stratus. And here, I'm also going to be getting more pec minor, if I'm doing the same thing with my deltoids. and whatnot, I'm going to be getting more range of motion in the traps and whatnot. And I'm going to be exposing myself to greater range of motion, but also loading tissues, like loading a greater variety of those tissues that support scapular motion, etc. So the same thing down at the hip, lower body's a little bit challenging, because we can't do cable work with our feet. So you have to be a little bit more creative, in terms of lower body stuff, and that's probably where a lot more of the unilateral work does come into play as is for the lower body, because then you can actually, you know, move the hip in more directions. Um, but I think if you're training like that, then there's no reason that you can't train hypertrophy style programming, and maintain great mobility. That's essentially what we're doing right now, in the physique world. This is we're taking guys that would be in that stereotypical body world. And we're moving them over to this and with no, like direct corrective interventions and stuff, we're seeing that their function improves in addition to their like their physiques improving.
42:54
Cool. I'm guessing you're more of a fan of internal cues for hypertrophy and your thoughts on internal versus external cues if you if you look at the literature, right, so Gabriel wolf has published a ton of stuff on this for performance, external cues appear to be quite a bit superior, but I haven't seen too much literature in terms of hypertrophy, looking at internal cues.
43:21
So Mike, if you'd asked me this five years ago, I would have been like, Yeah, absolutely. Internal cues for hypertrophy, mind muscle connection. And I, I jumped hard into that, you know, like intent based cueing world, right? Like, I've,
43:38
that's the popular thing to do, right, bro, you got to feel the muscle, you got to feel the burn, you got to think that you're actually being sitting in the fibers itself. And
43:47
yeah, and I'm actually probably partly at fault for that, because at the time that this was coming becoming popular, you know, I was, you know, working at a gym where we had quite a bit of exposure in terms of like spreading that information. And what I can tell you is that I've taken one ad after actually seeing the outcome of that. So here's basically, the way we look at it now is that if we have a movement, and we have set you up appropriately, and the arc of motion, the line of force, everything is where it's supposed to be, is that your brain is going to recruit whatever is the most efficient, right to do that. So if I set you up perfectly for a long head of bicep curl, like you know, with your arm, you know, shoulder flexion abduction, that's like, okay, and it's, it's right there. And we put the Moxie on you and the sensors on you. It's all gonna be like, Man, that thing just works without any intent. You don't even need to know that you have to biceps for it to be biased towards that head of the bicep. When we start adding intent based hues At that point in time, nothing changes. But if we take an exercise, that would be a crappy exercise, and then we add intent, we get a marginal increase in that. But what we tend to get is essentially just more of a hypertonic contraction that is held the entire time. So here's a good example of one that we did. Have you ever seen the lying leg curl, or people will like kind of push themselves into greater hip extension?
45:32
Yeah, changing the hip position,
45:34
right. And so that's an exercise where, okay, we're kind of actually creating a dis, we're decreasing the stability of the pelvis on one side by pushing you up into that position, and then we're putting the length tension on the muscles in a less opportune position as well. So what we'll actually see is that instead of this nice wave of like, you know, contraction amplitude going up and down, like we want to see is what you almost look as the wave looks like a hum
46:04
throughout the contraction, meaning photonic contraction, more or less.
46:07
Yeah, cuz it's basic, basically, at that point in time, your muscles are having to do so much work stabilizing that position, right? That they never, they
46:17
know where to go, right.
46:18
But they never can create that much intensity. So this is why we have to have the overlapping data because if I were to just throw Moxie on there, it'd be like, Man, this is exercise D saturated so fast, right? It's amazing exercise. But then I look at the EMG. And I'm like, Listen, looks like dogshit. And then and then we look at force production. And like, it was dogshit, right? Because there's no way we're creating more mechanical tension. If we're producing less less force, right? I mean, sure, if we're able to isolate things, we can expect a drop off versus the movement that can use more tissues. But if we're still using pretty much an isolated exercise, that's only going to get better if we can manage to get more out of that tissue, it's we're not going to get less force production. So what the intent seems to do is it just seems to layer on a hypertonic contraction, because essentially, to get intent, you have to create a co contraction. So so if I, if so if I'm doing a bicep curl with nothing, and I just, you know, squeeze things, my tricep is the resistance, right. And so if I measure that, it looks very similar to if I'm doing a dumbbell curl, and I'm applying a lot of intent. But if I doing a dumbbell curl that is like setup absolutely perfectly. And I'm loading it appropriately, if I add intent, just like it the needle doesn't move any further than when the exercise is good. So what the intent based cueing what I think, what the only, the only benefit that I think that we would be getting from that is you're you're creating more metabolites, you're burning through more fuel. So you are going to see people be like, Oh, yes, is good, I get a good pump from it. But when we look at the mechanical tension side of the equation, I think you're you're handicapping your ability to be able to get the maximal stimulus from the mechanical tension, because your force production goes down, your actual ability to get volume goes down like you like you get less reps, you do less load, you can tolerate less sets. So to me, it seems like what we're doing is we're just creating a scenario where you're getting tired faster, with less actual tension stimulus. The other thing that I've seen using intent training is it seems to create poor motor patterns, because you're essentially teaching people to co contract more than they would need to to stabilize the joints. And that's one of the things that I've seen, not only when I was using this, but being in kind of a circle, where this is very, very popular, is we would go to gyms. To do to do our seminars, and there would be a high, say a certain influencer would have like a very, like, you know, high influence on on those people. And they would all have the same type of dysfunctions. Like,
48:59
of course, like they're all in the same room.
49:02
And it would be amazing how, like, you could ask people like, Okay, let's do a row and their ability to actually coordinate the scapular and humeral motion together was just like, absolutely non existent rule, you
49:15
can't move your shoulder blade,
49:17
yes, you know, or you can move your shoulder blade, but only when your humerus is not moving. So, it's like one or the other, they don't, they don't move together. And, you know, at that point in time, you just, you know, you give them the whole like, just grip it and rip it cue to see like, Okay, if you just pull on this handle, what do we got? And how far away Have you gotten from your body's natural way to just produce optimal force on something to like, well, now when I go do something, I wasted an exorbitant amount of energy and create way more stress on the joint than is needed to do simple task like the perfect video for this. I don't know if you've seen it is that that guy, he did a video in this kid's kitchen where he's doing like all these stereotypical, like, exercise cues to do everything right. He like, retracts his shoulder before he opens up the refrigerator. And like, you know, he goes to this postural thing to get a cup out of the cabinet and whatnot. And it's just kind of hilarious because it's like, yeah, we don't move, we don't move like that. That's not how you're meant to move. And I think a lot of that comes from not only the intense stuff, but also people understanding dynamic stability, thinking that the only way to only way to stabilize a joint is to quote unquote, lock it down, right? Like a scaffold is only stable when it's not moving. When in reality, it's like actually, the only time your shoulder joint is stable is when the scapula can move with the humerus. Dynamic Stability is like humans are meant to be stable under motion, otherwise we wouldn't live.
50:40
Yeah. Now, that's super cool. Because I, I've gotten shed for this for many years, and I don't train a lot of top, you know, IFBB pros, I try and some, you know, intermediate, some natural competitors here and there for physique. And most of my clients are looking for performance and lean body mass. But I've had this theory that the people who respond well to internal cues, maybe there's some weird hyper responders to metabolic stress. And because their mechanics are not the greatest, they can use that cue and still see some beneficial effects from it. But what I've seen is similar to what you've reported, is that, again, my bias is, I will use an external cue because I want your brain to figure out what is the most efficient path to accomplish it because I think mechanical stress performance is the main driver of even hypertrophy as a side effect. And then if I don't like what I see, I'm going to look and try to change you than the mechanics, which you can make a very good argument for machines at that point, especially online training machine is going to reduce the amount of variability you have, your options of movement are going to be less, you're probably going to move quote unquote, better. Or I'll just, you know, give them maybe a different cue, maybe change the position. And then within the last four years, what I've done is I'm like screw this. So if they come here, I just throw them on a table, and just do very mid range manual muscle testing, Hey, does your glute max do what a glute max to do? Hey, does your so as to what we think of slash to do? And again, this is very limited, it's very, you know, I don't have a biodex I'm not measuring this shit. But can I do then an intervention? So at least on the table, okay, stuff works the way that it should? Cool. Now, can we go back in the gym? And do I see a change? Do I see a transfer now under load with that, oh, cool, and your hamstrings on the table tested better, your glute max does to better your solos is better. Hey, when you look at your deadlift, I give you the exact same cue again, your shin angle went from this to this and you've shifted back automatically, your rep speed went up and your RP went down. Cool. That means that what we did probably transferred to the actual lift, and you're probably going to see more hypertrophy from that. But I'm still using the bias of an external cue almost performance based model.
53:08
Yeah, I would agree, you know, with your application there. And I think, you know, there's certain areas where you have more degree of freedom, where internal cueing is less detrimental, because obviously, just, you know, you're just moving the dumbbell or the barbell or whatever, differently. So it's not necessarily creating a bad motor pattern. I think the worst is when is the internal cueing in constraint exercises, like machines? Or, I would say, like, you know, like the benchpress, like, some of the things where people are trying to, you know, spread the bar or squeeze the bar, rotate the bar with like, those are the ones where I think like, okay, we have to be careful with those, because we have in the bar itself in the way that we're trying to imply that internal cue is constrained, and is that actually a good or a bad thing, but on a deadlift, you know, giving somebody a cue that changes their center of mass, abs, I mean, because you don't have constraints, that's fine. We're just you're essentially just creating a slightly different exercise for them out of that, right. And I think another thing that can't be understated, if you're a trainer or coach watching this is, you know, you want to make your job as simple as possible, and then you, but you also want to make the, the client as confident as possible, and, you know, teaching intent based cueing, you know, in like, 2015 ish, like very heavy intent based cueing at large seminars and camps, you know, where we got people coming in trying to apply this stuff, you know, like groups of 20 or 30 people and I would have all of my assistant coaches with me going around trying to get all these people to understand that if you compare the amount of effort that it took on coaching, and the confidence that people that left with then versus what we do now, which is where basically we just go around and we just say hey, okay, you need to you need to move your torso here, you need to move your foot here and just show them how how to find how that setup is found. Whether it be an anatomical thing or positional thing, whatever it may be. And then when they just pull on the load, it just works, right? And then all of a sudden, it's like, okay, they don't have to feel incompetent of like, well, you're not, you're not doing this thing, you're not using your lats or whatever, it's like no, like,
55:14
you, you're
55:15
you are fine, we just needed to slightly position you in the exercise better, your body works fine, and it gets better every single rep when the Q, the Q is the resistance, right? Like that. That is that is the neurological cue, when the cue is a list of things that you have to memorize to do that aren't intuitive, to the resistance that makes it harder for a client to, you know, actually get proficient at the exercise. But it also seems to be, you know, a lot more not just mentally exhausting, but like people come out with like, man, I really suck at engaging my lats or whatever it may be. And it's like, maybe you don't suck at engaging your lats, maybe you were actually using you know, your rear delts because they happen to be a better solution for that exercise. But if we change the exercise, your lats work just fine when they're supposed to be the ones doing the work.
56:05
Yeah, yeah, no, I, I agree 100%. And I think one of the limiters is that everything that most coaches will hear is still internal based, bro, you got to feel your lab, you got to do this. And so they have, like you said, this checklist of stuff. They're trying to get clients to do and that's like everything that they're used to. And then you present like an external cue, it's harder to least it was for me to change my mindset into what is an external cue, right. So a big one I use all the time I got from Dr. COVID, z health is just okay, I want you to link that up against my hands, I put my hand on the top, okay, just lengthen up, okay, just hold that position. If I want more, quote, unquote, core stability, or whatever, or push your big toe down, when you stand up, whatever it is, that I, it's a completely different shift. But most the time I find that performance is better. But I find that coaches, they feel weird. Like, they feel like they're not doing their job, because they, they've sort of bought into this, myself included, that you have to be talking to your client all the time, if I'm not giving them a bunch of cues, I'm not doing my job. But when I went out and watched like very high level clients working with, you know, professionals in the NFL, more movement performance based. I was like, shocked. I'm like, dude, you didn't say hardly anything, the whole hour I watched you You gave like you walked around said like one cue here, one cue there. And they spoke like very minimal, but the results they got were like, really good. So I think there's some of this sort of internal dialogue that I know I had in the past to have. If I'm not saying a lot, it's like, they're not gonna think that I'm giving them enough value per se.
57:50
Yeah. And I think this is one of the things that, you know, I always say is that, if I have a silent session, that means it was it was an absolute, like it was an absolute best session. Yeah, totally. And then, when you're, you're the evolution that you should have with the client, is that your instruction should be exchanged for encouragement over time. Because obviously, when somebody's just learning an exercise, you don't need to tell them like, hey, push harder, more, right? They're just learning the exercise. But when they got it, then then you're trying to get like, you're trying to squeeze everybody juice out of it that you can. And I think that's the, if you're not making those progressions, then I don't think I think that's a way of saying, Man, but the way I'm coaching or teaching this isn't good, because I got to repeat the same cues over and over and over again, right? If this is actually working, if this person's nervous system is adapting, and they're mentally becoming more competent, then I should have to do less of this. And I should be able to focus more on making sure that we actually get the effort that we want to, right. And I don't think any client comes in, wanting to be like, man, I really hope that this person like you know, gives me all the cues and teaches me this like, in depth anatomy about this exercise. I don't know they want the outcome and they want the experience. And if you're a trainer that like thinks that your client needs all those cues, hire another trainer that coaches like that to coach you. And I guarantee you, you're gonna want to punch them in the face, like five minutes into the session, because we just shut up and let me just do the thing.
59:21
I don't know. That's, that's
59:21
my personal experience.
59:23
No, I agree. I mean, I've been, I look back on some of the early people I coached I'm like, dude, I want to write them like this big apology letter. I'm like, I'm so sorry. I vomited all these cues over you, like I would, because I thought that, oh, I must know more than what your body knows. Now. I'm like, that's like so wrong. Right? Your brain is going to figure out the most efficient path to accomplish it. Can we change it? Can we influence it? Absolutely. But I want to stay out of that process. I don't want to screw up that process by saying, bro, use your lats more like really the lads the only the only muscle that's working During that, so Yeah, I agree. Cool.
1:00:04
I was on time,
1:00:06
I gotta head out. But thank you so much for all your time, I really appreciate it. We'll have to get you back on again. And, of course, it's always my own bias. And you know, always like people who agree with your own little crazy thoughts, too. But that's all of us. But where can people find more information about you? And do you have any live seminars coming up? Or is it primarily online, or what's the best way for people to get more information?
1:00:32
So we're most prominent on on Instagram, it's just an one education, if you're a coach out there, we also have one called in one dot training, which is basically will say our are more white belt level level content, a lot of very, you know, excellent check, like do this not this exercise tips and stuff like that. Or you can follow me at coach underscore Kasam. I rant a lot. So you'll get some of that. But our websites are the same thing. And one that education and one training, basically, for the first quarter of 2021, we're focusing exclusively on online stuff, and kind of hoping that the world gets to a same place where we can then book some live events. So my goal is, is that we hopefully are in a position to do a decent amount of live events, my imagination says that it's probably going to be mostly domestic, you know, places like Florida and Texas are pretty much the only places that we can go right now without having to worry about things getting canceled. But that is my preferred way to teach. But we're going to do an experiment of really trying to do a deep dive, we've got a bunch of like, fancy little Mike here, whatever, a bunch of stuff that we're doing to try and improve our ability to visualize this stuff online. With the biomechanics, mentorship that we are gonna have first quarter 20. So I think, probably going to, I don't know when this recording will go out, but probably mid January, we will release the details for that.
1:01:57
Cool, awesome. And if they want information on that, go to the website, then is that the best place?
1:02:03
Yes. I mean, well, obviously, if you're following us on social, we'll put it there, I can go on the website, it will be listed there, you can sign up for our email list. And then you'll get announcements about any events and stuff that we do have.
1:02:14
Cool, awesome. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And thank you for all your time and effort and actually buying very expensive equipment and trying to get it to all coordinate and talk nice to each other, which is a very in depth process in and of itself. So I really appreciate all the work. And thank you for sharing everything here today to
1:02:34
my pleasure, Mike, hope to be excellent.
1:02:36
Awesome, thank you so much. Thank you so much to cast them for n one, education and training for all the great information, really appreciate his time, make sure to go out and check out his education and his certifications, everything that he offers, I don't make any money off of it if you sign up to learn more from him or not. So I don't have any disclosures on that. But he's one of the people I do follow in the training space and super excited for all the great stuff that he's been putting together. As we mentioned in this interview, getting all of that equipment to cooperate and work well in real time is not an easy feat. So make sure to check out all this information there. Of course, this is brought to you by the flex diet certification, you can go to flex diet calm, FL exdiet.com, where you'll be able to get on to the daily newsletter and the waitlist for the next time that it opens. It's a complete system of eight different interventions for you to maximize your nutrition for better body composition and performance for both yourself. And especially if you're a trainer or a coach, how to do nutrition work with clients in a complete system with all the references and even tons of expert interviews, they're to go to flex diet.com flxdt.com. Thank you so much. If you have just a couple seconds and you can leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform, I would really really appreciate it that allows us to get different guests and allows us to bump up in the rankings so we get more people to listen which is always great. So take a few seconds, leave us a review or even just whatever stars you feel is appropriate. Thank you so much. Greatly appreciate it. We will talk to you all next week.