#112 - Brett Jones - What Is Strength?

If I were to give one piece of advice, well, we'll make it two. Number one is patience. True power means you're patient enough to allow that power to come to fruition. So it means at the top of my swing, and if it is the games and you are doing the overhead swing, fine, you've got to do what's required for the competition.

You have to wait for those arms to reconnect to your ribs before you hinge. Then you have to allow yourself the time to hinge before you hit the quick turnaround, and now you've got to be patient keeping the arms against the body as long as you can. So you have this full transfer of energy from the hips and midsection to the arms and the belt. And so what I see a lot of people do is they rush that.

They hinge too early on the way down. They're trying to come up too quick on the way up, and they're letting the arms disconnect before they fully express the power from their hips. So if they would display patience at those three stages, wait long enough for the arms to reconnect on the way down, give yourself time to hinge, and then keep the arms against the ribs as long as possible as you're producing power through the ground, you're going to find a much more powerful swing and better transfer of energy. I'm joined by Brett Johns, Director of Education at Strong First.

Brett, welcome to the show. Excellent. It's great to be with you today and really looking forward to speaking with you and your audience. Yeah, me too.

We haven't touched on strength that much yet. Not in its purity. We've circled around it a little bit, but we're talking all things strong today, right? Absolutely.

Strength has been something I pursued for most of my adult life in various forms, and I look forward to the conversation on it. Yeah, it's going to be good. We'll have some CrossFitters, some PowerLifters tuning in amongst the people that just want to be able to lift the chopping a little bit heavier, I guess, as well. So that might benefit as well.

Absolutely. Talking about strength, how do you, as someone who spends his entire time thinking about strength, how do you define strength? So strength can be, so if we first go with this idea of physical strength, that can be your ability to produce tension, your ability to produce force against an outside object, or to manipulate your own body against a given leverage or position. So it's the ability to produce tension, to produce force against an object, and manipulate an object or your own body, like I said.

So that's kind of the 30,000-foot view. If you get into the mechanics of it, there's obviously a lot more going on. When you go beyond physical strength, and that's within Strong First, we actually have like a code of conduct. We're students of strength.

We're quiet professionals, and we believe the strength has a greater purpose. And the mission of Strong First is to pursue, promote, and practice strength because we believe strength has a greater purpose. And that greater purpose obviously transcends physical strength into many other areas. My grandmother is one of the strongest people that I know of on the planet, and she's never lifted a weight in her life.

And so we're not just referring to this concept of physical strength. We do believe that building physical strength can provide a window into greater strength in one's life in many areas, not just the physical. I understand. So, yeah, you touched on one of the two taglines, I suppose, or one of the two major elements of Strong First has, which is strength has a greater purpose, and strength is the master quality.

Is that right? Yes, so if you look at – Mephiev said that strength is the foundation of physical development for all qualities of physical development. So I remember being in a talk with Eric Cressy years ago, and Eric gave a great analogy. People have tried to give me credit for it, so every time I get an opportunity, I give him credit for it because it's where I heard it.

But basically he said strength is the glass. Every other quality you want to develop goes in that glass. And so the bigger your glass, the more of those other qualities you can develop. And so strength maintains a focus and a foundation for people's training.

And it's interesting right now as physical training has become more – I'm going to go old school here for just a second. So if you look at some of the ancient training systems, and I'm drawing back to the Greeks and the German Turnverein system and some of the other old training systems, which primarily came from training military and warriors and things of that nature, they really had three main components to them. There was a martial component, which was your ability to respond appropriately to aggression, and you could easily look at that from a martial arts or military perspective, and that makes very good sense. There was a restorative component because learning the martial tended to knock you out of center, and so you needed techniques for health and recovery and regeneration to be able to go do the other stuff again.

And then you had a pedagogical body of knowledge that supported the other two. Fitness has become our martial art. Fitness has become the thing, so our pillars of training have switched to where now our training, our fitness has become this thing that we do for itself, whereas we used to get fit to go do other things. The restorative component in the ancient systems was meant to just allow you to go practice the martial stuff more.

I'm a very exciting guy. I enjoy hiking. So my training at this point supports my hiking in addition to my own training and training of my students and the teaching that I do at search and things of that nature. So since fitness has become this martial art, this thing in and of itself, that's changed some of our relationships with some of these modalities, strength training being one of them.

Within a competitive environment, within an environment where people are using fitness as this display of what they've accomplished, then you start using the tools of barbells and body weights and things like that for either higher repetitions or for conditioning or for these other aspects of physical development, and strength training can get lost a little bit. That's interesting that fitness is now for fitness' sake rather than in service of another purpose. That's an interesting way to frame it. Going back to one of the things you said at the beginning about strength being the cup and everything else filling it, would you be able to explain how you would see something most people probably wouldn't link with strength, like endurance, capacity, perhaps?

How do those two link together? So one of the easiest examples that I could give is if it takes you, at this point, 1,000 motor units to accomplish some movement, and that could be whatever you want it to be, and we're just talking in very broad strokes and generalities, right? Let's take the deadlift. Everyone knows the deadlift.

Let's talk about that. So let's say for the deadlift you have to recruit, at this point, 1,000 motor units to accomplish that movement. If I increase your strength, your neural efficiency, your recruitment, your structural ability, your ability to produce tension, and that efficiency, because we do look at strength as a skill. Very few people look at somebody shooting free throws and go, wow, he's a really good free throw shooter, but he just has good technique.

They just say he's a good free throw shooter. Within strength training, there can be the excuse, well, he's not that strong. He or she isn't that strong. They just have good technique.

But strength is a skill, and we'll talk about it more later. But there's people that spend the lives, 20, 30, 40-year careers, trying to get better at one or two or three exercises. So it is a lifelong pursuit. So let's say due to our training and everything, I take that 1,000 motor unit requirement and I drop it to 500.

How would you do that? Via good strength training. So you become, well, yes, because if neural efficiency increases, if my ability to recruit, and we're going to sound like I'm going to sound manic here for just a second, but let's take a little side journey. We refer to being a strength professional.

And when you look at, let's use the bench press as an example. When you look at a strength professional on the bench press, and they've actually done this with some EMGs and looking at this efficient transfer between muscle groups during something like the bench press. When a strength professional gets wedged in and they begin their bench press, there's this really smooth transition from lats to pecs to shoulders to triceps. And it's like being in a Formula 1 race car, right?

Boom, boom, boom, boom. You don't even feel the gears change. You just go faster. Compare that to somebody who's learning how to drive a stick, right?

You're going to get whiplash and damage your neck because they're shifting gears, and it's really herky-jerky. And you see that in somebody who's a novice at the bench press. They'll bring it down. If they don't bounce it, then they'll bring it down.

And then there's this big push, and there's nothing coming behind it. So it fails and comes back down, or it fails, and then the second muscle group kicks in, or however you want to phrase it. And so the strength professional has learned how to have these really smooth transitions throughout a range of motion, displaying, producing force against an object or whatever. So, yeah, that efficiency leads to the ability to have greater tension, greater efficiency throughout the movement.

So I am kind of staying away from some of the mechanical properties at the moment and referring more to the neurological. So through good strength training, I make you more efficient. And now I get to the point that as a result of increased better recruitment, better efficiency, potentially better quality of the tissue, now that 1,000-motor-unit effort is a 500-motor-unit effort, how many more times are you going to be able to produce that 500-motor-unit effort? Because now you have 500-motor-units in reserve.

So as those initial 500 fatigue, you just start tapping into the 500 we now have in reserve, and your endurance has increased by means of increasing your strength. So the work capacity has gone up because it's less effortful to achieve the same movement. Yes. Okay, that's interesting.

So we kind of circled around it for a little bit. How do you contextualize strength, or what are the components of strength? Wow, that's a broad topic. Fair point.

Fair point to you. Because if we're sticking with the physical, then there is – so let's break that into the neurological, which is the patterning, the efficiency between muscle groups, and really having a really high level of skill in that movement. And when you dive down and you really dig into something like a deadlift or a bench press or a squat or a clean and jerk or whatever you want to dig into, a one-arm push-up, whatever the case may be, that neurological aspect, your ability to bring your intra-abdominal tension, your high-tension techniques, your efficiency transitioning through the muscle groups, that neurological aspect is really key. And that means one of our key programming principles is we keep a continuity of the training process.

So if I'm going to look towards building strength, I'm going to be doing the same exercises for a good period of time to allow time for this learning and efficiency and gaining of skill. If I'm switching exercises every four weeks, I doubt there's been a successful Olympic lifter that has changed exercises every four weeks. They may be modifying their routine within the context of trying to optimize the clean and jerk and the snatch, but they're going to work on the clean and jerk and the snatch and then highlight areas that need attention. So this continuity of the training process is going to stick with it.

So from a neurological standpoint, we're really focused on this concept of strength as a skill and practicing and pursuing our strength over time via the continuity. From a more structural standpoint, now we're talking about the tissue quality, and there's all of these things that happen within a muscle that produce movement. You can go down to the muscle fibers and look at the crossbridges and actinomycin and myokinesin, and you've got the calcium going out. You have this really complicated physiological thing, and, of course, the energy to do that via the ATP and the mitochondria and all of these things.

So there's these two – I prefer to treat the physiological aspect as kind of a black box where we do things and we get a response, and I don't necessarily need to understand all of the details that's happening in the black box. And actually, from a computer standpoint, there's a lot of artificial intelligence algorithms and things like that that are basically treated like a black box. They actually don't understand what's happening inside the AI box, but we get results. So the input's controlled, the output is what you want, and the process in the middle doesn't really matter so much, I don't suppose, as long as the output is what you wanted.

Yes. I like it. So we get kind of bogged down into the physiology because it's fascinating. I mean, you talk about – one of the things that we work on is this balance of tension and relaxation.

And so it sounds weird for a guy that's all about strength to be talking about relaxation, but if you're not able to relax, you can never fully bring your strength to bear. And from an athletic standpoint, if I'm walking around half-tight all the time, I'm neither efficient or fast or powerful. So I have to be able to relax. Well, relaxation actually takes more energy in the muscle than contraction.

Is that true? Because now you have to – yeah, you have to pump out the calcium that gave you the cross bridges and the contraction. Now you've got to pump that out in order to create the relaxation. And so there's this balance to be achieved, and your skill at relaxation can enhance your strength and your ability to produce power and force and things of that nature.

So – but that's complicated. Like, there's a lot going on in there. And I'm just a good old knuckle dragger. I like lifting and doing the fun stuff.

And while I have gone down some of the rabbit holes of the complexity, you can still read the research and see how conflicted we still are on things like hypertrophy and other aspects of muscle development. So there's a lot going on there. So I just kind of treat that as a black box. And like you said, the input, the output, and the magic happens in the black box.

Honestly, one of the problems I found when I was a young guy in learning about lifting and stuff, so I'm going back to probably 2007, which is like bodybuilding.com days, like quite heavily forum-based. And it was so bro-sciencey. And for every article that you read that said one thing, you could find one that said the opposite. And the same is still true now.

Like, for every person for whom keto works amazingly, there's another person for whom high-carb works amazingly, and then someone will do intermittent fasting, and someone will stick to a more consistent, steady, grazing-style, typical bodybuilders diet. You know, it really is a case of trying to find principles, I suppose, and moving those forward. So I've got a couple of questions. I've got one question for you, which will come up in a little bit, which I think might be like you trying to choose your favorite child.

For now, when we're talking about strength, is progressive overload king? Yes, however. There's always a caveat. There's always a caveat, isn't there?

I know. Life would be much simpler if we were able to just give absolutes, but only Siths deal in absolutes. So we'll stick with the asterisk and the caveat. Yes, progressive overload is the key, but within Strong First, which we call ourselves the School of Strength, we specialize in kettlebell barbell and body weight, not only from a tactical standpoint, but from a programming standpoint.

And Pavel's recent work within Plan Strong and Strong Endurance, in particular, has, with his new book, Quick and the Dead, you can get a window into some of our new conditioning and strength and conditioning research and work that we've been doing. The fourth branch of the School of Strength is programming. And in the development of Plan Strong, when Pavel took a step back, and he looked at the most successful Olympic lifting dominance of the Russians, and you can make all the comments you want about the pharmaceuticals that may have been involved, but everybody was doing it, and the Russians were still dominant. And not only were they dominant, they were dominant over years.

Olympic lifting is not considered a young person's sport, right? Well, they had Russians setting world records in their 30s and late into their... 30s and still winning world championships and Olympics and things like that. So when you really look at their programming, yes, it's progressive over time, but we tend to treat that as this linear relationship where we're always going up.

When you look at a very successful program like the Russians had, what you see is that. There's a lot of variability. And actually, about 80% of their work happened around 70% of the 1RM. So there was a tremendous amount of work happening at a very accessible effort level, which you can recover from, and you can build skill with, and you can have all these great results.

And then you're doing some work in the top end, a little in this about 70% 1RM sort of barrier. What's the rep range on that if you were to go to failure? Probably about 6? Yes, but here's the thing.

We're never going to failure. So yeah, 70% might get you 6 to 8, and there's a tremendous variability in how people line up on those rep charts. I was always able to operate actually a pretty high percentage of my 1RM, but then if you look at the charts, I should have been lifting way more. That's me, unfortunately.

You can rep out 80%, 80% or 70% for ages, but then just the top end of that curve flattens off. There'll be a lot of people at home that are the same. So what you're looking for is the progression over time, and I just wrote this article first. You have this waviness in the short term.

So you're always manipulating that variable, and yeah, like I said, we're progressive over time. We're not progressive in a linear standpoint. So kind of like the stock market. If you look at it day by day, it's doing this.

If you look at it over time, it does that. But if you just try to do this and be purely linear, you're running into problems. Why? Well, if that was true, if I could simply go down to the bench and add a pound every day, I'd be 365 pounds heavier in my bench year after year after year, which obviously just doesn't happen.

So you fatigue out, both from a central nervous system standpoint because of the skill-driven and neurological-driven aspects of strength, and you burn out from a physiological standpoint because tissue adaptation, tendons and ligaments are kind of the slowest to adapt. We'll build some big old muscles and the tendons and ligaments are like, dude, we're not ready yet. And so you have to allow time for overall tissue adaptation, and that also responds very well to having this variation in what you're doing so that you allow time for all these things to come together. I suppose that cycling through different movements, as you said, as well, and sticking to maybe two months with one particular routine or three months with one particular routine and then periodizing into something else will probably allow you to achieve that as well.

So right, I'm going to ask you the most difficult question I can ask you. You're only allowed to do three exercises for the rest of your life. What are they? So, yeah, you're right.

It's like choosing children. So I'll give two different answers. Such a politician's answer. But I told you what I was going to do.

I didn't dodge the question. I just said I was going to give you two options. For me personally, I am a squataholic. I love to barbell squat.

Because I do a lot of swings and a lot of kettlebell work, I don't have to do as much work on my deadlift because I do a powerful hip hinge on a consistent basis. So I personally like to squat. And I think for the individual, it's finding which are you. Do you need to squat?

Do you need to deadlift? Because both of those are going to give you mileage for a long time. If you're not swinging and working on a powerful hip hinge, then you probably need to be deadlifting instead of squatting. Interesting.

If that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It does. Why would you put the deadlift ahead of the squat in isolation?

It is. So there's a couple. And I'm putting it ahead of that because if I'm swinging and producing a lot of power in my swing, then I'm already doing all the strength work I need for my hinge. Quotation marks.

Copy on. So that's why I put it. If you're not going to swing, you definitely need to build your hinge and work on your deadlift. And that's not achievable just with a squat?

I don't think so. I think there's aspects of the deadlift as far as the inclusion of the upper body via the grip and the lats and the way the deadlift happens that make it a different animal than a squat. The squat carries with it more skill requirements. You are loading the spine in a unique way.

So there's different aspects involved in building that squat, which I think make the deadlift a better choice over time for a broader swath of the population. So that's kind of the, from a symmetrical standpoint, you need to figure out whether you need a squat or deadlift. We've got to push. We've got to do some sort of press.

And military press or bench press. So I told you I was going to give you two options. Military press incorporates the standing posture. You do need to have a very stable midsection, the ability to resist extension and maintain your position under that overhead load.

And so the military press has, I'm going to say, higher requirements than the bench press. Globally. Globally. But the bench is a great way to produce upper body strength.

And the way we teach it and really you bench from your feet and looking at a good lateral arch, not necessarily an AP arch, you set a foundation via the feet and lateral arch to really drive through the upper body. So you're going to build more upper body mass and strength via the bench press. You're going to build upper body strength via the military press. So picking which one you need there, make a choice.

And we're still going to strength training here. I do think you need some sort of pull, such as a pull-up. I think the lats are such an important tie-in from upper to lower body. And for everything we want to be doing, whether it's running or deadlifting or squatting or benching or pressing, I think the lats deserve their moment.

Kind of the upper body squat, as it was once known. I get it. Well, one thing I'm interested in is your inclusion of kettlebells. Because it's only been recently for me that I've seen kettlebells really kind of come into their own.

Guys like yourselves and Onnit and companies that are really, really pushing the kettlebell movements. Not just as kettlebells, maybe for me, 10 years ago would have been part of the Buns and Tums class for my mum to go and do. You know what I mean? Maybe like a two and a half kilo kettlebell or something like that.

And it's kind of just there to make someone feel like they're lifting away. Whereas now there's much more sophisticated public knowledge around the training for that. Can you talk through your vision and your views on kettlebell training overall? Absolutely.

It's something that I first got certified with Pavel in February of 2002. I started teaching with Pavel in April of 2003. So literally for 16, almost 17 years, I've been traveling the U.S. and the world teaching kettlebell training and certifying others in the use of the tool.

So the kettlebell for me represents such an excellent entry point to the world of strength and a bridge towards the world of conditioning and power work that make it a really unique and really a tool that I think belongs in everybody's program. And everybody, quotation marks, copy on, because that's no one thing for all people. So I think the thick handle and offset center of mass make it a very different and alive tool in your hands where now you're controlling this rotation or movement of the center, displaced center of mass, or that displaced center of mass is actually guiding you into better positions during the movement. So it requires an increased level of alignment with integrity under load.

And I'm grabbing that from Greg Cook, one of my other mentors. And so via the getup and the press and things like that to take advantage of this offset center of mass, you have this alignment with integrity under load, which builds this kind of great postural control, which helps set the foundation for a lot of the strength and the power work that you want to be doing. And so the kettlebell, in my mind, and what I've seen over the last 17, 18 years of using a tool myself, I think it really fits a need for people that a dumbbell, a barbell kind of don't provide because that weight centers with your grip instead of being offset. An old joke for us is you can't swing a barbell between your legs more than once.

And so the kettlebell allows you to achieve this really unique loaded eccentric position, which has tremendous carryover for anything athletic. And from a power standpoint, I think Zantziorsky and others would put it in a power metric category, not plyometric, but it still produces, I can produce three, three and a half times body weight, eccentric load at the bottom of a 24 kilo kettlebell swing. Because it's all dynamic, right? Exactly.

And that loaded eccentric really is unique. So I think kettlebells will still check a lot of boxes. And you'll see this if you look at Quick in the Dead. Once you've built a base of strength, power training has a lot to offer.

And you have to be strong enough to be powerful. And so we're still not forgetting that strength is the foundation. But once you have achieved a base level of strength, that power work really delivers across multiple spectrums of physical development, whether we're talking about endurance, power, strength. What's the difference between power and strength?

So power is how quickly you can apply your strength. Strength is how much force you can produce. So it would be the equivalent of horsepower versus torque. Yes.

I'll go with that analogy very easily. A torquey engine might not be quite so fast, but can pull a very heavy load. A high brake horsepower engine can go very quickly, but might not be able to pull such a heavy thing. And then in between the two, you have a midpoint.

Yes. So we'll have a lot of CrossFitters and other strength athletes listening. But CrossFitters, especially, we're about to enter the Open, which is a period during which there will inevitably be kettlebell swings. Would you be able to talk us through how you see the optimal kettlebell swing or what some of the coaching cues are that you look for that you think most people might mess up with?

So I think if I were to give one piece of advice, well, we'll make it two. Number one is patience. True power means you're patient enough to allow that power to come to fruition. So it means at the top of my swing, and if it is the gains and you are doing the overhead swing, fine.

You've got to do what's required for the competition. It's waiting for those arms to reconnect. I'm going to pull my camera off the – yeah. You have to wait for those arms to reconnect to your ribs before you hinge.

Then you have to allow yourself the time to hinge before you hit the quick turnaround. And now you've got to be patient, keeping the arms against the body as long as you can so you have this full transfer of energy from the hips and midsection to the arms and the belt. And so what I see a lot of people do is they rush that. They hinge too early on the way down.

They're trying to come up too quick on the way up, and they're letting the arms disconnect before they fully express the power from their hips. So if they would display patience at those three stages, wait long enough for the arms to reconnect on the way down, give yourself time to hinge, and then keep the arms against the ribs as long as possible as you're producing power through the ground, you're going to find a much more powerful swing and better transfer of energy. So that – more than anything, if people would display some patience, they're going to be a lot better off. I can definitely feel in myself when I'm doing a heavy kettlebell workout, especially when we are going to the overhead standard from CrossFit.

I can tell when that excitement during a workout takes over my form. And I know that when that's happening because my traps get pumped. And it's because – I'm going to guess because I'm upright rowing that weight up and overhead, that pull and pop. As opposed to allowing myself to swing through and then take it from there.

That's interesting. And that's – so when you look at it from a timing perspective, and it sounds like, you know, oh, he's saying, you know, be patient. Every rep's going to take so long. And it's not.

It's just being patient enough to allow those things to happen in the proper timing and sequence. You'll actually – you know, the rep speed will be not that much different, but it will be that much more powerful and efficient because now it's happening in the correct sequence. And you're not having it. You don't have to put the kettlebell down.

You don't have to take half as many breaks, perhaps, because you're moving better. Okay, so that's the first one. And what's the second? Well, I went so long into the first one that I'm – oh, okay, sink your breathing.

Okay, interesting. So now there's – I'm going to give you the kind of – there's a – we'll call it a boilerplate answer. And then knowing that there's techniques and strategies to optimize the breath during an extended effort. So we have a competition within Strong First called the TSC, the Tactical Strength Challenge.

And one of the aspects of that competition is a max snatches in five minutes. So – and we have people that will achieve with a 24-kilo bell, and some with a 32-kilo bell will have people achieving 120, 130, 140 reps within five minutes. It's – oh, it's awful. As soon as I recover from it, I'll do it again.

But so, you know, the sniff in to have good intra-abdominal pressure and bracing during the hinge, and then having the forced exhale match with when the hips finish, that sinks your power so that your power is efficient over a number of reps. Okay. So what happens is during a sustained effort, you will reach a time point where the need for oxygen becomes great. And so that breathing pace needs to change.

One of the easiest ways to change with that, especially within a five-minute effort, is the double inhale. So during the hinge, instead of having a single inhale, you have a double inhale. And so you're actually kind of filling the tank and topping it off, and then having the exhale synced with the hips. And then there's ways to have multiple breathing cycles within every rep.

And so there's double breathing. Really, really great to hear that. I guess this is how you get 130 kettlebell snatches in five minutes. Right.

And that's why I prefer the boilerplate answer. Because getting into the double breathing gets a little more complex. So what we're talking about is that you're going to breathe out as your arms are releasing contact with the body on the way up. Is that correct?

Yeah. I would sink it more with the finish of the hips rather than thinking about the arms. But you are not releasing the arms from the ribs until the hips finish. So yes.

Understood. Okay. And then as you're coming back down, you're taking the breath in just before you begin to hinge? Yes.

So when you hit the bottom, you've got that bubble of interabdominal pressure that gives you something to then produce force against. Yes. There's definitely been times I can think of, I'm sure the listeners will be able to sympathize as well, when you are breathing too much and you just get out of time and you're fully exhaled at the bottom as you're swinging a kettlebell through your legs. And it feels like someone's come up behind you and kicked you in the middle of the arse.

And you're like, maybe fall forward into the workout, which is not nice. Not great. No, no, no. But again, as you say, a lot of people will be listening, maybe doing these under fatigue.

You know, you're a CrossFit athlete and you've got this in amongst a bunch of rowing and potentially pull-ups or something else and your grips going and everything else like that, you do need to be delicate with that. So I suppose trying to adhere to that as closely as possible is not going to be a bad idea. Definitely. And that would lead into potentially another broadcast on the concept of the difference between your training and your testing and the fact that your training does not always have to look like you're testing.

And you build capacity and minimize fatigue rather than always trying to push. Conditioning, and I know we're getting away from the strength message, but the conditioning has kind of fallen into, the primary camp that conditioning has fallen into is building tolerance. Basically, this is going to suck. So we're going to do it.

And over time, it will suck less because you have a better tolerance to this. There is another way in building capacity, your ability to handle the energy production and the byproducts and the efficiency of the organism versus the tolerance of the organism. And so, and again, you look at Quick In The Dead and Pavel's new stuff, you'll see a lot on this. You can build a lot of capacity and have better health, kind of lower injury, better performance, and test better.

But if you're always testing yourself and you're burning that candle hard, it's like having a NOS, it's like having nitric oxide on your car. Well, if you're using that to go pick up a loaf of bread, you're going to burn out your car. You want to save that for that one moment where you need that extra boost. Is that where the 70% or so window appears to be optimal?

Is that one of the reasons why that will be in there as well? It is. It's interesting because, again, I'm around a lot of Crossfitters, but I'm just around a lot of athletes who like to go hard as well, whatever their particular given field. There is a subgroup that train in our gym who are just sadists, and they enjoy getting into that 190 BPM heart range.

That's what they live for. It is very unique in the fitness world based on what I know, having spoken to guys like Dr. McGill, Brian Carroll as well, these sorts of guys who talk about embedding the movement engrams in as perfect a way as possible, especially if we're talking about big lifts that need to be perfect, and doing those under fatigue appears to be a very, very dangerous way to train. Yes, I would agree with that, and I think that there's one reason we prefer something like kettlebell swing and kettlebell snatch as our display of maintaining our skill over time under fatigue, because there's different ways to look at this.

As we're building these patterns, I have to load you to find out if that pattern is going to hold up under the load. Then I need to, especially if I'm training an athlete or somebody, I'm going to have to push you into some fatigue to see if that pattern is going to hold up under the fatigue. It's my job as a coach to know when to pull back, because you're not handling the fatigue in the form or the load in the form, and so that's where my skill comes in to say, that's enough for today, or yes, you can push to go a little further. So definitely, yeah.

Can you suggest any heuristics or rules that people who don't have a coach that's on hand can use? So I'm going to couch this in a couple of different ways. I would say that rest is the single most abused training variable. We don't rest enough.

And I remember years ago when the high-intensity interval training really became popular and was basically a response to this idea that nobody had time to train. And so here comes this high-intensity interval sort of protocols and Tabata, which nobody's ever done Tabata outside of the original Tabata research. It's a miserable thing to even think about, much less endure. And just because you're doing burpees for 20 seconds or 10 seconds off, you're not doing Tabata.

It was a completely different thing. But anyway, here comes this message that you have this high-intensity with short rest for a compressed period of time, and you accomplish all these great things. Yes, you will for a little while, and then the wheels will fall off. Why?

Because it's like a crash diet. You just can't maintain it. If we're doing the cabbage soup diet, we're going to lose a lot of weight and accomplish some very short-term results, and then we're not going to because nutritional deficiencies and problems will set in. When you burn the candle to both ends and in the middle, and you're burning the nose every time you go into the session, the car eventually falls apart.

You just can't handle that level of stress over that period of time. You exceed the ability of the organism to compensate and recover from that stress. And again, we're back into the capacity versus tolerance discussion, and I would rather build capacity and have this health aspect to my training. I'm an ancient 48 years old, and I can tell you that I enjoy the health aspect of my training.

From a strength standpoint, I was the 11th guy in the world with Ben the Red Nail. I've accomplished a good number of grip strength feats, some decent, not great powerlifting numbers raw, and so I've built my strength, and I've worked on that end of things. I've snatched a kettlebell a bunch of times and worked on the conditioning end of things. But the only place fitness comes before health is in the dictionary.

Your training should be driving you towards a better standpoint as far as your health is concerned. And we may sacrifice that from time to time in order to accomplish a performance goal. Certainly, if your goal, I was working with a guy at a workshop that his goal was a bench 500, and he was doing whatever it took. And you can read into that whatever you want to.

He was doing whatever it took to get to 500. And I gave him a couple of mobility techniques and things to work on because he was really suffering with his shoulders. But he was going to do whatever it took to accomplish that goal, as long as he's willing to change goals. Once he's accomplished that, and regained the health of his shoulders and body and things of that nature, fine.

We make these decisions from time to time. If you're going to run a marathon, get ready to spend a lot of money on treatment and surviving the training in the marathon, and then hopefully get healthy on the back of that. So we make those decisions as long as those are conscious decisions and things that we've factored in. If the only thing we know how to do is burn ourselves to a frazzle, be forced to take time off, either due to illness or injury, and then burn ourselves to a frazzle again, I think there's a better way.

Reminds me of Eddie Hall, hearing him talking about the way that his body was and how he felt around about the time when he won World's Strongest Man. And he was talking about the fact that his marriage was falling apart, barely seeing his kids, and he was so heavy that he could, I think he's like 190 kilos, and he's like 5'9 or something, or like 5'10 or something like that. So inordinate size, as wide as he was tall. And he was talking about all of these different things.

But as you say, he said, I wanted to be the World's Strongest Man. I was prepared to do whatever it took to do that. But one thing I've got a massive amount of respect for Eddie for is seeing the transformation that he's undergone after he completed that goal. So he did complete that goal.

He got where he wanted to, and he has taken a complete step back from the professional side of that sport. He's doing other stuff. He's doing a lot more varied fitness challenges. I think he's like swimming and stuff at the moment.

But yeah, you know, you're right. People are prepared to make sacrifices for things that they deem to be valuable to them, given their values in life. They think, this will make me feel satisfied and give me a sense of accomplishment if I run this marathon, deadlift 600 pounds, bench press 500 pounds, whatever it might be. There is a treadmill that people can get on where they don't realize that if there isn't a goal at the end of that, if it's just fitness for fitness's sake, if there's no end point, if there's no periodization, that's when you get people that do get severe burnout, or they end up with a very serious injury.

So yeah, you mentioned about one of the ways that people can self-judge when they're pushing themselves too hard and when they potentially need to move back towards capacity. So let's go with in a session, because I think that's important. If your rep speed is slowing down, so your tempo changes, and I have a very easy metric on that. If I'm doing swings, and I know 10 swings takes me roughly 17 to 18 seconds, if that 10 swings starts taking me 20, 21 seconds, I'm slowing down.

I'm beating the proverbial dead horse. It is time for me to stop or increase my rest periods. So seeing tempo change, exceeding about an 8 out of 10 on an RP, unable to catch your breath. You're not able to recover before the next set.

I've been a slave to the clock for years, and have over the last couple of years worked very hard to free myself from the clock, and allowing myself better recovery, and not surprisingly seeing better results in my training. So those are just some easy kind of stop signs that we talk about within Strong First, that within a session, within a set, within a session, within a training session, we look for those things. I think it's very interesting. I was asked one time on the podcast what my favorite recovery strategy was, and I think it's interesting that we have an entire cottage industry of recovery strategies that have grown up around this idea of how do I recover from the training that I'm doing?

Well, my answer was proper programming. If I have myself programmed appropriately, if I am taking into account the organism and my overall stress, nutrition, sleep, ability to handle work, and the environment, my programming, and things of that nature, if I've got those two things taken care of, and I have done well with this environmental consideration of the program, then I should be recovering from my training. I shouldn't be always trying to figure out how I'm going to recover. Probably one of the easiest answers to people who are always trying to figure out how to recover from the training is do less.

Yeah, you're right. If you're constantly having flappy wings so hard to stay afloat, it's probably just time you need to reassess the program overall, decide that you're going to just take a little bit more rest time, whatever it might be. And that's, I think, because we are exposed to the work rate of everybody else online with social media and being able to now see a window into the lives of professional athletes, or semi-professional athletes, or just your normal gym athlete who happens to have a ridiculous work capacity. Because you're able to see them, you use the canary in the coal mine for how hard are you working and how hard are they working.

And that can lead to people setting themselves a standard which is unreachable given their physiology. There are some people out there whose ability to recover, they can recover fine from a really hard workout and seven hours sleep. There's some people who require, you know, 10. And I guess that's a decision you need to make yourself.

It is. And if you're mindful of your recovery and your health and, you know, things of that nature, and, you know, if you're constantly dealing with a, I mean, quotation marks, injury, you have a pain problem or thing that you're constantly having to manage, you're probably pushing too hard. If you're, you know, if illness is a repeated thing for you, you're probably pushing too hard. And you have to take in overall life stress into consideration.

If you're sleeping four hours a night working two jobs and you're having a lot of interpersonal stress, you're not going to be pushing very hard on your training because your recovery ability is already taxed by this lifestyle stress. Or if your simple, your diet simply doesn't support your training, then expect to suffer and have trouble recovering. It's classic type A mentality though, isn't it? That there are some people for whom you tell them to do eight and they will do 10.

Well, why did you do 10? I told you to do eight. Well, I just thought more is better. And then you can roll that out if you scale that across someone's entire life.

Yeah, you end up with that. So final question I'd like to ask, and I spoke to Brian Carroll about this, and I thought it was really interesting. I know that Dr. McGill agrees with this.

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. For strength athletes, powerlifter, weightlifter, Brian and Stuart are of the opinion that training the movements once per week is optimal for them to cycle for most athletes. What's your stance on that? It depends on the athlete.

But the broadest cross-section of athletes that you know, what would you say? So it's almost impossible because where that athlete is on the spectrum, where that individual is on the spectrum matters. If you're reaching a true physiological peak where your strength is really based on your structure and anatomy and ability to recover and everything, it's actually reaching a physiological peak and you're able to push yourself to that limit, then yes, you can train less frequently. But if you look at the Russian powerlifting team, they bench seven days a week.

No way. Yeah. They bench what? Every day.

It's because they're in multiple, sometimes multiple sessions in a day. It's because their training is very wavy. Forget the wavy stuff. They do bench days every day of the week for the Russians.

What's going on? If you look at Shaco and the Russian powerlifting team, they do a lot of work. And so there's kind of this classic American powerlifting sort of mindset. Ed Cohn, Marty Gallagher, Kowalski, a lot of classic American powerlifting that is very linear.

It is working each main lift once a week. There's the Russian method, which has multiple sessions per week. Both have had their success stories. It's figuring out which one you tolerate and where you are on that spectrum that would dictate those decisions.

If I'm working with a younger, in their progression, I'm working with a younger physiological age athlete, and that can happen at any age. I could be working with a 50-year-old who's just getting into strength training. They're at a very young physiological age. That individual, I might want to deadlift five days a week because I'm building that pattern.

They're still grooving it. Practicing it once a week is not going to get them to a skill level where they can actually build an appreciable level of strength. But, yeah, if that's the 30-year-old athlete who really has been pushing hard and is nearing a physiological peak, yeah, I might be deadlifting them once a week. I love how the Russian approach is.

It's like, we do bench today. What do we want to get better at? I want to get better at bench. Guess what we're going to be doing?

We're going to be benching. We're going to be benching. So, yeah, it is a very utilitarian, minimalist sort of mindset. And we get into muscle confusion and all these different things, and the pursuit of building strength actually means dedicating yourself to a very narrow window of things that you're going to be doing.

Now, you look at something like Westside, where Louis Simmons not only had – and Westside's very interesting. But they were trying to optimize three lifts. But Louis has like 200 assistance exercises for the bench because he would spot a weak spot in your bench and had a drill to address that weak spot. So it wasn't variety for variety's sake.

It was variety meant to progress you in that main goal. But the goal never changed. The continuity of the training process was always there. And that strength training means dedicating yourself towards a goal of building strength and doing that over time and having this continuity of training process that leads to success.

Isn't it interesting that there's so many different paths to achieving the same goal that you have? Russians competing with Americans, stepping onto the same platform within minutes of each other. But some training methodologies that couldn't look more different in some ways. Or do you have the guys from Westside in the equipped leagues who are going up against other people?

who may never do anything other than big compound lift, their accessory work might be pull-ups and that's it. It's so, I find it fascinating that there are all of these different risks. It comes back to what we said at the very beginning, right? Where it's like, you can find proof for effectiveness, proof for ineffectiveness for pretty much everything.

So at the end of the day, this is a nice way to round it off, I suppose. Does the training methodology that you choose come down to personal preference for the one that you can adhere to the most and that feels the best for you? And how are you supposed to select to have this myriad of training opportunities in front of me? How do I choose?

So I think to get started, let's start there. To get started, the basics work. Three to five sets of three to five reps, three to five days a week. Just to keep it as simple as possible with some variation in what you're doing.

That will build strength. And for the beginner, I don't want to say almost any program will work, but almost any program will work for the beginner. It's when you have built a base of strength and you're trying to specialize and aim yourself in a particular direction that then the next training protocol carries more weight. Strength training joke.

It carries more weight in how you're going to succeed in that. Keeping in mind health and progress, as long as you're being mindful of those, then you've got to know when to stop a routine and make a change. You don't want to, and I know, I've seen it referred to as struggle porn, where there's this message out there that you've got to grind and you're going to grind and you've got to grind and you put all these hours in and you grind. And believe me, I put in the hours and that's not a problem for me.

But you can grind too far and too deeply and cause yourself problems. You don't want to quit before the process comes to fruition, but you've got to know when the process isn't going to come to fruition and you've got to make a change. So kind of a dichotomy there to work with. So figuring out whether you're a high-volume or low-volume athlete, I think is one of the most important distinctions from a strength training standpoint.

And I have friends of mine that can handle a very high number of lifts per month. I am not that person. I'm not a high-volume trainee. If I do a high-volume routine, it needs to be six weeks to eight weeks and small windows and then get away from it because the siren song of volume becomes a little too strong if you overload yourself.

I love it. Brett, thank you so much for today. It's been great. If the listeners want to find out some more info, what's the book's been that we cite today and where else can I add?

So if you go to strongfirst.com, you'll find everything there from the community forum, our articles and things of that nature, a lot of information available there. The book is Quick and the Dead, The Quick and the Dead, and has some tremendous information in it. And you'll see our barbell, kettlebell, and body weight sort of modalities represented on the website and on the forum. So kind of a one-stop shop, a lot of information at the beginning there.

I love it. Thank you so much for your time. I'm hoping it will make some people a little bit stronger. Any questions that you have, feel free to throw them in the YouTube comments below and I'll try and hassle Brett if there's anything specific that I can't answer myself.

But for now, Brett, thank you very much. Beautiful. Thank you, sir. It was great to have the opportunity.

Thank you.