"Strength."
The word echoes through our culture. But do we truly understand its importance? Imagine moving through life with the strength of your youth, defying age and societal expectations.
This episode features the godfather of strength training: Mark Rippetoe. "Rip", (as he is affectionately known), illuminates the crucial role of strength in our lives, going beyond aesthetics and into survival. He demystifies the process of building muscle and breaks down the complex world of strength training into simple and effective methods. He delves into the fundamentals of human movement patterns and how to apply force against resistance to reveal the core principle of strength training.
As an example, he explains the art of squatting effectively and why a slight angle is more efficient, debunking many misconceptions around squats.
Strength is not just about looking good - it's a fundamental aspect of our existence that helps us withstand environmental challenges. More muscle mass doesn’t just mean a better physique, it means a better life, especially as we age.
Rip analyzes the physiological differences between a deadlift and a squat, clarifying the complex contraction orders and angles involved in these exercises. The mission is clear: build strength for a healthier, more fulfilling life. He compares the contrasting effects of squats and deadlifts on muscle development, providing clarity and guidance for your strength training journey.
Shatter societal stereotypes about strength training. No matter your age or gender, this episode will encourage you to prioritize your own progress and strength. And for those who find the world of strength training overwhelming, he simplifies the process.
He explains the benefits of using sets of five reps, striking a balance between work and weight, and highlights the simplicity of strength training for metabolic improvement and muscle growth.
This episode will encourage you to build a stronger, more satisfying life.
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
"Strength."
The word echoes through our culture. But do we truly understand its importance? Imagine moving through life with the strength of your youth, defying age and societal expectations.
This episode features the godfather of strength training: Mark Rippetoe. "Rip", (as he is affectionately known), illuminates the crucial role of strength in our lives, going beyond aesthetics and into survival. He demystifies the process of building muscle and breaks down the complex world of strength training into simple and effective methods. He delves into the fundamentals of human movement patterns and how to apply force against resistance to reveal the core principle of strength training.
As an example, he explains the art of squatting effectively and why a slight angle is more efficient, debunking many misconceptions around squats.
Strength is not just about looking good - it's a fundamental aspect of our existence that helps us withstand environmental challenges. More muscle mass doesn’t just mean a better physique, it means a better life, especially as we age.
Rip analyzes the physiological differences between a deadlift and a squat, clarifying the complex contraction orders and angles involved in these exercises. The mission is clear: build strength for a healthier, more fulfilling life. He compares the contrasting effects of squats and deadlifts on muscle development, providing clarity and guidance for your strength training journey.
Shatter societal stereotypes about strength training. No matter your age or gender, this episode will encourage you to prioritize your own progress and strength. And for those who find the world of strength training overwhelming, he simplifies the process.
He explains the benefits of using sets of five reps, striking a balance between work and weight, and highlights the simplicity of strength training for metabolic improvement and muscle growth.
This episode will encourage you to build a stronger, more satisfying life.
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
Well, thanks for joining us again, folks. It's the Stay Off my Operating Table podcast with Dr Philip Ovedia. We are joined today by someone who I knew about long before I knew about Dr Philip Ovedia, so I've actually been looking forward to this one. In a way, I haven't really anticipated, you know, like, for example, the sleep expert we had on recently. Phil introduce our guest.
Speaker 2:Sure thing, you know, this really is an honor. We got a true legend on today, and you know.
Speaker 3:You guys got all ready.
Speaker 2:We got a buttery up good right Before we get into this.
Speaker 3:It's amazing.
Speaker 2:Building muscle is one of the you know kind of pillars that we talk about around metabolic health. So I said let's go find one of the world's experts on building muscle, and unfortunately he wasn't available. So we got Mark Ripitow and so we ended up here yeah, right.
Speaker 2:But really, really good to have you. Mark, I think most in our audience will at least be maybe superficially familiar with you. But why don't you give a little bit of your background, how you got into, how you became a legend in the building strength world and then really excited to have a conversation about some of the pillars there?
Speaker 3:Well, I appreciate your having me on, phil. I started off as a little 18 year old kid who had Good, good Been in a fight that I was not happy with the outcome of, and so this is. You know, back in the 70s and I was I decided, you know, maybe I need to be bigger and stronger and so I started fucking around in the weight room out at the college and, you know, ran into a few people who guided and directed me over the years and decided I liked it well enough to get into gym business in 1984. And I've been in the gym business ever since and I've got probably 48 experience years of experience in strength training and coaching people, not just me, but I've been coaching people as long as I have been lifting weights myself. So I've probably got as much experience as most people in this business will ever have a chance to accumulate. So you know, I just kept good records. I've got records of all of my own personal workouts back to probably 1980. Every workout I wrote down still do. I've got a big batch of data. I've, you know, I've trained thousands of people over those years and you know it's this is not complicated.
Speaker 3:You know, one of the things. I don't know if you guys have noticed this, but one of the things about human beings is that they tend to tend to like things that are complicated. They tend to be fascinated overly fascinated with complexity, when simplicity actually usually works better, and strength training is no doubt the same thing. I mean, what we do is and this is just as simple as it can possibly be we teach you the basic barbell exercises and then you come into the gym and every time you come into the gym, you put five more pounds on the bar and lift for the sets and reps that we've figured out over the years works the best, and over a period of several months, you accumulate a strength adaptation. Now, there's no more straightforward way to accomplish this. A whole bunch of assistance exercises are not necessary. You don't need to do leg extensions. You don't need to do peck decks. You don't need to do all of the shit that that a standard commercial gym exists to provide ways for you to do. You don't need to do that. You need to do five or six different exercises and that's all, but they have to go up in load every time. It's possible for them to go up in load if strength is your objective and this is just the logical analysis of this is.
Speaker 3:So start with the basic principles. What is strength? Strength is the ability to apply force against the next term resistance. All right, now that, and that's all it is. There's no, we're not done a strength of character. We're not talking about strength of you know some mail or anything like that. We're talking about physical strength is the ability to provide, to apply force against the next term resistance, and it's. It's not any more complicated than that. So how do we apply that force?
Speaker 3:Well, how does the human body normally move? Everybody's designed to do a few things, right. If, in squatting down and standing back up, picking something up off the ground, pushing something up overhead, pushing something away from you, pulling something toward you, these are all of the normal human movement patterns that human beings can perform on both feet in a, in a, in an environment of stability. So if those are the the human, basic human movement patterns, we just got to figure out a way to load them. So we load them with a barbell. We load a barbell, we put it on our back, we squat down, we stand back up. We do that in the most efficient way we can to utilize our muscle mass and our skeletal components and we squat down, we stand back up and over time, the ability to squat down and stand back up gets more forceful because we have added weight to it. We forced a strength adaptation. We haven't invited a strength adaptation, we forced one.
Speaker 3:So you come into the gym and on your first day, I show you how to squat, and there are ways we've figured out how to do this over the years that that make teaching you how to squat a fairly straightforward proposition. It's. It's not a complicated movement. You just have to analyze it. From having watched tens of thousands of reps and watch how people squat heavy weights and light weights and all this other stuff and it there's a, the explanation for how to squat most effectively falls out of observations.
Speaker 3:What is the phenomenology? How do people squat? Well, they lower their hips and they raise their hips. Well, if that's the case, then what we do is we focus on hips and we we come in every day and on the same. On the first day, we take the bar up to 115 pounds and we have you do three sets of five across. One set of five at 115. Another set of five at 115. Third set of five 115 and we quit and it's not a max. It's not supposed to be a max and we're not looking for your one rep max or your five rep max on the first day. We don't need to know that. We need to know a weight that you can execute correctly according to the instructions on the first day.
Speaker 3:Then the next time you come in, we go up 10 pounds, and then the next time you come in, we go up another 10 pounds, and then the fourth time you come in, we go up another 10 pounds, and then the fifth time you come in, we're kind of it's kind of getting a little heavier and we have you go up five pounds and you can do that for months. You can do that for seven, eight months and, as a consequence of going up only five pounds of workout, every workout is a little heavier than the last one, but you will perceive it as being the same level of difficulty. It's real interesting. You never just you know mash you. It's always hard. So that did 135 for three sets of five the first time. Don't understand that two, 75 is going to feel exactly the same way. But you're able to do it and you've gotten stronger because we made you get stronger. And why do we squat? Because it's one of the normal human movement patterns. So you come in and you squat, and your squat go up and your deadlifts go up and your overhead presses go up and your benches go up, and then we'll have you do some chins, because for beginners, chins, most people that haven't trained before, don't have much of a chin up capacity, so we're going to have you pull something toward you which which looks like you pulling yourself toward the chin up bar. It's the same thing, and then we will continue on this line. So, in other words, exercise variety is not the variable. Load is the variable, because the the adaptation we're trying to obtain is the ability to handle heavier loads, because that's what strength is.
Speaker 3:Once you get into your mind that a guy who can deadlift three, 15 is stronger than a guy that can deadlift 135, then everything gets real simple. This is not a complicated approach. We're trying to make you stronger and we do that five pounds at a time, and it this works for everybody. It works for you guys, it works for your mom, it works for your kids, it works for everyone who does it and it's not any more complicated than that. The only questions are what's the best way to do a press, an overhead press? Well, we have an analysis for that. I think our analysis has never been refuted and the way we teach the overhead press is very straightforward and pretty much everybody can learn it. This is what we do on our weekend seminars. We teach five of the five basic barbell exercises and we usually get everyone in the room all 30 people in the room doing these exercises at a very high level of perfection within a few sets, because we've learned over the years how to teach it.
Speaker 3:And the bench press, the deadlift, the squat press, the power clean, where you throw something up and catch it, that's another normal human movement pattern and we use all of these in our training programs and we don't really use anything else. We don't really use any machines, because machines force you to move the way the machine is designed, whereas with a bar, you move the way you are designed and it just works very, very well. And we've had tremendous success with this with people of all ages, all levels of ability. The same process applies to everyone. Your 85-year-old grandmother can come in our gym and train.
Speaker 3:We've got 12-pound bars that we can start her on and we just but the theory remains the same we find out where you are now in terms of your ability to perform these normal human movement patterns. Find out where you are now and then we go up a little bit every time you train until that stops working. And it's going to stop working, and then we have to get more complicated, but until then it's not complicated. It's very simple. Now, I said earlier, people worship complexity because they think this is real complicated. Certainly and I just barely understand it it must be right. Oh no, not at all. It's not a valid assumption. So that's the basis of what we do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that simplicity can be well applied to many areas of life. So just kind of getting the basic concepts down. Why do you feel it's so important for people to get stronger? Why should we be focused on building strength?
Speaker 3:Well, that's an interesting question that we've got a controversial answer to. I said in the book, strength is the most important. Physical strength is the most important thing in life Because you as a physical being, you as an animal, have a physical relationship with your environment. Your physical relationship with your environment is predicated on your ability to produce force within that framework. Producing force within your environment is how you exist. It's that it's fundamental to your existence.
Speaker 3:Now, stephen Hawking was a brilliant man, but I'll bet you, if you asked him toward the end of his life, he would rather have been able to produce enough force within his environment to move around without the aid of five or six other people. You know this is. This does not denigrate the intellectual, but the intellectual is not as primary to our existence as the physical, because when the physical stops, the intellectual stops to, the strong body is able to withstand perturbations within the environment that a weak body cannot stand. And it's real simple if everybody will just stop being offended. That's just. This is material right. Everything we do is fairly. You know why would I need to explain that to you that it's better to be strong than to be weak. Now you know from a, from a physiologic standpoint, the more muscle mass you have, the more metabolically healthy you will be. Right.
Speaker 3:And running does not build muscle mass. Running eats up muscle mass. I'm not saying don't run. What I'm saying is, if you have the choice between running and lifting weights, duh, you lift weights. It was. Lifting weights builds muscle and muscle is good. More muscle is better than less muscle, and this is especially true the older you get. I mean, what is the difference between a 30 year old man and a 70 year old man? 70 year old man, in the strong is the 30 year old man. Why not? You got less muscle mass. Remember how much better you felt when you were 30 than when you're 70? I sure as hell do you know. I certainly do, and I don't think that it's a particularly complicated question. The answer is why do we want to be strong? Because we get to live longer, we're healthier, we get to live more fully, more independently if we're strong. All those are good things I want to ask that doesn't preclude intellectual development.
Speaker 3:Now does it? None of that precludes intellectual development at all. No, no, not at all, you know, I'm still, believe it or not, I'm still capable of learning things. To do it all the time, you know.
Speaker 1:I want to ask some training specific questions.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 1:What's the difference physiologically between a deadlift and a squat?
Speaker 3:Physiologically Well, that's an interesting way to phrase that. Physiologically, the contraction order is different in a deadlift and squat. Squat starts with an eccentric contraction as you lower yourself into the, into the below parallel position, and then a concentric contraction occurs to stand you back up. The deadlift begins with a concentric contraction and the angles and musculoskeletal relationships of the two exercises are completely different. Okay Now, in terms of muscle mass involved in the yeah is the angle.
Speaker 3:you're not as deep quote unquote in a deadlift start position as you are in squat start position. The squat is not a deadlift, is not a squat with a bar in your hands. No, I'm sorry, that's not that's. You know that we have to get out of kindergarten sometimes and that's that's the kindergarten explanation for the for the deadlift. The deadlift is a pull and the squat is not.
Speaker 1:Can you go a little deeper into that? And I have a reason for asking this. It's fairly simple. I reached a point where I and in fairness to myself, I didn't have a coach, but I reached a point where where squatting just felt like I was taking too big a risk with my back and deadlifting didn't. Right, well, let me, so I just made the decision to quit squatting.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that was a bad decision. I think you should have gotten some coaching on your squatting, because the two exercises do have something in common that you probably didn't realize the squat is not performed with a vertical back Right At all. Now it's obvious that the deadlift can't be performed with a vertical back. But if you try to remain vertical in the squat, if you try to load your back vertically in compression in the squat, that is not the most efficient way to squat big, heavy weights or even moderately heavy weights, which you have to do if you're going to get stronger.
Speaker 3:The picture that people haven't investigated this, having their mind of the squad is with a, with a vertical back angle, and that's incorrect. The back angle in the squad is, you know, at 45 degrees. It's a little tiny bit for most people. This depends on arm length, leg length, anthropometry, the, the. The back angle in the deadlift is a little bit more horizontal in the back angle in the squat, but not much. But neither one of them are are should be even attempted with a vertical back, because that's that doesn't allow for mechanical efficiency in the movement pattern. Okay, all right.
Speaker 1:We can go deeper. I I I'd like to know more about the. The muscle development difference between the squat and the, the deadlift, are you?
Speaker 3:developing a different set of muscles or no, you're doing the same muscles but you're using them in two different ways. The muscles that extend the hips and the knees are involved in the squat and the deadlift. The muscles that maintain spinal extension are both trained in the squat and the deadlift. The bottom of the squat features a stretch reflex and a rebound, for the bottom of the deadlift is not. The deadlift is mechanically easier, especially for novices, than the squat is. I have taken 55 year old women that come in the gym that that can't physically squat their own body weight, who deadlifted that same workout, deadlifted 110 pounds the first time they ever did it. Deadlift is is easier to lift heavier weights and and that remains the case until you've been training through four years you will eventually reach a point where you can squat your deadlift, but not at first.
Speaker 3:It is normal for the squat to exceed the deadlift, to exceed the squat when you first start training. That's perfectly normal. It probably is a hundred pounds ahead of the squat. Wow, 500, 400, 300, 200, that famous thing on our car sticker 500 deadlift order, squat, 300 minutes, 200 press and that's that's. That's normal. So in terms of muscular development I don't know what you mean by that I mean muscles contract. That's why all of these you've seen these these silly ass programs where we push and pull, push, pull. What the hell does that even mean? You know what is a deadlift? Is it a push or a pull? Well, we coach it as a push because it works better. When you think about it that way, you take your grip on the bar and then you push the bar away from the floor. Are you pulling or pushing? Who cares? Say a relevant distinction. Right so, but you know people are still caught up with that.
Speaker 3:In terms of the the the effects of the exercise on the body, the squat is much more profoundly stressful over a longer range of motion. It uses more muscle mass over that long range of motion than the deadlift, but the deadlift, being mechanically easier to perform than the squad, can be done with heavier weights, which also makes it stressful. For example, we do when we first train people. We will start off and probably stay with one heavy set of deadlifts for five, but three heavy sets of squats, because you can recover from three heavy sets of squats whereas you can't recover in a timely manner from three heavy sets of deadlifts.
Speaker 3:Three heavy sets of deadlifts Just beat the piss out of you and you I mean, you got to be ready to go again in 48 hours, and you can't do that If you make each one of these workouts so difficult to recover from that. We can't put a program together that produces a strength increase over time, right? So we, we've got all this worked out and you know every thing we do with our programming and our exercises. Execution has been analyzed and we can explain it, but the bulk of our audience is over 40.
Speaker 1:And, excuse slightly female Right, I found a little surprising, but there it is. So talk to the bulk of our audience who aren't lifting yet over 40. And mostly, mostly, over 40. Call it 5545 female to male.
Speaker 3:Right. Well, the bulk of our audience is probably the same age demographic, whereas we skew much more strongly male, and this is a function of the way Western society has developed and let your brother pick that up.
Speaker 3:You're just a girl and a lot of them have internalized that to the point where it's just unfortunate. But you know, we have a lot of strong women that come to our gyms and train with us and do amazing things and make the same kind of progress in the same period of time that men do. So it's not, it's. You know. There are profound differences in males and females, as I assure you realistic gentlemen understand. You know that it's fashionable to ignore now. You know what the failure to just realize these basic, obvious differences in in human sexuality are are. Well, the most immediate Function of that is that we're not going to have women sports much longer. Yeah, you know, if you let the boys in the women's division, well, the girls are going to leave, as they should. Right, because we're different. Men are much, much more neuromuscularly efficient than females. In other words, we can recruit more motor units, more muscle, into contraction, than females can.
Speaker 3:And these changes began eight weeks post conception in the womb, when the male fetus begins to secrete testosterone and his entire central nervous system develops in the in the presence of testosterone and hers does not. These changes are irreversible. You can't put a dress and lipstick on a boy and having be a girl, I'm sorry. We're supposed to have learned that over the past 15,000 years now, haven't we? But it's fashionable now to ignore that, so Right, but from in a practical sense.
Speaker 3:In a practical sense, what we see is women come into the gym and, you know, a 200 pound deadlift for a female is not that's baseline. That happens very, very quickly for four months and this. You tell them that and they don't believe you. 200 pounds, I can't pick up 200 pounds. Not only can you pick up 200 pounds, you're going to and it isn't going to be that long in the future. So I want you to get your head wrapped around 300 pounds, because that'll be more productive. All right, because this happens all the time. We have women pulling 300. You know, we've got a lot of girls. I mean, you know, this is, this is, you know, age adjusted. Of course we've, but we've got, we've got 60 year old women pulling 300 pounds. Wow.
Speaker 3:That's seriously cool, it's normal. It's normal, it's normal, it's not. It's not something to be marveled at. That's just what happens when you go up five pounds of work. It's, it's the phenomenon of accumulation, of adaptation. You accumulate an adaptation accumulation over time, you of course the organism that's going to be, of course the organism to adapt, because that's what life's all about, is adaptation. You adapt the organism, then you apply more stress in the organism adapts, and you apply more stress in the organism adapts again. Right, what happens when the, when the temperature of the water in the lake changes? Well, the fish either adapt to the change in the water temperature or they die. So that ability is built in to the DNA, just like it's built into our DNA. All we're doing is taking advantage of this freshman biology, right, and it's not any more complicated than that. And if you make it more complicated than that, it becomes less efficient.
Speaker 1:So the the exercises that you start somebody first right out of the gate on deadlift, squat press press press press overhead press. Yes, standing overhead press.
Speaker 3:Yes, always standing.
Speaker 1:OK.
Speaker 3:Because there's more muscle involved in the exercise. If you're standing as opposed to seated, we want to affect the most muscle mass possible to make the most of the time spent in the gym. Right? It's just more efficient that way.
Speaker 1:Was there a fifth? Seems like there was a fifth Power clean.
Speaker 3:We teach the power clean to everybody who could do it. Now, power clean is not useful to older guys Because as we age, our connective tissues get shittier and shittier as we get older and we there's an injury risk with explosive movement factors. So, depending on how old the guy is, depending on his, his training history, his physical condition, we might not use power cleans for a 55 year old guy that starts training. But a 30 year old guy start training, he's going to have to clean because this is one of the normal human movement patterns you pick something up off the floor, you accelerate it and catch it on your shoulders. It's like hauling hay, right, yeah? So those are the basic exercises and we do some chins. We add that. So we're going to start with six exercises and that's all. And for the rest of your training history, you put your hands on the floor. You probably will not use more than eight or nine exercises at any time during your during your training, because it's not necessary and it's not productive, right? So think of it like this Everybody knows that triceps are involved in the bench press, right?
Speaker 3:Got to use your triceps to bench Right. What gets your tricep extension, numbell, tricep extension exercise up Doing dumbbell? Tricep extensions are putting 200 pounds on your bench press.
Speaker 1:I would assume the bench press would do a better job of it.
Speaker 3:So what are we assisting? Who's assisting what? Right? The bench press is assisting your tricep extension, but that's not the way people think about it. Nobody ever got their bench up doing tricep extensions. You get your bench up by benching, going up two and a half pounds of workout. Who's the smaller muscle groups Right? So, it sounds like universal.
Speaker 1:It sounds like there's got to be a differentiation made between building strength and building muscle, why I'm assuming that somebody who's working on tricep extensions what they're really after is they just want that tricep to be bigger. It's more about we just had a interview with a bodybuilder and I'm guessing a bodybuilder would have a different approach.
Speaker 3:Well, the good ones didn't?
Speaker 2:The real good ones didn't.
Speaker 3:Doreen Yates and Ronnie Coleman were the you know the guys that come to my mind and I know the bodybuilders, all All those guys deadlift big weights, the bench press big weights. They may do some assistance exercise to Effect the outward appearance of a muscle belly in the tertiary phases of their training, but they're not. That's not how Ronnie Coleman got real big by benching about 600, deadlifting eight for reps. Look, how does the All right? So the basic question is this how does a muscle get?
Speaker 3:stronger. How does a muscle get stronger? If I asked my muscles to go up five pounds of workout five pounds of workout and I go from 135 pound deadlift to a 315 pound deadlift how did my body adapted to that? How did my muscles adapt to it? They got bigger. So a strength adaptation is hypertrophy. So now the question becomes what is the best way to produce a strength response? And that the answer to that is always sets of five reps, not sets of eight to 12 reps, because if you're lifting 12 reps, you're lifting the lightweight. Light weights don't make you stronger. Heavy weights make you strong. So you want to get stronger. Then you lift heavy weights and while you're getting stronger, your adaptation within the muscle bellies involved in the exercises to grow. That's hypertrophy. So getting stronger makes you bigger. We have had guys go from you know. They walk into gym, weigh in 175 and two years later they're weighing to 45. Having never done anything but sets of five reps, I know this isn't what you've heard 70 pounds of muscle.
Speaker 1:Well, how would that affect you metabolically, phil, that would be a great metabolic improvement.
Speaker 2:Certainly that gives you a lot of place to store some extra glucose. So why five reps? What's kind of the sweet spot there? Not just do one? You know, do your one rep every time, right Well? There's several reasons we use fives.
Speaker 3:From a metabolic standpoint, a set of five reps, a set of five, is much more work much more work in the first times distance version of that equation than one rep or two reps.
Speaker 3:Yet it's a low enough number of reps to where the weight handled in a set of five is still heavy enough to produce a strength adaptation, whereas a set of 10 is not A set of 10, set of 12, that is primarily boredom. You get good at doing such a 12 by just thinking about something else, right. But at no point during the set of 12 is the weight heavy enough that you're going to miss the rep, whereas the fifth rep of the third set of five you had better have your head on straight or you're not going to be able to do that fifth rep. You've got to execute the movement pattern correctly and you have to think very hard about what you're going to do. And if you successfully apply that stress during the fifth rep of the third set of five, then you recover from that and come back 48 hours later and add five more pounds to it. Then you have gotten stronger. And the mechanism by which you have gotten stronger is that your muscles have grown.
Speaker 1:Pretty simple.
Speaker 3:It's it. You know, I'm sorry, I wish it was more complicated than that, and lots and lots and lots of people in the ex-fizz business wanted to be more complicated than that, but it's not. It's not any more complicated than that. It really isn't.
Speaker 1:So the idea with five? I know this because I've been.
Speaker 3:I know this because I've been training people for a very, very long time, very long time, much longer than any of those guys with PhDs in ex-fizz have been writing papers about why you should do eight to twelve reps because that's wrong. That's just Rob, sorry. Get familiar with the concept. People are wrong all the time, even if they're PhDs.
Speaker 2:We certainly know that Bill knows this. Oh yeah, Bill knows that well. Yes, we do. So what? What are some of the other factors that go into it? So you know, you come, you show up, you do your, your reps, you know what? What are some of the other factors that people should be paying attention to to successfully build strength?
Speaker 3:Well, they've got to eat correctly and they've got to get recovered. So the the cycle is stress, recovery, adaptation. So if we want to adapt to the stress, we have to recover from the stress. So what's involved in recovery and that is nutrition and rest. Right, you've got to sleep. You've got to get to sleep. Now, for some people this is going to require that they get a CPAP or they learn how to use their oxymetazoline nasal spray.
Speaker 3:I'm a big fan of that. It's like I have a badly deviated septum, but I don't think that I can adapt to a machine strapped on my face, a little buzzing thing over here by the side of the bed. I roll around in bed and everything. It'll keep me awake. So I just use some oxygen and the tazoline in my nose every night before I go to sleep. That's the only time I use it and I've been using it for about four hours, about 45 years, and it works pretty damn well and I haven't had to have my nose amputated yet. So everything's you know. That's why I get some sleep.
Speaker 3:You've got to have a decent mattress. You wake up every morning and your back hurts. That's not the training, that's your mattress. Get a better mattress. Change your mattress. Don't be afraid to get a new mattress every six or seven years. Ok, don't do that. Get a firm mattress that holds you up, that keeps your back from going into flexion when you're laying on your back on the bed. Right, all these are just fundamental things. Make sure the temperature of the room is correct. You've got to get some sleep. If you can't sleep, you can't recover. Right, and you have to learn how to eat correctly.
Speaker 3:All right, if you are an underweight male, if if you are an underweight male. If you're an underweight male, then you need a huge caloric surplus, probably more calories than you're willing to eat. If a kid walks in my gym and he's five, 11 and he's 175, he's a little skinny guy. He's a little skinny guy, so he's got to eat. And the easiest way for young men to add calories is to drink milk. It's already cooked, available at every store on earth Well, here in North America anyway and you drink milk. It's. It's. That's the answer to your nutrition deficit that you're experiencing right now. Start drinking milk. Gallon of milk a day. You don't have to do it for the rest of your life. You shouldn't do it for the rest of your life, but if you want to gain, if you're training and you're serious and you're lifting heavy weights and you're even slightly underweight, you need to drink gallon of milk a day.
Speaker 3:Now, listen carefully. If it's what I said. If, because I'm not a person, who's not a person, who's not a person, who's not a person, who's not a person, who's Buenos Aires or Buenos Aires, it's just guys with someone who's not a part of their helping hand are hard, but it's a loss for yeah, yes, yeah, yeah. And with that having hour, spill your fill is next and wait 10. No-transcript what you do drinking. No, that's not what I said. What I said is, if you are an underweight male, you need to drink a gallon of milk a day. When you stop being an underweight male, you stop drinking a gallon of milk a day. Huh, right. And you need to make sure that you get enough high quality protein in a day, because we're trying to build a bunch of tissue and we can't build tissue out of donuts. Muscles aren't made from doughnuts.
Speaker 1:You've got to get a best line oh my gosh, that may be the best line We've had in two and a half years of doing this show.
Speaker 2:Muscles that are made out of doughnuts.
Speaker 1:I love that. No, they're not.
Speaker 3:Muscles are made out of protein, so you have to eat meat, you have to eat eggs, other things with protein cheese. You know, you know what to eat. You guys know what to eat. If you want to use some whey protein, whey protein isolate, it's what you use. That's very good. It's a food. It's not a supplement. It's just whey protein. Make a protein drink if you're having trouble Getting enough protein in during the day. Makes protein drink with 70 grams of protein in it and drink it right.
Speaker 3:But Carbs are kind of a problem for people once they get heavy enough. Carbs are our detrimental to the way we eat them in North America is detrimental to people's health, as we tend to get our carbs from sugar. And and now we'll let Phil talk about diabetes and the effect carbs have on diabetes it's it's a deadly disease, but people want to treat it as it, as if it is a normal consequence of aging. And it is not. And I mean, look, if you want to get your feet cut off, then you go ahead and continue to eat your doughnuts, all right, you develop type 2 diabetes. That's your fault. Type 2 diabetes is your fault. Type 1 diabetes is not your fault. Probably type 3 diabetes is your fault. To Alzheimer's right, that's probably your fault too. Okay, but type 2 diabetes is your choice. So we don't recommend that you eat a whole bunch of you know glommie, sugary carbs, because that's just not good for you. You guys know what to eat. I'm not the nutrition guy, but I am.
Speaker 1:It's really, you know we get. We get a lot of of highly educated, very academic people who all say this and and and. Hearing it come from somebody who picks up heavy things and teaches other people how to pick up heavy things it's gotta do it hits differently.
Speaker 3:It just so, because one of the problems that we have With young men trying to gain weight is that, a little bastard, you just won't eat enough. You can't make them eat enough. You know, if you're playing football and you're coming in the gym trying to lift weights and trying to get bigger and stronger, I'm sorry, you can't do that on 3,000 calories a day. It doesn't work. You have to go to 4,000 calories a day, maybe 4500 and are not tall, you are maybe 5,000 calories a but if you're trying to try to do an athletic training regime on 2,500 calories a day, you can't do that. It's not physically possible. You can't get recovered from it. There has to be a surplus of Calories in order to recover from this kind of training. There has to be a caloric surplus.
Speaker 1:I'm assuming at my age, which is older than Phil.
Speaker 3:Oh, how old are you? I'm 67.
Speaker 1:I'm 62.
Speaker 3:You're just, you're a freshman. Oh, thank you.
Speaker 1:I appreciate that you're just a freshman. Yeah Well, I am thinking back to when I, when I went to college, I was six foot three and I weighed 175 pounds. Yeah, yeah, exactly, I was a toothpick. No, but, but I'm assuming recovery takes longer as we age. Yes, or am I wrong about that?
Speaker 3:No, it doesn't. Everything takes longer as you age. You may have noticed that, and one of the things that we recommend and I don't know what Phil's opinion on this is but we think that At the time you get to the age of 50 or so, you probably ought to have your testosterone level checked and If you really want to have a better time all day, it would be better if you got on testosterone replacement therapy. All right, there's a lot of misinformation out there about testosterone replacement therapy. Most of it's all bullshit.
Speaker 3:All of the people that say, well, that's causes heart disease no, it doesn't. There's not one study that demonstrates that. This is, believe it or not, this has been studied. All right, and no, it doesn't cause heart disease. No, it doesn't hurt you. What hurts you is not having enough of the hormones that make you a male. By the time you get to be an older male, you'll have a better life on testosterone than off of testosterone, and this is just. I'm sorry, this is the truth, but if you guys are rather, you know, walk around with your testosterone of 175 and, you know, be obviously pathetic and silly looking and go ahead and do it, but I'm telling you you'll be better off With your testosterone up higher than that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, and and I certainly agree with that, with the caveat being you know, if your testosterone is low because you're eating like crap and not lifting any weight, then you know, fix that first before you go, you know, to the Well Injecting or you know, let me say, let me say this, phil Yep, Let me say this, phil there have been a lot of studies that have studied the effects of heart disease, the effects of exercise intensity on on hormone secretion, all right.
Speaker 3:And if you look at those studies, none of them Look at anything but acute hormone response to exercise intervention acute Whereas testosterone replacement therapy is a chronic elevation in testosterone, like you had when you were 30. All right, they're two completely separate thing. Yes, it's true that if you go in and you squat and deadlift heavy and you get through the workout, they measure Before and after testosterone levels. The testosterone level is raised as a response to that stress, but that doesn't mean that they're that clinical levels, physiologic levels of testosterone, have increased as a result of training. That's not how it works and that's not what the studies show. But you know, the ex-fizz guys have the extra, have the equipment to measure all this, so they write papers about it all the time. But it's, it's. You're missing the point. You're missing the fucking point.
Speaker 3:Point is that we don't care what happens to your testosterone 30 minutes after you finish your deadlift workout. We care what happens here, what, what your testosterone is during the 72 hours post deadlift workout During which you're supposed to be recovering from the damn thing. That's when we care about your testosterone level, not as an acute response. That is transient, it's a transient, acute response. It's not clinically significant, but you're right, that does make that lifting weights does make your testosterone go up a little bit for a very short period of time. Now, I'm not suggesting that people who don't train go on TRT, because I don't deal with people that don't train. I don't, I don't. They're not my concern.
Speaker 3:I think they need to train, and I think, in the absence of training, what this good differences to make with your testosterone is, you don't care about yourself anyway, so why get all worried about that? You know, so you know well said oh this is oh my gosh, this is fantastic.
Speaker 1:I'm having a ball here.
Speaker 3:Well, good, I'm glad I'm able to brighten up your day a little bit you are.
Speaker 1:You are definitely brightening my day.
Speaker 3:So well, what I'm doing is telling you the truth and I'm not couching it in platitudes and saying the word may and stuff. I don't know this how researchers say may all the time. It's possible that you know exercise may increase your strength, Strength, training may increase your lean muscle mass. You know weasel words like that. I, you know, hear it a lot, tired of it. So I'm just going to tell you the truth. And truth is if you're 55 years old and you have not had your testosterone checked, you probably will be better off if you do get it checked and if it's, if it's even a little bit low, start taking some testosterone. Why not? Why not? And I haven't heard a good reason why not?
Speaker 1:That's good, so All right. Well, um, it's fascinating that that this conversation has gone the way it's gone, because, um, I really thought I would have lots of questions and the way you laid it out at the very beginning, this is simple, yep, um, yes, has left, has left me without many questions, other than there's folks out there who are here in you, who are kind of like me, who are going. This guy speaks my language. I get this. What do I do next? What's the next thing? I'm motivated, I'm ready to get to get busy. Get off my butt, start learning how to pick up heavy things, get stronger.
Speaker 3:What's obviously? I'm going to tell you to buy the book you know, okay, yeah we've got a book You're allowed to do that.
Speaker 3:Tell us, what tell us about the book yeah, starting strength basic barbell training is sold almost a million copies. We are the best selling book on strength training in history. And, uh, it's available on Amazon. It's available from us, wherever you want to get it, it's, it's. I wrote the book. I wrote the book for the guy training in his garage Because I want him to be able to take the book and have a guide for his, for his efforts under the barbell.
Speaker 3:And we've we've tinkered with it and every time we do a reprint we put a little correction or something in there that we can. We learn all the time. We've changed the illustrations up quite a bit from the time the third edition was first printed until the current published published version of the third edition. This is the third edition of this book We've got, and our programming book is practical programming for strength training. That's also in its third edition and if, if, if, you want to learn how to do this, the book is the place to start.
Speaker 3:Now. Not everybody learns as efficiently from from a book as other people, and if that's the case and you need some help with your coaching, we have coaches available that can work with you online. We have a gym chain. We have 40 gyms Wow, that have been, that have been. We have 21 of them open right now, in the other 19 or in various stages of completion, where you can go in and be coached by people who know how to coach this method.
Speaker 3:There are dozens and dozens and dozens of other coaches all over the country that that know how to coach this method because we've been teaching them how to do it for a very long time now, and it's if you want to learn how to do this, then get the book, read the book, go out in your garage If you've got barbells already, or go to a gym and start training. We explain every detail of what you have to do when you learn how to squat in the book, and you can learn how to squat effectively from the book. And if you want some more help, we've got video after video after video about all this, all these lifts on the website, starting strengthcom, and we've got, you know, help resources on that website for you. You can get this done. This is not once again, this is not complicated as much as the rest, as much as the rest of the industry wants this to be complicated?
Speaker 3:it's not complicated. You have to learn how to squat correctly, you have to get below parallel and you have to go up five pounds next workout and that's really all yours too. There's really not any more complicated than that. I love it. Yeah, this has been great.
Speaker 2:And uh you know, honestly, uh, this, that that's kind of exactly what I wanted to get out of this for the audience is is so that they can just, you know, start adding this very important component to their pursuit of metabolic health. Go learn how to lift some heavy stuff and go build some muscle and, uh, kind of like you said, every everything gets better when you start doing that. It does, in fact, and let's go back to your comment about your audience, demographic Women.
Speaker 3:Uh, when women look at their body, they look at their body. When women look at other women which they do, as you know, and they identify a woman they see as attractive and aesthetically pleasing, what do you think they're looking at? It's looking at a muscular woman. They're looking at a muscular woman. What is a nice ass on a woman? Come from muscle Muscle. Okay, do not, ladies, don't make the mistake of looking at a contest body builder at 6% body fat and thinking that you will ever, ever approach looking like that because you're not going to do it. That's not what. That's not what we're here for. We're here to increase the size of the muscles in your hips and your legs so that they burn more fat and they have the shape that you recognize as being aesthetically pleasing for a female body, female bodies, aesthetic pleasing. This comes from muscle mass, just like men's bodies come from muscle mass when they are aesthetically pleasing. This is deep in your DNA.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:This is very, very. This is not a cultural uh a cultural acclimation.
Speaker 1:This is genetic.
Speaker 3:This is genetics. We recognize the fundamentals of human health with physical appearance. Physical appearance is very important because that's how you identify somebody with his head out of his ass, right? You know, 450 pound fat guy waddling around is not going to attract your attention. 250 pound muscular guy will always attract your attention, okay. And 165 pound muscular female will always attract your attention. To Notice, I didn't say 118 pound female.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's skinny. You know, woman is five, six, five, seven. She is going to look her best at 155 and that's muscle, so to speak to that part of your audience. You know, uh, you know, don't, don't use this as an excuse to not get in the gym and do things that you know you need to do. You need to lift, you need to be stronger. If you don't care how you look, you still know you need to be strong. So this is how you, this is how you make this happen.
Speaker 1:Bill, this has been, honestly, one of my favorites so simple, not complicated, not even controversial, in spite of the fact that there's going to be people who will get their knickers and a twist about it.
Speaker 3:This is, you know, and they try to. I'd like for them to refute the argument. You know, I don't want to hear how I'm purple and fat myself and all this other shit. I want you to refute the argument and nobody's ever done it. You refute the argument? Yep, Please, you don't like what I'm saying? Tell me who I am wrong. Don't tell me what. We don't do it this way. Well, what you're doing is wrong. If you're not doing it our way. What you're doing is wrong.
Speaker 1:It's all we're just doing. Mark Rippitow. Thanks, man, this has been Anytime guys. This has been really fun. So that's startingstrengthcom. The name of the book is Starting Strength. Any last words for us, Mark?
Speaker 3:Guys, take the ball in your hands and throw the damn thing. All right, nobody's going to do this for you. One of the most important things that you learn from strength training and I can't say this enough One of the most important things that you learn from strength training is that when you take control of your situation, you make the decisions for yourself and you execute the process that you know works and you see that process working. It reinforces your own self agency, if you know what I mean by that. You learn about yourself from doing hard things.
Speaker 3:When you get out of the bar and you do you take the last set of five out of the rack and you go through the first four reps of that last heavy set of five on the squat. When you get to the fifth rep, you have to decide something. You have to decide. Man, I don't know if I can do this or not. This is heavy. The fourth rep felt like shit. This thing is heavy. I'm having trouble moving it. So you have to decide am I going to attempt the fifth rep?
Speaker 3:And when you make that decision and you attempt the fifth rep, whether you get it or not, you have learned something. You've learned something about yourself. You've learned something about your physical capacity. You've learned something about the process you have been following, that it in fact is logical and that it works, and you are better for having done that. You're not just physically better, you're better there. Strength training is the key to all this stuff. Follow the process, do the hard things, do the work, and you've learned that these things pay off in ways that nothing else does.
Speaker 2:Very well said. As we say often here, take back control of your health and building strength. Lifting heavy things is certainly one way to do that. Thank you, Mark. Thank you for all that you've been doing and continue to do, and really hope that our audience learns from this and gets at it, starts doing it.
Speaker 3:Well, I'm glad to be here. Phil, Thanks for having me on the show. Hey, appreciate you guys, let me know if you need anything.
Speaker 1:Well, you know what You've got behind you. There's a sign that says starting strength radio.
Speaker 3:You didn't mention anything about.
Speaker 1:You didn't mention anything. Oh, I thought.
Speaker 3:I just assumed everybody knew we had a podcast. We have a podcast that goes up Friday every week and we talk to people like you guys. We talk to people less important than yourselves, we talk amongst ourselves most of the time, but we discuss important things about strength training and we'll have, we'll take questions from the audience. Sometimes we have a call in line set up and we talk to people for an hour and a half. Sometimes they write us questions in on the forums and I read those and we just.
Speaker 3:You know there's a whole bunch of information exchanged on our podcast. It's called starting strength radio. You sign up for that on our website and there's a podcast tab at the top of the website. You can go there and sign up for the, for the podcast. Now we don't, we don't release these podcasts on YouTube because we say unpopular things sometimes and YouTube doesn't want you to say unpopular things. So we don't podcast up on YouTube because they can't control us and we're not going to allow them to do that. But you know you guys want to watch a couple of podcasts. Let me know and I'll get you. I'll get you in and you kind of see how we do that and we we talk about controversial things all the time on starting strength radio, talk about climate change and COVID-19 and all kinds of things like that. And you know I'm not going to be told what I can say and what I can't say, so we just do it on our own network.
Speaker 1:Love it. Starting strength podcast. You can get there on Mark's website, startingstrengthcom. That's right, all right, good deal, phil. This is fun.
Speaker 2:Yes, it was another great one.
Speaker 3:All right, well, thanks for having me on, guys Appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Hey, we're glad you're here for Mark Ruppertow. Dr Philip Ovedia, Thanks for joining us and we'll talk to you guys next time.