Drive Coaching Results With Wall Street Weightlifter's 50-to-1 Method

Ready to help your clients get stronger without burning out?

In this episode of “Strength Coach Collective,” Graciano Rubio—better known online as the Wall Street Weightlifter—shares a training philosophy built around intensity, intention and clarity.

Known for his brutally simple barbell work and big lifts, Graciano explains how he uses estimated one-rep maxes to guide weekly progress, even when life outside the gym gets hectic.

He talks about helping both CrossFit members and personal-training clients zero in on the most important part of every session to create focus that drives consistency, motivation and results.

Graciano also walks through the numbers behind his 50-to-1 Method and explains how to adjust training based on life stress. For the "more is better crowd," the Wall Street Weightlifter offers insight into why junk volume holds most people back.

Tune in for a straightforward, actionable, sustainable approach to strength training.

Links

Strength Coach Collective

1:13 - Graciano Rubio’s background

13:03 - Short-term training goals

19:43 - The 50-to-1 Method

31:36 - 50-to-1 training example

42:55 - Who this method works for

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:00

Thank you so much for having me. We are here to help advance the strength and conditioning coaching community by bringing a wide range of experts in our field. You can join our group at strengthcoachcollective.com. Gross. Welcome, man.

SPEAKER_00: 0:37

Thanks, Kenny.

SPEAKER_02: 0:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 0:39

Appreciate being here.

SPEAKER_02: 0:40

Yeah. We've been working together for a little bit, but nice to talk about this context of things. I'm going to be pretty shameless in telling you I like to show people your freakish antics on Instagram. Have you seen what this guy can do? So for the listeners, if you have not found Grouse on Instagram, he is a Wall Street weightlifter, and he does some pretty remarkable things with a barbell and some other strongman stuff. So go check that out. Do yourself a favor. How did you get into all that? Did you just grow up naturally strong? What's your background here?

SPEAKER_00: 1:20

No, I started off, probably my first interest in strength and lifting weights was really as a kid. So growing up in a household that that's prioritized, but not in an official capacity in terms of training, but just as a general idea that it's better to be strong. It's better to be more capable. So probably my first, if you even want to call it training, would be Just helping my dad around the house. You know, typical, like, boring labor type of stuff. But that started off at a young age as simple as if my dad could carry two 2x4s in on each trip, you know, I would try to do three. And so he'd always one-up me because I was young enough. But then it would be four or five or trying to beat him at loading the wheelbarrow heavier. So that started, you know, really as a kid. And then it progressed from there that, you know, as you get a little bit older, you get into sports, you learn that you can train and then become better at it and be better at the sport. And that kind of initial enjoyment of doing, you know, harder things and trying to push your limits carries over to the gym. So yeah. Once I got into the gym, it was all that same mentality just applied to a barbell instead of kind of manual labor.

SPEAKER_02: 2:50

Yeah. Nice. What was the first like formalized training? What did that look like? What was the purpose of it? Who was, what were your methodology? Like, how'd you get into the path you are in, you are on now? Like what was the kind of segue to segues as you got through it?

SPEAKER_00: 3:06

I probably, well, technically I probably have never had any formal training.

UNKNOWN: 3:11

Um,

SPEAKER_00: 3:12

So I never had a coach outside of what I could learn from the internet. So I think that started with, it actually started with a school project. So I was in school, I think it was seventh grade science class where you have to put your project together and you need pictures and you need all that. So I think, where can I find an example for the muscular system? And this is early enough in the internet where you still had good domain names. So I think I just typed in bodybuilding.com and it popped up and you start reading through the articles. You start figuring stuff out and they outlined, even if, even if, uh, you know, you got a mountain of junk in there, you find some gold nuggets, you know, within, within that Bible. And that's where my first introduction of knowing really anything about how to train came from. was reading that. And at the time, that and a few other sites kind of served as a hub where that brought a lot of different strength sports and a lot of different coaches and athletes together to share ideas. And that was a real general platform where you kind of get a high level of how people do things. And if there's something that interests you, they would direct you to go to their website and go read about them. So it really started off there. And then once you read through, you get a good BS detector of this guy's trying to sell supplements and this guy's actually giving good training advice. And you make your way into other websites and figure out different athlete logs of how they're training and the principles of why they're doing it. So at first, I just copied what they were doing. It was, hey, here's a program. Here's why I do this. And so just go into the gym, mess around, figure it out, look in the mirror. This is before you really had cameras everywhere where you could video and analyze your technique. And so you just screw around until you figure it out. And if you're young, that's really not that hard to do. You're not going to get hurt. You're not going to get injured as long as you're not doing anything totally stupid. And so you play around, you figure it out, you go back, you read what the guys with more experience, more knowledge than you have to say about it, because most of them have figured out these problems already. And then you apply at a young age, but all of these guys took years and decades to figure out. And so right from the get-go, I just did what the older guys said they would have done differently. So most of them will say, oh, If I could start over, this is what I would have done. Well, I just started there. So almost, I mean, almost every idea you're going to have, someone has probably already thought through it, practiced it, figured out if it works or what the pitfalls are. And so there's no need to really reinvent the wheel. You just, until you get to a really high level, you copy what all the people have done before you. Maybe with some tweaks, but it's almost going to look identical.

SPEAKER_02: 6:47

Yeah, totally. That's just, that's a remarkably similar path that I like saying bodybuilding.com forms, man. Like those were the, those were the gems. I would stay up until two in the morning, just reading and reading and reading. And like you said, you get the BS detector going, but I learned a lot. I think I'd, uh, Shutter to go back and look at some of my questions and posts and just be curious to see what kind of wacky stuff I was trying to figure out, gosh, like 30 years ago. But yeah, there's the shoulders of giants thing I think is a good way to sum that up. Like you said, somebody else has already messed it up plenty of times. You might as well learn from them and try and contribute it to your own stuff. So at what point, like were you doing mostly hypertrophy bodybuilding stuff back then or did you use that? I know it's bodybuilding.com, but there was a lot of strength type stuff on there. What was your training like back then?

SPEAKER_00: 7:39

That would be probably not really either. I mean, it probably started off more of a typical bodybuilding type of workout with a little bit of bias maybe towards strength and having a few things in there that were a bit more sport specific and not in the sense of because through that time I was only playing football and not sports specific of like, I'm gonna go out there and work on pushing a tackling dummy, but more so of making sure that the body parts are built in proportion. So if you're a football player, most of what you should be doing is leg work. I'm not gonna be going in there and doing a mountain of curls and then maybe some bias towards the energy systems and the time domains that are relative for football so a lot of the conditioning is short bursts with small recovery mimicking a little bit of what that looks like on the field but not out there doing you know really specific stuff

SPEAKER_02: 8:57

yeah okay and then to get to where you are now like you're doing some pretty impressive weightlifting feats, like just for context, like what are some of your, if you want to brag about yourself for a second, what are some of your big lifts? The

SPEAKER_00: 9:13

hardest one I've ever done was that 330 Isabel. That's by far the hardest one. The other ones were tough, but that was the one that was kind of the pinnacle in terms of a hard workout. Yes. And most of a lot of that stuff. So once I had, once I had gotten out of high school, I always wanted to compete in strong man. And so during college, I met a friend that he was competing and he was an intern at the university strength department. So he was working with athletes and the strength coaches there would let him sneak a little bit of equipment out and store it in our garage and And so we had accumulated various Strongman equipment, different barbells and stuff like that that we could train as a group. And so he's the one that first got me into Strongman saying, hey, there's this event coming up. And so we prepared for it. And so I competed in Strongman after high school. And I think it took about three years of actually competing. Then I became a pro. And when you get kind of to the pro level, there's really one of two options for you. Either all your focus is winning America's Strongest Man. Like you're only looking at the higher, the really high level competitions. Or you got to get fat again and compete as a heavyweight.

SPEAKER_02: 10:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 10:47

And so I don't want to get fat again. And at the time, I always thought weightlifting was really cool. I mean, I enjoyed watching it. I thought the movements were awesome. It's just something that's fun to watch. And I've always been a believer of, you know, strong when you see it. Like you watch someone warm up, you watched how they move. Like, you know, right off the bat, that person's really strong. And when you watch the weightlifters, they always just look the strongest. Like the flexibility, the speed, all those components, when you look at them, they look incredibly strong. And so... I started learning weightlifting. I would say seriously practicing it after I became a pro strongman because there's a pretty short window that you can effectively do weightlifting because you start losing the speed and the flexibility required for it. So it's not that once you get older, you're going to suck, but you're certainly not going to be at your best. Whereas in Strongman, you can continue competing at a high level for much, much longer. You got some guys that are in their 40s that are still animals, but you don't see any 40-year-old guys going out there and snatching with the young guys.

SPEAKER_02: 12:05

Yeah, right, right.

SPEAKER_00: 12:06

So I kind of shifted a little bit and started doing way more weightlifting just because I knew there's a time window right there to learn this stuff and be any good at it. And as I was doing it, I really knew how to train through powerlifting and strongman. And so I kept a lot of those same ideas and adapted them to weightlifting. So that's where a lot of those workouts like the heavy Isabel, the heavy kind of twist on CrossFit workouts and a lot of the ways to build technique came from having learned strongman And using just what I would consider at that time, using a little bit better tool to get that goal accomplished.

SPEAKER_02: 12:58

Yeah. Got it. Love it. So where does that bring you now? Like what's your, I mean, you're, you run a CrossFit gym, you're coaching, but you're also still doing some, what does your training look like? Where are you focusing on? How are you? Like, tell me about what you're up to these days. What's your focus on?

SPEAKER_00: 13:20

You know what? It's totally made up. There's not even a clear-cut reason of doing it. Once you've done something for a while, you do it just because that's what you do. So I've always been more of the belief that I prefer to having extremely short-term goals rather than building up and leading to something that's in the future.

UNKNOWN: 13:47

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 13:48

And the biggest reason is, you know, no matter what, you're going to have to bring it into the short term and execute on it. So it's nice to have kind of these larger long-term goals that you're leading up to just as a North Star. That's where I want to– that's the direction I'm going or that's where I want to get to. But when you can bring it down to the shortest time possible, which in a training context would be per session. This session I want to get this done. Pretty much all of my focus goes down to that. And that was something that I've done since I first started, which is almost 20 years ago. And that's because if you look at what does a really, really small amount of progress look like when you add that up over 10 years, most of the time it looks like you're not even making progress. And so when you add those up, though, you're going to be a world champion. But in any six to eight week timeframe, which is how a lot of people would evaluate a training block, it'll look like you made no progress. And so you kind of, I'm always looking at just on the day to day, like the per session, what is the goal of this session? What am I trying to accomplish? What am I trying to get better at just on this one session? And That kind of maximizes the opportunities when you look into the future. If you have someone that's really strong, you know, a huge back squat, huge deadlift, big bench, they run fast, they do all of those things, they can really do any strength sport. And it's not going to be a huge relearning process for them to switch gears and do something else. And so without like a specific competition to work towards, I'm usually looking just at like a three to four week basis. Like what does my schedule look like? Realistically, how much training can I get done? What kind of progress can I make? And always evaluating it on that basis. You know, what have the last three to four weeks look like? What does the next three to four weeks look like? And that makes my decision of what I'm doing this day.

SPEAKER_02: 16:13

Got it. So you're still, I mean, the generalist kind of idea, recognizing that you can get specific anytime you want, but remaining general is kind of the mindset you're typically approaching your own training with at this point?

SPEAKER_00: 16:25

Yeah, typically. So, for instance, in Strongman, and this is a thing that a lot of guys do, is they'll get overly concerned about, you know, being good at a specific thing. overhead movement and learning all the details of how to do that, which the skill will matter, but there's not really any situation where if you have a 200-pound barbell strict press that you're going to beat a guy that strict presses 300 pounds. Most of the strongman implements don't have enough whip to it, your log, your axle, your sandbag, all of those things. So if this guy outpresses you by 100 pounds, he's winning every single event in the overhead against you every time unless he tears an elbow or something. So up until you get to that point. Now, when you're comparing maybe 5% difference or 10% difference, okay, the skill is going to matter. Some other things are going to matter. But just being really, really strong is going to set you up better for than the really fine details of stuff. And really, if you bring up just kind of your standard overhead barbell strict press, all of those movements are going to improve. I don't need to plan out specifically, I'm going to train the axle today, I'm going to train the log this day, I'm going to train a sandbag press this day. And personally, I think that it's more detrimental than beneficial because that introduces so many variables to the training to be able to answer a simple question of, is this getting harder? That you don't have really any kind of progression to your training anymore because there's no way for you to look at these movements and know this workout on this day was harder than last week's, which was harder than last week's. So I try to keep it as general as possible. One, because I've got to pay for all that stuff. I've got to store all that stuff. I've got to plan around all that stuff. And that all gets in the way of getting things done. And so pretty soon you spend all your mental energy focused on making this perfect program instead of training really hard.

SPEAKER_02: 19:01

Yeah.

UNKNOWN: 19:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 19:04

I like that. I mean, just the intentionality in the session. Like, I think that's kind of one of the biggest takeaways I'm getting from you is like, just show up to every session with the intention of getting every single thing out of that session rather than, I think it allows for a lot of complacency. If you look at the training block and think, well, I've got eight weeks, like today I can kind of, I'll make it up tomorrow or I'll make, you know, tomorrow I'll try harder. Tomorrow I'll get more out of my session. I think like you said, like I said, what I'm getting from you is the intentionality behind every session and making it what you need to get out of that. So I think that that's great advice. It sounds simple, but it's really solid advice.

SPEAKER_00: 19:42

Yeah. And that's where, that's where this, this idea of, you know, what I call the 50 to one method is that started, well, it started out of investment theory or advice or knowledge. It was someone that presented that You know, there's the old principle of the 80-20 rule that 80% of your results are from 20% of what you do. But he brought up the point that if you take the logical conclusion of that, you're going to be left with the 50-1 rule because you can apply that 80-20 idea to the 20% of what you're doing. And so you'd be left with 64% and 4%. And you can take that again and to that 4% of what you're doing and you're left with 50% of your results is 1% of what you're doing. And so every session I look at, what is that 1% here that's gonna make the difference? And in a typical strength workout, you're looking at your top set of your main exercise. So on your back squat, if you're building up to one max rep set or multiple, you know, sets, you know, a five by five or something. If you're building up to a max rep set, it's that max rep set that is all the progress you're making. And not only is it the max rep set, but it's the last reps of that set. So really in my head, when I go through a workout, let's say it takes you 30 to 40 minutes until you're getting to that max rep set. I think of the workout really is one minute today. It's that one max rep set. The 39 minutes prior to that, I was just warming up and getting prepared for that right there. Because that cleans up the execution of everything that you're doing. Because now when you warm up, you're not thinking like, oh, I need to set a world record on the bike right now. You're thinking, I just got to get moving. All I care about is some blood flow, feel better. if you do any exercise or work prior to starting those back squats, you're imagining what that max rep set is going to look and feel like. And you're visualizing that 30 minutes prior. And then as you perform all those warm-up sets, you're doing it in the technique or in the style, the right tempo, the right movement, the right everything, as if you were performing those top reps, right? And it also gives you 40 minutes to go through that whole anxiety cycle before you get there. So you're ready for it when it happens. So if you have a goal like, okay, today I'm building up to eight reps at this weight. You've already gone through the panic. You've gone through all those feelings before you get there. You've been visualizing it for the last 40 minutes. Now it's a given that you're going to make it.

SPEAKER_02: 22:52

Got it. Yeah. I like, so this is, so it's not like, it's like not, you know, five by five and four of those sets are junk, not junk, but you know, it's just kind of what I like the fifth, the one out of, so yeah, maybe I should ask this in a better way. Put some context to what that looks like. And I think you just did, but like as a, rather than a, maybe as a, as a comparison, rather than a five by five, what is your, what does your design look like for a session? If we're comparing it to five by five.

SPEAKER_00: 23:26

I've done five by fives before, but I think a five by five is kind of the same thing. If you have a five by five, your first three sets are not that hard. Right. Yep. They're not easy, but they're not that hard. So to me, I'm looking at it as that last set of five is the most important. Yep. The first three, I want to perform at... the best movement standards I possibly can. It's like those first three, I already know, like, hey, this is not hard enough for me to have, for me to deviate at all on these sets. These should be perfect. The setup, the walkout, the whole movement should be perfect here. And I think you have a certain amount of mental energy for a session. And I'm not expending all of that getting to myself hyped up for the very first set. When it's like, I should be able to hit this. It shouldn't be very hard. So even on a 5x5, that means you're keeping your mental state low on the first one or two sets. Your third one, okay, now you're a little bit tired. So you really got to focus to be able to do it right. Fourth one, you're just getting ready. Fourth and fifth one, okay, now it's go time. Now this is the point where if I don't do this, I'm not getting stronger for this session. Those first three sets were for just me to maintain my strength, maintain where I'm at. These two are the ones that are adding strength to it.

SPEAKER_02: 25:04

Yeah. So does that allow more freedom in the buildup? So if you were to write a prescription for somebody, what does that look like in comparison? Or is that just more of a mindset thing?

SPEAKER_00: 25:19

It's a mindset for the session. Where the freedom comes from is when you take a step back and you look at a week of programming or a month of programming, then when you can identify those things that are really important, for someone that is, and this is the difference really, for someone that just wants to walk around every day that's really strong, your life takes priority. And you fit the training around what your life is like. If you have a competition coming up, then the training takes priority and you move your life around depending on what that training needs to be. So in order for you to perform your best on a given day, you have to be at a certain point, two weeks out, four weeks out, six weeks out. But if you don't have a competition where it's not about how I perform on this particular day, It's how I perform on any one of these days six weeks from now, whether that's a Monday or Thursday. You don't really care. So you have way more flexibility in that sense because when your life is too busy where you're not able to accomplish the full workout or if you've got to move to three times a week or you're on vacation, you have more time to train. It lets you know immediately what can I cut out of my training while sacrificing the least and where do I add which would benefit me the most. So if you got to go down to three times, if you normally train four to five days a week, you're out of town. For whatever reason, you have to reduce your volume. You know right away, this is the things that I'm going to get rid of. I'm going to get rid of this accessory work. I'm going to get rid of this skill work. I'm going to get rid of these things. But I'm going to keep the intense part. I'm going to keep that max rep set. On the warm-up, I'm not going to have all this skill work. I'm not going to have all of this practice getting ready for that top set. I'm going to do just what is critical. But when you view, you know, let's say an hour-long workout as if all minutes are of equal value, then... You cut the stuff that's really important, and then you keep all the stuff that's not that big of a deal. So it provides you flexibility where your deloads become reactive, where you're not planning them out ahead of time. Like, oh, I'm going to go take this week off. You're reacting either to how your recovery is going or what your schedule is going to be like. And so that natural fluctuation that most competitors will go through is where they're going to ramp up their training, they're going to taper, they're going to peak for competition. That's just ebbs and flows of what your life is like. Of, hey, this next month, I'm way too swamped. I'm going to train twice a week. This is all the stuff I'm cutting out. If I'm only training twice a week, that means the intensity is way higher. And so your whole busiest month of the year, that's where you made the most gains. Whereas a lot of times you would otherwise... come at the end of that and then be out of shape and weak and everything sucks. But that was your best time of the year. Yeah. And so if, if something frees up, you're like, okay, now I can train more than usual. You identify really quickly. This is what I can add to it. Like I'm going to extend the warmup and I'm going to do this stuff first because it's going to make the heavy sets better.

UNKNOWN: 29:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 29:07

Or when the heavy stuff is done, you look ahead to the following week and ask the question, what could I do now that would get me ready one week from now to perform better? And so if you can look at those most important aspects of the workout, then it gives you way more flexibility once you zoom out and look at a week or a month of programming, right?

SPEAKER_02: 29:38

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I've seen that so many times in the CrossFit space with just adding junk volume to add volume because they think people will think that's what they need to do. And then they lack the intensity across the important things.

SPEAKER_00: 29:53

Yeah, we have a member that she's moving to go to the police academy. So she's going to be gone for a while. And I don't think she's moving back here when she's done. But we had that conversation because she doesn't think that she's going to be able to continue going to the gym when she's in the police academy. And so that was what our discussion was, was when she's in the academy, she's going to be required to do a lot of things physically. They're going to require her to do a lot of running. They're going to require her to do other physical tasks. So we had that conversation of you don't need to be going to the gym, you know, three, four, five days a week. If you could do two and those two were of higher intensity and higher quality for where your fitness is currently at, you're gonna still be seeing progress. And realistically, if she can get one really good strength session per week, for her, she'll probably still see progress. So whether, really whether you're done with the heavy strength work if you go and do a whole bunch of accessory stuff just to get a pump and get more jacked, that's not going to be significantly different than going outside and doing a bunch of yard work and just making the yard work harder. There is a difference, but not one that you skip that and stay at the gym and then listen to your wife complain on the weekend about your messy, ugly-looking yard.

SPEAKER_02: 31:36

Yeah. Yeah. So could you walk us through a day at a week and a month, like just kind of back through a cycle? Like just, again, again, that's a big question, but just in general, could you walk through what that would look like? And maybe let's, let's assign an avatar, some goals, like what specifically this might look like for somebody.

SPEAKER_00: 32:02

Well, it's a, it's a little different depending on what the goals are. For someone whose primary goal is strength, it's really about three to four weeks, and it's not any different than what every other strong person does, which is going from lower weight, higher reps, and then building up to heavier weight and lower reps. So I would say the key difference that I've seen some people use and practice they maybe use it a little differently, is I assign all sets a score. And that score is an estimate of your one rep max. So if someone did a 300 pound back squat for 10 reps, and I only use these numbers because the math is really easy. That's supposed to be a 400 pound back squat. So if you do 300 for 10, your estimated max is 400. And I go off of the concept of relative intensity, where what matters is you being able to do something harder than you've done before. And so training is not different than getting a suntan. If you want to get more tan, you go out in the sun, you get a stopwatch, you time it. And it's very easy week to week because the sun's not going to significantly change, right? You have some clouds and other stuff, but it'll change a little bit, but not enough that it's going to make a difference. So when 10 minutes aside doesn't work, you go to 12 minutes and you go to 15 minutes. And training is not different than that. Where it becomes really difficult is that it is hard to standardize those things to know this workout was harder than this workout. And so... If I was going to look at like a four-week block, I could use one movement as an example. Week one, they're going to build up to a 300 for 10 back squat, okay? That set right there was a score of 400. That's how we know how difficult that was. Now, next week, you're going to do 310 for nine. And Every other set prior to that is going to be exactly the same. So you have the same overall tonnage. It's done at a higher average intensity because it's the same number of reps with just a tiny bit more weight. Plus you reached a higher peak level of intensity. 310 for 9 is harder than 300 for 10. And so that is sufficient to make you stronger. You provided your body with a stimulus. It's going to recover. It's going to adapt to that. And then the following week, you're going to do 320 for eight. And it's the exact same thing. It's higher, slightly higher tonnage, slightly higher average intensity, and a higher peak intensity, or whatever you want to articulate that harder set as. And that'll repeat for 330 for seven. 340 for 5, and each time that estimated max is going up a couple pounds.

SPEAKER_02: 35:37

Can you walk me through that math? You know what I mean? Like how you did 310 for 9, 320 for 8, or 3... Sorry, I think I screwed something up along the way. What's the math that you're... Are you using some sort of... You said overall tonnage, but... Yeah, walk me through how you got to those numbers as you progress it. I

SPEAKER_00: 35:56

just took... This is probably... Oh, this is when I was– from when I very first started lifting, one of the things that teenage boys will do is, especially on bodybuilding.com, they'll go type in the estimated one rep max calculator. Like, oh, well, I did this for this, so what can I do? And so I went and I looked at all the studies where they got that from. And so the top, I think, four studies were they measured all these athletes, figured out based on– their performances, you know, what certain percentages are as a, or what certain reps are a percentage of their max. So your three rep max is supposed to be 90%. Your five rep max is supposed to be 85%. And so I just went at each rep and I just averaged all the studies. So added them all up. 95% is supposed to be a two rep max. 90% is supposed to be a three rep max, 85 is supposed to be a five, and 75% is supposed to be your 10 rep max. Okay. And then just draw a nice little smooth line for the reps in between. But they basically all agreed 90% is your three rep, 85 is your five, and 75% is your 10 rep.

SPEAKER_02: 37:20

So for the 310 for nine, is the correlation there 75? Whatever that is. 77% for nine years, but you're walking your way up to one RM adding. Is it, is it a slight add of intensity or is that a, is that a expected rate of, you know what I mean? If the expected, if they have performed a 400 pound back squat, they are then doing 75% for 10, then 77% for nine, 79, 70, 80% for eight and, But you're not adding, it's not a manufactured slight tweak of intensity from those to grow that number. Are you trying to get them back to 400 or like what's a projected?

SPEAKER_00: 38:10

No, I'm trying to get them beyond 400.

SPEAKER_02: 38:12

Right, right. Okay. That's what I figured. Yeah. So what's the mechanism to get them over that number?

SPEAKER_00: 38:20

Oh, when they make that heavier. It needs to be for a number of reps that's actually harder than what they've done before. Okay. So in the sense of if I do 300 for 10 and then I plan to go heavier, I don't have a good way of saying this was harder than what I've done before. Right. So what ends up happening to a lot of people is they add weight, they reduce the reps, and then they come back and they squat 400 pounds again. Right. Because for six weeks, your workouts weren't actually getting harder.

SPEAKER_02: 38:57

Yes.

SPEAKER_00: 38:59

And so that difference of looking at it, of saying we're going to give all of these an equivalence of an estimated one rep max, now we can compare what you did for seven reps to what you did for 10 reps. And that works really well. when you're dealing with three to maybe 12 reps. Three to 12, it works extremely well. And you could use that. That's where the bulk of strength athletes live is in the three to 12 rep range. Every single method you're going to see, that's where all the strong guys spend most of their time in is in three to 12 reps. You can put a fancier name on it. Westside calls it the repetition method. So in that zone, it gives you a very clear-cut idea of understanding this is actually becoming harder. And that 90% and beyond, it doesn't quite work as well because you fluctuate too much on a daily basis where you might walk into the gym and 95% is death. Like one rep was everything that you had on that day. So your 10-rep max performance doesn't really fluctuate that much. I mean, I can always go in and I'll fight for that 10 rep max performance, but at above 90%, there's nothing I'm going to do that's going to get me that second rep. So once those percentages are light enough that your nervous system is not going to be the limiting factor of just how empty you are, but then not so light that this is really just conditioned at this point, it works really well where a majority of the strength training should occur, which is three, about three to 12 reps.

SPEAKER_02: 40:59

Cool. Okay. That makes great sense.

SPEAKER_00: 41:01

And then with, with that top set being harder when, so when you're way too busy, your workout basically looks like I'm going to build up to one really hard set. I'm going to pack my gym equipment. I'm going home. See you next time.

SPEAKER_02: 41:18

Yep.

SPEAKER_00: 41:19

you know you've provided that stimulus. And I've seen on TikTok and Instagram lately, like they're trying to bring back Mike Menser's ideas about training. And so stuff like this isn't new. This is stuff that guys were doing 40, 50 years ago. Menser was a big proponent. We need one really hard set. You have guys all throughout history saying, It's the intensity that matters. Dorian Yates, who was the first real mass monster, was known for not spending significant amounts of time in the gym because it was all about you've got to get to that higher intensity. And this isn't the only way to get there. Part of it is what people's mentality is. So if you know that you're a performer... Like when the pressure is highest, when it's time to go, like, you know, that's where you're at your best. This works extremely well. Some people do better with, I'm going to do something like a five by five, or I'm going to do a bit more weight. I can grind and force myself to do these things. So I can create that same effect by through multiple sets and really beating myself up. You can adapt that the same way, but in terms of efficiency and in terms of guarantee, I know that workout was harder than what I did last week. That's where it becomes valuable.

SPEAKER_02: 42:54

Yeah. Well, you kind of answered this, but who do you see this work best for? And I realize you just said the performers, but who should be taking advantage of this? Or who should coaches be programming this style for and utilizing this?

SPEAKER_00: 43:14

The people that I've seen perform best with it. And you'll get a feel for athletes' motivation. And so I've used it with teenagers. I had a teenager in the course of one year probably go from a 95-pound squat to a 300-pound squat. And... He was... I picked up on this pretty quick. He's the least... Family has like eight kids. I think he's the youngest. He's the least athletic. His older brother, who was in the program at the same time, does everything better than him in every single measurable way. But his brother just... He does enough. He'll work hard and he'll... push himself, but he does enough. The younger brother with just a little bit of a chip on his shoulder, his performance is not nearly as good, but he's giving a higher percentage of his effort. Like he's really getting after it. And so the way that I would use it for him is that I would write out a whiteboard and say, okay, we're doing this weight. This is your one rep max based on how many reps you could perform here. So it's up to you to decide how strong do you want to be. And so in that case, when you can look at it and visualize and see, hey, if I do one more rep, that means I can do this. I do one more rep, I can do this. His top sets were just way more intense. Instead of stopping at six reps, he's going to push for 10 reps. And so every week, each one of those workouts, he's going to squeeze out those one or two reps that he wouldn't have done otherwise. I mean, at first, he was two. I think he was 14 at the time or 15 when he first started. But like a lot of 14 and 15-year-olds with no strength training experience, they're kind of awkward. Like they haven't really figured out how to be stable and move correctly. And then once he figured that out, and then once he started really seeing a path where, hey, I've been coming here for this amount of time, I've gotten stronger, these things have gotten easier. Now when you ramp up that intensity, it was really about a three-month block that was like, whoa, dude, he's gotten so much better in these last three months. But then he's coming into the gym already asking me, hey, what is it that I got to do? Like, what number do I got to hit? So for probably six months, it was like a cattle prod, like trying to push them, trying to get a little extra out of them. But then when you adopt that in your head, now he's coming to me before we even get started, like, hey, we're going to do a max rep deadlift here. How many reps do I got to get? What do I got to do to be able to do this? But that's going to squeeze those extra couple reps every single week. And those one or two reps every workout, when you add that up over 50 weeks, that's a ton of progress in there.

SPEAKER_02: 46:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 46:47

And I would say the flip side of it is that because you normally fluctuate in terms of your abilities... meaning one day you feel like Superman, the next week you feel like Batman. On those weeks that you're Superman, it keeps you, it saves you from yourself. So on those weeks where it's like, man, you can really push and go as hard as possible, there should be weeks in which you hit that higher level of intensity, and it really wasn't even that hard. Like, oh... Shit, that's all I got to do today? All right, I'm going to pack my bag, and that sets the expectation of next week. So if you just hit an all-time best lift this week, it wasn't that hard, next week you should go into that session expecting you're going to do more, and there's no reason why I can't do that.

SPEAKER_02: 47:48

Yeah. And by that you're saying, are you saying that as a projected max, Or are you saying, and it could be both, but are you relating that as a projected max? Like saying, okay, I did, you know, conceptually, I was supposed to have done five. If my max is 400, if I did five, that would correlate to a 400-pound max. But if I do seven, that correlates to a 420-pound max, right? Like, is that what you're saying? So when you say best lift, it's not necessarily that you're, it's your new seven rep max best lift. It's your new one rep max as a correlate. I guess they might be the same thing, but you may not have ever done a seven rep max. It's more looking at the overall. This is now my new one rep max because of what I just did. Correct. Okay. Got it. Yeah. That seems super encouraging. I think that's, that's some, that brings it all a little bit together of like the single effort for the single session to as an encouragement, as an intensity barometer and intentionality spectrum. Like that makes a ton of sense. And I think it would just encourage the heck out of people to be able to see that and relate it to where they should be or could be based on what they just did.

SPEAKER_00: 49:07

Yeah, and part of that is it's really tough to get someone to train for eight to 12 weeks building up to a new one rep max. And nowhere along the way do you ever get to celebrate having gotten stronger across those 12 weeks. So you didn't get stronger all in that last week. That's the only time you're going to recognize it. You're recognizing it on a weekly basis. So when you have someone that's a beginner or even an intermediate lifter, the beginner is getting stronger every session. The intermediate is often getting stronger every week. But they only get to celebrate that every 8 to 12 weeks. So instead, and this is kind of a bit of psychology, like from a slot machine, if you can shorten the work and reward period, it's going to lead to repeating that behavior far more often. So if you can perform, and then one week later you're going to perform and recognize that, hey, you got better, okay, now they want to come back.

UNKNOWN: 50:08

Yep.

SPEAKER_00: 50:09

And then you want to come back and do it again. And then all of a sudden it's, hey, what more can I do? What can I add? What can I do differently? But if I got to wait 12 weeks and do all this stuff, you're not really motivated to go in and do a five rep max when this doesn't mean anything. This is part of this big, long, encompassing program building up to a max in 12 weeks. But if you can say, if today you hit that weight for five reps and then you can say for sure you got stronger from where you were before. Well, now they come in and do it. And so those 12 weeks, every workout's at higher intensity than it otherwise would be.

SPEAKER_02: 50:52

Yep. And I can see the advantage too here where you get the opportunity, like you alluded to, to put a deload week in if you notice their central nervous system trash, whatever else is going on in their life. Like if they're not able to perform where they are, probably expected to, like, you're going to get a reading on that right away. Like you're going to see it, right?

SPEAKER_00: 51:12

Correct. So you, you have the ability to make training an iterative process where now if someone, if someone's not doing the other things that support training, you recognize that right up front instead of waiting until they can't hit that new max.

SPEAKER_02: 51:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 51:28

So when someone comes in and performs poorly, then you immediately go back. Well, what led to this? Okay. Well, let's review the warmup. Maybe you're pressed for time. You took too big a jumps. You weren't really ready for that set. Yep. Okay. That wasn't the problem. Well, what'd you eat? Like when was, what was your meal before the workout? Okay. Well, the meal was good. That's, that's fine. But you trace your way back to be able to say, what is it that I can change for next week to be able to perform at that level again?

SPEAKER_02: 52:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 52:01

And now you're going to look at, Oh, well, I stayed up until 2 a.m. Okay, well, if you want to get stronger, you've got to stop doing that. But you can make those changes. If you're thinking of an eight-week block of training, I'd rather make that change at week three and immediately see how my actions are going to impact my performance in the gym than wait until week eight and When you're like, damn, I took eight weeks to hit five pounds on my, on my lift.

SPEAKER_02: 52:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 52:38

No, we'd rather make that change week three.

SPEAKER_02: 52:39

Yes, absolutely. I love it, man. That's great. And this actually, so not to go too far down a different rabbit hole, but I see this, we, And I have used the heck out of five, three, one. And I think a lot of people like when they're five, three, one is such a common program for people to use, but there's a lot of downsides to it. One of which is the looseness of the plus set. And what you've just told me is a solve for that, right? Like the, the, and Wendler says this in his books and all the things he's ever said, he's like, look, the magic is in the plus. Like you got to do extra work at the, at the plus set. Like it's three sets of three, the final set of three, uh three at 90 like you got to do more than that and i think that people hear them more than that and a lot of times they just blow it off quite frankly i see i think they just do three or they do four and they're like oh that was more technically i did the thing but to have a correlate to what that means to their max is brilliant i think that like gives a real clear indication of hey how like you said for your teenage athlete how hard how strong you want to get Like let's eke out these extra reps and correlate this to where you want to go with this.

SPEAKER_00: 53:55

Yeah, and Wendler– so a lot of what I do is really similar to 5-3-1. And even in Wendler's book, he will touch a little bit on that idea of using an estimated one rep max and saying, hey, when you go into the gym and you see that plus set, you should have a goal in mind of what you want to get to.

SPEAKER_02: 54:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 54:18

The difference is I started, and I know that he's written a bunch of times, that every time I went away from 5-3-1, my training was worse. And every time I did 5-3-1, it was going really well, and I fall into the trap of, well, if I just make this one change, it'll be even better. And he said, I change it, and it's not better. I just need to stick to this and be happy on that rate of progress. And the difference is Wendler wrote that program after he's really done competing in strength sports. Like, okay, I'm done chasing my peak strength and my peak ability. And so I think that 5-3-1 program is great for an athlete that's 40 or over. And you're looking at how can I squeeze in some extra progress where I can, one, If they're 40 and they've been training for a long time, they're already probably pretty strong. And you're looking more at the recovery side and the not beat yourself upside. And you take your wins where you can get them. And so when I started doing it, I was still a teenager. I was doing those same things, but I was 14 or 15. And so it's a little bit different application, even if the principles are the same and the fundamentals of the program are really similar. But in one case, you have an older guy that is, how can I not get hurt? How can I recover well? How can I still have time to go do other things and to fit in other more athletic training? Whereas when I started doing it was, how can I use this to get as strong as possible?

SPEAKER_02: 56:06

Yeah,

SPEAKER_00: 56:07

right. And so that plus set is a little bit more detailed in terms of what to do. And then once you figure that out, that's kind of the first step. And that takes a while before you've squeezed what you can out of there. And by a while, I mean like you should be squatting 400, 500 plus before you worry about the subtle tweaks. but the way I use it for myself is I add in RPE with it. And so the RPE gives me a gauge of how much I'm recovering. So you have an objective component, which is what is the score of that set? And we can just say that that score is 400. But based on RPE, I might say, okay, I know for sure I could have done one more rep. So it's an RPE of nine. So 400 is what I did. 410 today is probably what I'm capable of. And now I have a 10-pound buffer in there. And over the course of, let's say, six weeks, I'm going to slowly get rid of that buffer. And so at week six... I'm ready for a new max. So those early sessions in a training block is gonna be a pretty large buffer in there. I'm not gonna be near my peak intensity. I'm not gonna be taking things to failure. And there's gonna be a bit more volume. But then slowly as it works towards the end of that training block, that buffer's gonna be smaller and smaller until eventually I might have a week that I'm like, okay, that was a 10. That set of three was an RPE 10. I got nothing. There was no chance of another rep. Then I'm ready to hit a new max the following week. Got it. So that would be a more advanced application of it where you're using RPE to give yourself a good gauge of recovery and That will let you know how much assistance work can I put in? How much do I need to take out? It'll keep your taper and your peak a little bit tighter to know, like, I for sure am going to perform my best on this day. And so the fundamentals of that don't really change. It's just some small tweaks in there to squeeze a little bit more out.

SPEAKER_02: 58:57

Yeah. and a more comprehensive understanding of where you're at. Yeah, because at

SPEAKER_00: 59:04

first, if someone's only been training for a few years, it's not that they shouldn't start learning things like RPE and those things, but in terms of getting stronger, your RPE doesn't really matter. You didn't train hard enough. You didn't provide your body with a sufficient stimulus. And the absolute best way to to increase RPE would be to eat garbage and not sleep and don't drink any water. And then when you come into the gym, okay, I did an RPE of 10. Yeah. Great. Well, your workout was terrible. Yeah. It was, it was on every objective metric. It was worse than he did last week just because it felt really, really hard. Doesn't mean you're going to get better.

SPEAKER_02: 59:52

Yeah. Got it. Right. So are you managing this individually with athletes? Are you doing this generically with bigger populations of athletes? What does that look like? How are you doing this with your people? Because it sounds like there's an individuality that is kind of required unless somebody really knows what they're capable of or what they're at.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:19

No, we can fit a lot of this into– this is something most people at the gym will get an introduction to.

SPEAKER_02: 1:00:24

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:24

And so anyone in a standard CrossFit class that uses sugar wad and tracks their weight, they will look at it. And so anytime that a max rep set or something comes up, they understand the concept of if I want you to do this weight for this number of reps and this is why. And that cleans up a lot of their training. So people don't come to us and be like, oh, what can I do extra? What can I do differently?

SPEAKER_02: 1:00:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:55

Well, I told you, you need to get five reps. You stopped at three.

SPEAKER_02: 1:01:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:01

So before you add extra stuff, go get those five reps.

SPEAKER_02: 1:01:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:07

Then if you feel fine after that, you can add some extra stuff.

SPEAKER_02: 1:01:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:12

But then they come into class more motivated and ready to go for that class. And they're, they're treating each aspect of it for what its purpose is. So we don't have any warm-up All-Americans. And in fact, some of our people are a little too lackadaisical in the warm-up, which is usually not a lot of CrossFit classes. Like, you'll see people from the time they step foot in the door, it's an all-out war. Who's going to win every aspect of the workout? Yeah. Our people are taking a nap on the bike on the first round. I was like, okay, this is what's important. And so sometimes there'll be a little too laid back on those portions. But then they know, like, hey, this is the important part of the workout. And whether it's the strength portion, they've identified, hey, when I get to those heavy sets and when I get to the hard ones, that's what I need to focus on. I need to get that complete. Or If we're expanding that idea, we're looking at a 10-minute AM round. They all understand, hey, it's minute– between minute six and seven that all the magic happens, not those first two minutes. So don't come hot out of the gate and burn out. You're waiting for that minute six to seven. That's where your results are going to come. So instead of the one-minute rounds– quickly turning into two-minute rounds and five-minute rounds, they'll hold a consistent, steady pace and then really push and try to maintain that when they get to the hard portion of the workout.

SPEAKER_01: 1:03:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:03:02

But as long as they keep some amount of tracking through SugarWad and they record their sets, they're implementing that just as part of a regular class.

UNKNOWN: 1:03:17

Cool.

SPEAKER_00: 1:03:17

And the people who do personal training or some kind of personalized programming, I'll just spell it out for them and say, hey, this is what you're doing. This is why you're doing it. And so they're not going through it and figuring it out themselves. I'll just lay it out. Hey, last week you did this. This is what we're building towards. And maybe give them a little bit of look in the future. And if they're working with me more... on a closer basis, then I'll incorporate some of that kind of RPE type of stuff because I can see it. Like I saw that set, man. He had three reps to go or that one was looking a little tough. I think you don't have much more you could have given.

SPEAKER_02: 1:04:06

Yeah. Cool. That's awesome, man. Where can people find more from you?

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:18

Mostly through Instagram. Yeah. We set up a website, and we haven't gotten all the stuff transferred over, but we're going to keep that website as a repository of things because at first I just started putting it right to Instagram and typing it all out, and then after a while it starts getting too cluttered where you're like– Damn, I'm going to scroll through all this and get back to that one post to figure that out.

SPEAKER_02: 1:04:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:46

So we're in the process of moving that all to a website so that it's easily searchable. And you can see it in a pattern that makes a little more sense.

SPEAKER_02: 1:04:57

Cool. Okay. Love it. And you are at Wall Street Weightlifter? Yep. And you have a link tree, I think, that has all those websites in there or the resources in there, correct? Or not yet?

SPEAKER_00: 1:05:09

It will shortly. I'm going to change my links back.

SPEAKER_02: 1:05:15

Perfect. I'll let you know when this comes out. Maybe it'll be done by then. It'll probably be done this weekend. By the time you hear this, it's going to be up. All right, buddy. Well, thanks for doing this. This is awesome. I really appreciate it. That's great. I'm going to start using this with my people too, so appreciate it. All right. Thanks for joining us. Don't forget, you can join our group at strengthcoachcollective.com.