Sustainable progress in any physical endeavor, particularly in areas like powerlifting and personal enhancement (PE), hinges on the principle that recovery must be given equal importance and intensity to training itself.
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Get your ass down. Get the [ __ ] down.
You are in my video this whole time. You
want the biggest piece of advice that
people literally pay me for? It's this.
If you cannot clearly articulate exactly
why you need something in your program,
take it out. If you can't clearly and
precisely articulate why you're going up
in weight or pressure or time, don't do
it. You simply have not earned the right
to do advanced techniques when you're
too undisiplined to just use an extender
or hang consistently for two months
without switching programs and doing XYZ
[ __ ] you read about on Reddit or buying
whatever [ __ ] brand new shiny tool
some influencer or affiliate link
because they get paid to do so. So,
since I've been coaching, I found myself
saying a couple of things very
frequently. I have said the same thing
to most of my clients so many times that
I'm sure that they get sick of hearing
it. One of these little pervasisms is
this. Training and recovery must exist
at an equal volume and intensity for
progress to continuously occur. If I go
down in PE history for one thing out of
all the things that I've done, I hope
it's for this idea. For those of you who
don't know, I'm a competitive
powerlifter. I have total elite in three
different weight classes. And I have one
of the biggest squats ever performed at
242 lbs, which is 876 pounds in
competition and 95 in training, even
though nobody cares about training
because gym lifts don't count. My
longtime training partner, who was a
very successful college athlete,
jokingly or not, asked me once, "How do
you outs squat, bench, and deadlift me
when I've been training for longer than
you? I spend more time in the gym than
you every single training session. I'm
heavier than you and I take more drugs.
I said, "That's easy. I outreover you."
At that period of time, I had two entire
days out of my training week where I
would train mobility and flexibility. I
would work on movement patterns and do
prehabilitation to bulletproof myself
against injury. Why is this relevant to
PE? Because most of the guys that come
to me only come to me after they've
tried it on their own and they've
plateaued or can't gain anything. The
common theme among most of them and 90%
of the people who come to me that have
stalled or haven't made any progress at
all is this. They are typically doing
too much to cause damage and nothing to
heal from it. Training doesn't make you
grow. Recovering from training makes you
grow. And few if any of the guys that I
have worked with truly understand this.
The guys who I see that have 15minute
warm-ups and then do high tension
extending using infrared heat massage
guns, gouacha boards, vibration, bundled
stretching, bundled extending, pump
assisted clamping, rapid interval
pumping, and of course an ADS every day
for 13 hours are exactly like my old
training partner. they are simply doing
too much for the level of recovery that
they create. So that's true. Oftentimes
I would leave the gym after working up
to a single set of a big squat and doing
literally nothing else. No back
extensions, hamstring curls, good
mornings belt squats, just nothing. I
should mention it does take a couple
hours to actually warm up to a 900lb
squat, but that's not the point. So what
am I saying? Am I saying that all of
those PE exercises that I just listed
off as well as all the muscle building
exercises that I just listed off are
useless? No, that's not what I'm saying.
I'd often come back into the gym on
another day and train those body parts.
And I do in fact recommend some of those
techniques for some of my PE clients. My
point is this. You only grow from what
you recover from. So there is no point
in doing more work to create strain when
you do little to nothing to recover from
it. So often I find myself cutting 30 to
60% out of guys routine in PE completely
out and then they grow. So why does this
happen and what does this actually mean?
So one of the core principles of
successful PE practices is being patient
enough not to unnecessarily add [ __ ] in.
guys start coaching with me and they
want to know when we're going to add
vibration or bundle extending and
infrared and rapid interval pumping. And
the answer is we'll add it in when you
need it. If you cannot clearly
articulate exactly why you need
something in your program, then take it
out. You just haven't earned the right
to do advanced techniques when you're
too scatterbrained to just extend or
hang and pump for one or two months
consistently without switching from
program to protocol or doing XYZ that
you read on Reddit or buying a new tool
just because you saw some YouTuber say
it was or some affiliate link it because
it makes them money. I literally
manufacture PE gear for a living and
I've never even suggested that buying
any of my [ __ ] is a prerequisite for
growth. So, do you want to know what my
powerlifting program was like? It was
the same [ __ ] over and over consistently
for 13 years. No Instagram shoes, no
[ __ ] that came with a discount code or
affiliate link. Most of the training
that I did was detailed in Soviet
strength manuals from the 1950s and
1960s. None of it was new. None of it
looked cool on Instagram. None of it
even sounds particularly exciting. My
point is entirely this. Our training and
recovery have to be of equal importance
for us to progress. When your recovery
fails to meet and exceed your training
stimulus, you will fail to grow. So, I'm
interested to hear your thoughts about
this. I will likely make another video
about this and go into specific
protocols that I use to assess fatigue
and overtraining in my clients along
with the interventions that I use to
actually accelerate recovery when we do
discover a deficiency. If you're
interested in seeing it, please like and
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