Critique of Traditional Periodization Models

Hey everybody, welcome to the podcast. I'm sitting here talking to my buddy all the way across the world in Australia, Luke Lehman. Welcome back, man. Nice to be here. This is good. This is weird. Last time we were sitting in a living room in Melbourne. Yes. And now we're halfway across the world. So man, and without blowing smoke up your butt, I'm very grateful to have you back because there's very few people who I actually enjoy having conversations about muscle building with because most of the time it's the same stuff. And I like to talk about people who are pushing the paradigm and challenging things and thinking differently. And as we were just talking about prior to recording, I said, like, I was very interested in hearing your thoughts on periodization and programming because, you know, I've been building a course and doing a mentorship and, you know, I spent hours and hours and weeks and weeks developing my own thought process, months and years, obviously, developing my own thought process. But this seems like, and I could be wrong, it seems like there's very few people that are doing it in their own way, right? They're just kind of following what everyone else does and as I said, modeling strength and powerlifting. And I love to explore how you approach periodization And I love to talk about your course and love to talk about how you mentoring coaches but I just getting into you started talking about percentage periodization yeah I mean everyone looks at the hypertrophy stuff as it's very I don't want to say it it's very myopic the way people look at it right and you know I think part of the problem is is a lot of the evidence-based community where if you don't see it in a study, it doesn't exist. And so everyone keeps repeating the same thing and everybody's learning things from the same places. So most of the time you're going to, with traditional periodization, you're going to see a percentage-based model or a rep range-based model, but that rep range-based model is going to be based on a percentage of one rep max. So whatever your one rep max is, then you can work down. And there's a lot of different rep max continuums. The one I used, I learned from Charles Poliquin and it's very easy to memorize. So that's why that's the one I teach. And it's within point, whatever number from what everybody else uses.