Internal vs External Stability in Squatting

I think from a training perspective, I've got a saying, like if you're looking at bodybuilding, you're sculpting, right? You're doing, you're making a biological sculpture. If you look at how someone makes a big statue, they take a big piece of granite. So they hit, they hit a quarry with a piece of dynamite and they make a big fucking rock. So the first thing you should do is just put on raw size, just take time building everything big. And then what's the next thing a sculptor does? they take a big chisel and they start chiseling out pieces. So now once you've built the base, now you can start looking at where your weaknesses are and maybe you need to bring your arms up, your legs up. So you prioritize that. And then once everything starts getting in the balance, then you take smaller chisels and you start tapping away at stuff. And as you tap away at stuff, you start seeing where you have more weaknesses that you then have to rectify. But I think that... So does it just look like getting fat? Does it just like get as big as you possibly can no absolutely not that's that's the one thing i was about to say next you you don't the fatter you get uh and now here this is something i can't prove yet but uh it makes sense to me right so if we look at the ways that we trigger anabolism part of its uh part of its insulin and and growth factors stimulating its receptor getting amino acids in the cells but the fatter you get the more inflammatory chemicals you're going to create of course And those inflammatory chemicals are going to desensitize the insulin receptor and other growth receptors. So you get to a point where the bulking gets too far and you're too fat to get big without drugs. And a lot of the guys that get big and they're a little bit fatter than they need to be, like some of the world's strong men and some of the big bodybuilders, people don't understand. They're taking drugs to override that process. But, you know, if you're looking at it from a purely physiological perspective, you don't want to push yourself to the point where now you're not growing correctly or the right tissue. You're getting big, but it's not the big you want. So you want to make sure you don't get too fat. I think that, you know, once you stop, can't see the shadowing of your abs, you probably need to do a mini cut. Right. So I think once you start getting close to 20%, and that's being very conservative, not being conservative, being very liberal with it, I think people probably shouldn't get much above like probably 16, 17% before they need to cut a few percent off. And what's crazy to me is it's so easy to cut a few percent of body fat off. You can do that in two or three weeks, especially if you're coming off of a big bulk where you're set at a perfect time to lose weight. There's no reason to push into the 22, 23, 24%, which a lot of guys do. And I think they're in denial about how fat they are, which is easy to do when you look really good in clothes. And you look massive in clothes. And people are commenting on how big you're getting. And then you don't think to look at yourself. And then one day you look in the mirror and you're like, oh, shit, I've taken this too far. And you look down, you can't see your dick anymore. Like, you've gone too far. True story. So speaking of training, do you have an approach to how you might choose exercises for someone in that scenario? Meaning, are there certain ones you think like, hey, you need to get really good

this, this, this, and this, if you want to build that. Yeah. I think, you know, getting good at the, at the basic stuff, um, getting good at squat pattern, getting good at pull patterns. I mean, it's gotten really trendy these days. I don't know about your view on this stuff. People are like, oh, you know, you know, front squats, not great for bodybuilding back squats, not great, great for bodybuilding, just use machines and all that. But realistically, it, to me, it is, um, it's taking a very myopic viewpoint of the stuff and the thing is like some of the biggest growth stimulus stuff you can do are these big compound movements and as far as keeping the body if they're done correctly the body has made them do those patterns um i've got a very specific um response to that and i think it's i mean it's the most logical i've ever uh come up with and so you you know people as well as i do and i can think of someone offhand that we both know but i won't mention names who can let's say someone can do a nine plate hack squat super strong like unbelievably strong crazy leg extension um but they don't squat let's say they get a nine plate hack squat but they're doing a two plate squat right what does their hip mobility look like what does their spinal mobility look like you know but without even having to to see it you know someone who can if there's that big of a differential between what i can hack squat and leg extension what i can squat by definition you know my hip mobility is shit and you know my spinal mobility shit. We know that. So the way I view that is internal stability versus external stability, right? So external stability with a hack squat and leg extension, I have a machine or apparatus there to stabilize. Therefore, the musculature of the hip, pelvis, and spine isn't required to do work. It's just turned off. So I'm getting really good at this extension pattern. I have nothing at the hip that's able to stabilize. So the quad obviously originates on the hip. So if I want to generate stability at the origin end, I need to have the muscles there working. So if I have that much of a differential between a squat and a hack squat, I know your mobility is going to be poor. I know your spine is going to hurt. I know your hips are going to hurt always. Like these people are going to constantly get injured. So what I view the necessity of squats, lunging, and front squatting is whether or not, irrespective of the fact that they're a good or a bad exercise for muscle building, to me, it doesn't matter. What matters is, do I have the ability to generate a near equivalent internal stability with my musculature as I can external stability with my apparatus. Because as those things scale, I'm going to have improved internal stability. Therefore, I'm going to have improved mobility because I have to have mobility to access the position or otherwise I can't squat. So when I see someone that's got a big differential there, I'm literally going to pull them off the leg extension in the hack squat and go, hey, you're not allowed to do that anymore. You got too much horsepower, not enough steering wheel right so you know your alignment's going to be broken if because we hit we hit the gas pedal something's going to explode and so that's kind of how i view the necessity of squatting and front squatting again i think it's a useful thing to do for um for muscle building for some people i would definitely argue that that hack squats and leg extensions are better as far as direct isolation to a muscle but it can't be in isolation it has to be both of them growing in tandem yeah and the thing is like in the last five years i've gotten into the manual therapy side of things so i do faster stretch therapy i do massage uh stretch neurostem all this stuff and the bodybuilders that are the most fucked up are the guys who don't do full range of motion and they never do squat pattern they never that it's always on a machine or that's just junky form. So, and you know, the, the old, like the, you, you were talking about this well in Melbourne, talking about like a muscle centric versus movement centric movement. And I've always done kind of the Paul check thing of isolate before integrate and looking at that thing. And you know, it's, it's just a matter of semantics. We're both saying the same exact thing. And so I look at some of this stuff where people are talking about the intention training and just origin to insertion and things like that, that's good. But the problem is that that's not how the body works. So when you start looking at fascial lines and how things work in concert, you're going to be limited on how much weight you can use with that type of stuff, which is going to limit some of the growth stimulus. And you're going to create dysfunction at some point that you're going to have to fix later because let's say you're doing like a lat specific row. If you're doing that, That's great. But if you do that too much and you don't get all the other muscles around the scapula and the low back and the thoracic spine and the cervical spine, if you don't get those to move with it, eventually that muscle is going to dominate something and throw something else off. Now you're injured. Now you can't train or now you're in pain and that increases sympathetic drive, which limits your recovery. So there's a lot of other factors into it. So I still love doing more athletic based movements for bodybuilders to keep their body tip top and moving like it supposed to But then we'll supplement that with some of the more specific things like the leg extension or a last specific pull down or whatever you're going to use for that stuff. um