Acceptable Technical Deviation and Failure

Yeah, so what I'll usually tell clients is we have an acceptable deviation from technique and that's also gonna be dependent on what we're doing. So if it's a beginner, they get stimulation just from walking into the gym. They don even have to do that much Just walking in the gym and doing a set even at a high RAR they going to grow now at some point as you become more advanced and your training age goes up you going to have to go you need more stimulus so you're going to have to go a little closer and a little closer but the difference is with a beginner if something goes sideways they can't they usually can't recover so if they get too far off and they keep they do a junky rep the next rep gets a little more junky than a little more junky. And the next thing you know, the bar falls off their back. So it's like, all right, let's create a percentage range here. So when you feel one rep that feels significantly different than the other ones, we're done. Once you become more advanced, you go, okay, you got two or three grindy reps that you can go through before technique is going to really fall down because the more advanced you get, you can stay in the pocket better. Like that's the thing, Like they have less fear of the lifting. And when they stop in a movement or they slow down, they can usually grind it up without getting too far out. So that's the way I'll usually do it. So like, and I look, something I learned from Andre Benoit was like, you get one shitty rep, like, but not too shitty. Like you don't want to hit 10 reps. And that 11th one is just all over the place. Okay. We're done by that point because the goal is to get, you know, as close to failure as possible. And to me, it's as close to technical failure. So, you know, people talk about task failure and all this other, you know, they come up with all these new terms. I just say technical failure. Be stuck in the moment of your lift. Don't worry about what I'm doing. Worry about what you're doing. Feel the lift. How does it feel? How's the speed? How does your foot pressure feel? How do you feel in space and time? And I try to get them more conscious of getting an understanding of spatial awareness and where their body is and what the weight feels like. so then when they feel a rep that's a little off okay i think that's it all right cool because we can always add another set if we need to get another stimulatory rep we can add another set or like let's say it's a back squat maybe we just use that for general strength general hypertrophy but we're going to follow that off with maybe some hack squats where you're more you have some external stabilization you can full send it on that and you're not likely to get hurt unless something like a catastrophic accident happens and then throw on a leg extension so now you have like kind of a good global strength movement general strength movement of a back squat something like that now you go to a machine movement where you have more stabilization you can full send it to complete failure even beyond and then you tidy it off with some knee extension and that's a pretty solid workout yeah i guess like one thing was it what's going to ask you about as well as like um I guess the process before we get under the bar, right? So I guess like my approach to warm has always been pretty short and quick. Efficient, I call it. So I've always pretty much just like came into the gym. If I had to do any kind of movement prep, like say, for example, if I felt like my hips are tight, I might do some like single leg gordials, hip airplanes to kind of get some access into internal and external rotation. but you know it's not that i just get underneath the bear and like you know start with 20 kilos or body weight squat 20 kilos and just work my way up however i do quite often find that for a lot of people that approach doesn't work a lot like all that all that well uh especially if they are kind of maybe having a job where they're like century trade today they're not moving all that much and definitely for the people who are just like new to training and like you know i've been training since been 15 so you know that could very much be all i need to really kind going to perform well but for somebody who's just kind of starting off in the gym like you know or kind of like our average individual who's walking in what type of things would you be considering for that person before they get like underneath a squat bar yes there's a lot the first thing are you actually warm so is it five in the morning and you just woke up and you had a coffee and a shit and then got in the car and drove to the gym probably a good idea to get warm so maybe get on a treadmill or get on a cross trainer and go for like 10 or 15 minutes and just try to get a little bit of a sweat. Like don't try to turn it into a marathon, but just get the joints, just get everything, the muscles warm and ready. The second thing is, you know, if we, if we get under the bar, let's get on the bar that I basically use the movements as their own warmups. So get under the bar with just the bar and see how that feels or get under the bar with like 50% of your first work set. See how it feels. If it doesn't feel good, then we're probably going to do something else. So this is where stretching can actually help, even though people go, Oh, you can't stretch before you train. Well, if you can't get into the position for the movement and it's either, well, we do a different movement or we find a way to get into position. So if you, if you are like married to the idea of doing whatever exercise it is and you can't get there, well, maybe we can do something that's going to help increase range of motion. Is it going to affect how much load you can use on a bar Yes but it a it a paltry amount It like you losing what five or 10 big fucking deal If you take it to failure who cares You providing the tension anyways So you know we use something like what we came up with was backloaded structural balance, where we might do a couch stretch. We might do a kneeling hip flexor stretch, just get, get the quads to calm down a little bit. So they're not fighting you on the way down. And we find that it's very effective, but usually if they've been pre-qualified for a movement, unless they've like not been in the gym for a couple of weeks or they've been sitting at a desk a lot they shouldn't have any problem just warming up like general warm-up and then using the movement to warm yourself up but when you go back to like beginners or people that have a long layoff let's say your idea is to do a back squat today and you get on the bar and it looks junky you can't hit depth you're all over the place maybe the back squat's not a good idea right now Let's figure out some type of other triple flexion movement. So maybe we try some split squats first and just see how you go with that. Spend a few weeks doing split squats, get everything nice and loose. Use the couch stretch and hip flexor stretch with it as well. And then go to phase two, add your back squats in there and see if that's cleared all that. But the problem is people get married to married to exercises and they're like, I have to do this exercise. You don't like you can find if it's not working today or it hasn't worked for a few sessions. it's really easy to just make some type of similar but different substitution that allows you to move in the same movement pattern because we can always go back to that exercise. People see stuff on paper and they go, I have to do it like this. They look in their app and they go, okay, I have to do this. No, no, no. If that movement's not safe today and it's not working and your hips are a bit grindy or your lower back's grindy, let's find something else that still hits everything in a similar manner than what you're looking for, especially if it's bodybuilding because, again, bodybuilding is just put tension in muscles. It's like if you want to think about the most caveman fucking sport you can do, it's bodybuilding. It's like everything works. If it's sports performance, we have a different conversation because one of the things you ask is like, what about training myths? Like you have to do this. Well, if you're a powerlifter, you have to bench squat and deadlift. There's no way around that. So, yes, you have to do this. If you're a weightlifter, you have to snatch and clean and jerk. there's no way around that but for everything else the bodybuilding physique stuff general health and fitness there are no rules of what you have to do there's just there's probably good things you should do but your options are a lot more open when you're talking about things that are very general in nature like that yeah i think the you have to do these exercises or assumed exercises that you need to do by a lot of people are you know they are the classic barbell lifts and what i do think that like we should all have the ability to be able to perform them because god if we can all we can all remember the lockdowns yeah and how being able to actually move in like that kind of uh that time like that really such a lot of people so if you were only were doing like leg press leg extension and then all of a sudden you have to learn how to back squat you know yeah it's a good it's a good skill to have we had a lot of like during lockdowns we had a lot of new clients that came over because um some of our colleagues that were training them that they didn't have any equipment and those colleagues only knew how to use barbells dumbbells cables and machines so now they came to us because we understand gymnastics and calisthenics training so we ended up training get training a lot more people that way because we they didn't understand how to manipulate a program when you don't have any equipment at all yeah i was working as a personal trainer in like a commercial gym so like a lot of the classes i would have been teaching would have been you know classic uh like pump classes with very very low weight so like from that my programming would have gotten pretty creative if you still like be able to kind of use different kind of training variables other than just load you know to still kind of give people effective programs and it definitely improved like my skill set a lot as as a coach and like to be honest my business actually did quite well sorry sorry to everybody else out there who had a bad time during it but for some of us it was good time um but um yeah like they kind of the need the need the need to do exercises you made a really good point there in regards to like you know you couldn't just switch to something else if it feels better on a day and the exercises programmed feels worse or even like another kind of context for this is like you know you're training you're training at that like 6 a.m period right and go to the gym the gym is rammed and the exercise you're meant to do is is like you know the machine's full or something like that right like if it if you can't do it like a machine press you'd give a dumbbell press to go or you'd give a single arm dumbbell press to go like you know it

just has to be okay what type of muscle am i using what type of movement pattern am i using here and like you know how can i load that if you're not not able to do your cable lat raises and take up the dual cable stack you just do dumbbell lateral raises so like you can use in in all contexts whether it's like a mobility issue where something doesn't feel good that day or just like you know you need to get in a certain type of movement pattern but the exercise again the machine is taken up you know what type of what's the next best option to this of course just take a tiny bit of like uh education knowledge but like you know if you're a coach they will be able to give you like different options and that's something from time to time i'll do you know for people who are in these kind of situations i'll write down like you know alternative exercises besides the actual exercises yeah 100 it's like i mean i have clients that live in the middle of nowhere. They have a squat rack, adjustable bench, plyo box, weightlifting set, couple of kettlebells and some dumbbells. So it's like, they don't even have access to a gym. So most of the stuff, most stuff I actually write for our online training, our general online training, because we have one-on-one stuff. And then we have just general templated stuff for people who don't want the cost or want to train themselves. And I write all of that stuff for barbell and dumbbell, because there's not a gym in the world you're going to go to that doesn't have those two things. Now, if somebody does sign up for those programs and they're in a massive, fully kitted out gym, cool. You've got all the toys. Great. This is a physique program. You're doing machines, right? Because if you want to do physique, there's no real inherent reason to do back squat, bench press and all that, unless you just really like it or you're like, I want to bench squat deadlift and I want to bodybuild. I'm like, cool, like we can do that. But they have to have options for that. yeah yeah having the options on your program i guess is the as you said it's going to be very much down to what you have available like um last year i was living in canada and i was training in ever hear pure muscle of fitness no no it's like it's kind of like the gold's venice of canada it's like 36 000 square foot gym they have about 20 leg presses in one room and like you know jesus they've they've every machine that you could think of and they have like multiple multiple of them but like that type of gym they're like you know as big as it was and no matter how many people was in it you always were able to do the exercise that was on your program because you're just like every single one of those machines whereas like now the gym in live in spain and like you know like most gyms has one leg extension one leg press which is a bit of a a bit of a change and like now that i'm doing bodybuilding i guess i'm trying to follow my program as best i can i definitely find it i'm waiting a lot longer for uh for equipment and whereas i used to do powerlifting i go to the squat rack and nowadays nobody uses squat racks nobody uses bench press nobody really is using free free weights again that comes back to the people getting too much from just bodybuilding and just just machine-centric muscle-centric and movements and i think a lot of people as a result they're kind of like they're probably missing out on some things but that's like definitely one thing that i used to always really appreciate about about doing the powerlifting training is that like you go anywhere in the world and not have to worry about like you know not having the leg extension with this certain resistance profile that i will use because then i can track my progressive overload or whatever like that right i guess like um one thing with with the with being able to do a lot of the barbell lifts too is i i i find there's there's a good cross transfer to your ability to push harder on machine-based movements or like other other movements too i think it allows you to kind of access a different level of intensity that definitely when you go over to a leg press just feels a lot easier doesn't matter if it's the same or p or p then the squat feels different or P10 on leg press.