Powerlifting Prep and Recovery

So currently prepping for Pro Raw at the Arnolds next year. Fantastic. I will be there. It'll be good fun. But yeah, just chipping away week by week, session by session. How much rest are you getting? Are we talking in between sets or in between sessions? All of it. Yes. No, it depends. Like I'm still like 16 weeks out at the moment, so it's nothing too crazy at the moment. No timed rest periods. It's more so just like when I feel recovered, cool, go again. If that set moves like a bag of shit, rest a little bit longer. So question to you, and like you're, yes, you're a trainer and you're a coach and you're aware, you know, you can observe other people. How, I guess, acutely aware of your own sort of shortcomings when it comes to being able to tell yourself, okay, I need to take a rest or not? Do you keep yourself accountable to someone else? So I'm pretty fortunate. Like I've got a bunch of guys that like I train with at PTC in South Melbourne. Deacon. Yeah, Deacs, Demir and a few of the other boys. Like they're all coaches as well. Like they're all very good powerlifters. It's the kind of thing if I go in and I'm moving like a bag of shit, like they're pretty good at going, what's going on? Like you're not moving the way you should be. I mean, like, this is the fun part about coaching myself as well, because I'm pretty switched on to, like, if I'm having a good day, if I'm having a bad day. Sometimes you just need to, like, take your ego aside and be like, you know what, today's just not my day. I'm going to go home, I'm going to eat some food, I'm going to drink a fuckload of water, and I'm going to have a nap. Like, especially being 16 weeks out, if I was going to push now for the sake of trying to satisfy my ego and I hurt myself, that's not fucking good for me. So, like, just going back to coaching myself, like, I obviously know my body pretty well. I know what it likes, what it doesn't like. Volume? Do you like volume, Ben? Upper body, I do. Lower body injuries flare up a little bit, which is... What else flares up? Do you really want to get into that? I just building empathy bro I love it At least smell my beard again I think twice is more than enough the fact that I did it once was kind of weird do you want to do it a third? come on you need one second I'll say no on air Benny's getting so much love right now I'm not going to look at you for like 10 minutes that's what they all say there we go the reason I bring this up is because there was an ungodly amount of volume in one of those one of those programs one of those phases that i saw that you were doing um i remember a conversation with you about it and i remember uh thinking uh that may not be the best thing for you at that particular time so at the time like i was going through quite a bit of like personal stress i had a bunch of shit on my plate i was like you know what like you know we're all as we were saying earlier like we're all human like i'm still a being at the end of the day even though i'm a competitive powerlifter i couldn't handle that yeah it was too much stress on top of the current stress i already had it was just a compounding snowball effect that was actually detrimental sure as opposed to my approach which would have been okay cool like let's go in let's do a little bit again like that whole minimal adaptive volume give me enough that still causes some adaptation but again like if i'm going to go in and i've got a heap of stress going on in my personal life and i go into the gym i'm like fuck i'm actually really anxious being here is it really going to be beneficial the reason i bring this up is because you would you were working online no face-to-face no and i mean the personal was taken out of that that coaching arrangement that's always going to be the case with online training is that takes away the personal aspect of it yeah um however like in terms of like that stress management component like i feel and luke was saying that like it's a it's an element of the industry that i think it's overlooked massively like people be like oh just eat well get enough sleep and you'll be fine it's more than that yeah like are you going and getting your massage work are you gonna go see your physio you get your treatments done like are you doing the stuff that you need to to recover harder than your training like as powerlifters like we all try to push pretty bloody hard especially in the competition like we're like okay cool we want to achieve these numbers we need to push so hard to get into it you know people don't recover to match the training levels like even with the gen pop guys i train you know they all come in they like they see me compete the way that i do they're like oh well i want to do the same but like i say to them like you know how many hours a week you trained like oh maybe three or four i'm like cool i train between sort of 10 and 12 how many hours a week do you spend on recovery and like what do you mean exactly i'm like how many weeks like how many hours a week do you spend on recovery and they're like, oh, I don't know. They come up blank. How many hours a week? Oh, hours. Yep. I'll include massage work, whether it be... Masturbation. Well, that's just a given. That's part of my actually workout routine. How do you think I get forearms like this? I have no grip issues. You never let go. Never. That's a pretty aggressive masturbation. Go hard or go home, Luke. That's what they call choking the chicken. Or go home and go hard. Oh, yeah, that works too. But yeah, like, so... I completely lost my train of thought on that one. I'm just confused. You were talking about rest, and you were talking about how many hours in the week you spend resting. You'll get like jam-packed guys, and again, they might train three hours a week and then wonder why they're not progressing at the rate that you are. It's like, well, I train for three times as many hours a week as you do, and I spend three to five hours a week on recovery work alone. And people are like, well, what do you mean by recovery work? I'm like, cool, like something as simple as stretching. Like how good is stretching for fucking recovery? It's great. It's one of the most underused. We've done that in our sessions. Sell it to me. How good is stretching for recovery? You've smelled my beard, right? Would you like me to chime in here? You can give us an anecdote. Now, Ben and I use an expression, feeling like a bag of dicks. When the nervous system is literally on the fritz, there was one session recently I thought, fuck, I can't not go train. I'm sure there's something I can do, but I'm telling you, my head was somewhere else. My nervous system was on the south pole. Seriously, I was in no shape to train. And Ben did a bit of ART. He held your dick in contraction, pressed on it, and then stretched it. Yes, exactly. Got it. What else do you do? We gained an extra couple of inches, didn't we? It's all about the inches back. That's right. That's right. So it worked, clearly. But no, Ben, we did some stretching. We did a little bit of therapy, a little bit of treatment. We did a bunch of, you know, it was all within that realm.

It was all within, you know, active therapy, treatment. Restorative work. Restorative work. I think, okay, I think they don't want to tell you they were doing the Dutch rudder. Do you know what that is? No. Never heard of the Dutch rudder? Okay, so you grab yourself and then Ben grabs your wrist and he uses your hand to jack yourself off, but he's actually making the motion go. Right, like it's like assisted. Somebody else. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sounds alright. So you can still be heterosexual, but you're facilitating the process of recovery. I'm all about giving. That's it. That's all very restorative. I'm here for personal services. I'm here to help people. I know. Oh, do I know. Oh, yeah. So, Mack, I'm bringing this back around. I'm turning this ship back around. Just so everyone knows, the bottle of whiskey is almost gone. Oh, fuck it. It is, too. It really is.