There's seemingly no end to the "evidence based" coaches out there nowadays making all sorts of claims about you should train, backed up by scientific data. Have you actually read any of the papers they cite to back up their claims? It turns out, there are numerous problems with the field of scientific research, from the actual design of the experiments to the reporting of data, the publishing process and peer review, and, last but not least, skewed incentives for the people carrying out research at every level. Dr. Bradford, who earned a PhD in Pharmacology and Molecular Cancer Biology from Duke University in 2004, walks through the problems with the modern scientific process, and why professional research is the not the same as science.

Weights & Plates is now on YouTube!

https://youtube.com/@weights_and_plates?si=ebAS8sRtzsPmFQf-

Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com

Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana

Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream

Email: jonesbarbellclub@gmail.com

To quote Mark Rippetoe, "women are not a special population, they are half the population." In other words, women fundamentally train for strength the same way that men do -- the same principles of progressive overload, using compound barbell lifts that target the whole body, and nutritional principles apply. There are a few exceptions, however, and that's what Dr. Santana and Coach Trent address in today's episode.

How Birth Control Can Inhibit Strength and Performance by Lea Genders:

https://www.leagendersfitness.com/news/how-hormonal-birth-control-can-inhibit-strength-and-muscle-development

Weights & Plates is now on YouTube!

https://youtube.com/@weights_and_plates?si=ebAS8sRtzsPmFQf-

Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com

Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana

Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream

Email: jonesbarbellclub@gmail.com

Dr. Santana and Coach Trent wrap up their mini series on post-novice programming with an important discussion on understanding why you missed reps. The novice linear progression cannot last forevever (or else we'd all be squatting 1,000lbs!), and as the saying goes, all good things come to an end. This means that at some point, you'll miss reps. What do you do then? Some people have the impression that missing reps means it's time to change the program, and that's not necessarily true. Often there are recovery issues at play that can be addressed, allowing the lifter to extend progress on the novice linear progression with a few simple tweaks. In today's episode, Dr. Santana and Coach Trent walk through the The First Three Questions outlined in the Starting Strength method, and a fourth question, related to the stress/recovery/adaptation model.

In the Starting Strength article The First Three Questions, Rip identifies three important questions to ask yourself when progress stalls:

1. How long are you resting between sets?
2. How big are your jumps in weight between workouts?
3. How much are you eating and sleeping?

The demands of heavy barbell training are high, and many trainees miss the mark on one or more of these questions, especially a few months into a novice linear progression when every lift has become hard. Coach Trent adds a fourth question to the mix: what other stressors are going on in your life? Psychological stress affects physical perormance, especially when it becomes chronic stress. Especially for busy adults with lots of responsibilities outside the gym, you have to account for life stressors in your recovery and programming.

Weights & Plates is now on YouTube!

https://youtube.com/@weights_and_plates?si=ebAS8sRtzsPmFQf-

Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com

Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana

Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream

Email: jonesbarbellclub@gmail.com

Dr. Robert Santana and Coach Trent explore the Stress/Recovery/Adapation cycle (adapted from Hans Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome) and how it serves as a guiding model for programming decisions in the intermediate phase of training.

Weights & Plates is now on YouTube!

https://youtube.com/@weights_and_plates?si=ebAS8sRtzsPmFQf-

Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com

Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana

Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream

Email: jonesbarbellclub@gmail.com

The novice linear progression (NLP, or LP for short) is a fun time in the training career of a lifter. Never will you make as much progress -- and as fast! -- as you will during LP. It's also brutally hard, especially toward the end. Nevertheless, it comes to an end for every lifter, and people often spin their wheels trying to figure out what to do once the simple A/B program stops working. In today's episode, Dr. Santana and Coach Trent discuss some basic principles of post-novice programming, and point out that at all stages of the game, the main goal is that the weight must go up.

Weights & Plates is now on YouTube!

https://youtube.com/@weights_and_plates?si=ebAS8sRtzsPmFQf-

Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com

Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana

Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream

Email: jonesbarbellclub@gmail.com

For a variety of reasons, the predominant form of exercise in popular culture is endurance training. Endurance is valorized in the media, with sports like swimming and running receiving prime position in Olympic broadcasts. Military films often depict the hero enduring through miles and miles of trackless jungle and urban wastelands. The overarching experience of endurance training is pain, and pain is relatable. Everyone suffers, or will suffer, from pain in their life. It's even in the popular saying: "no pain, no gain."

Strength training, however, does not elicit the same pain response that endurance training does. Strength training does not burn or ache, it is an entirely different experience. Squatting a heavy set of five with a barbell feels like being crushed by a Mack truck; you must overcome an intense amount of pressure in your whole body, while pushing as hard as you can against the weight. Your body dumps adrenaline, increasing your heart rate and blood pressure. The set begins long before you step on the platform too. Hours or even days before the event, the anticipation of a heavy, all-out set of squats gives you butterflies. Strength training is, essentially, engaging with and conquering a fear response.

For this reason, strength training is a harder sell in the fitness community. It is socially acceptable to pound a trainee into the ground with endurance training. People will pay dearly for it, in fact! Just look at Crossfit, where they frequently claim "your workout is our warmup." Yet, if you want to build a strong, resilient, muscular body, learning to face your fears and lift heavy barbells is a must. It's a useful skill in the gym, and in life.

Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com

Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana

Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream

Email: jonesbarbellclub@gmail.com

You've tried the templates in the bodybuilding magazines, from the bodybuilding sites. You've tried lifting like the big jacked, ripped dudes on social media... and it hasn't worked. You don't look like them, and your growth has stalled out. For some reason we accept that in sports, we shouldn't expect to perform like pro athletes without elite genetics and many years of training, but in fitness, we expect to acheive the look of people with outlier genetics, years of training, and, often, performance enhancing drugs as well. In today's episode, Dr. Santana and Coach Trent explain why basic barbell training is the answer to a better physique for the vast majority of trainees -- and that includes you!

Compound lifts -- the squat, bench press, overhead press, and deadlift -- work the entire body with very heavy weights if you progressively train them, that is, add weight to the bar on a regular basis. Because they utilize so much muscle mass, they can produce a stimulus for growth that no isolation exercise can match, and many of the best physiques in the world were built, at the beginning, with a lot of basic compound lifts. A solid base of strength in these four lifts forms of the base of the pyramid for body composition. A guy that works hard to get his squat to 315 and bench to 225 will have a decent set of legs and chest! Once that is achieved, he can then bring up his weak points with a small selection of assistance work. The same guy squatting only 185 is wasting his time trying to do any assistance work -- he simply needs to drive his squat up.

So, if you're tired of not having a muscular physique and "looking like you lift," then re-dedicate yourself to acheiving some baseline achievements on the main barbell lifts. Then, when it's time to introduce some additional exercises, you'll have a much better base of strength to perform them with (i.e. you'll be able to do those lifts heavier, and thus get more out of them) and you'll have a much better idea of where your actual weak points are.

Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com

Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana

Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream

Email: jonesbarbellclub@gmail.com

Happy New Year! To kick off 2024, Dr. Santana and Coach Trent discuss the biggest ingredient to success in achieiving your fitness goals -- consistency. All the talk about programming and training splits and macros is futile if you aren't taking action consistently to meet your goals. Many people struggle with consistency, however, so they dive deep into the factors that influence consistent action: environment, motivation, and discipline. Dr. Santana points out that every trainee has modifiable and non-modifiable factors in their life, and optimizing the things you can modify, while setting expectations around what you cannot, is important to creating a productive environment.

Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com

Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana

Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream

https://www.jonesbarbellclub.com