Beyond the Buzzwords: Unpacking True Strength Training

On the first episode of the "Strong Principles" podcast, hosts Rob Dela Cruz and Zack Bragg, both from Vero Strength and Conditioning in Vero Beach, discuss the distinctions between "real" and "fake" (or ineffective) strength training.

Rob, owner of Vero Strength and Conditioning for 16 years, and Zack, his head coach for the past five to six years, highlight the common misconceptions in the fitness industry, especially with the rise of boot camps and franchise gyms that often misuse the term "strength training." They emphasize that many programs marketed as strength training are, in fact, more akin to cardiovascular conditioning.

Identifying Ineffective (Fake) Strength Training

Conversely, ineffective "strength training" often features:

• High Reps with Poor Form: Performing a large number of repetitions (e.g., 15-20+) quickly, without proper tempo or tension, primarily leads to conditioning rather than strength gains.

• Lack of Sufficient Rest: Short rest periods between sets prevent full recovery, turning strength exercises into a cardiovascular workout.

• Circuit-Based Workouts with Light Weights: When exercises are strung together in continuous circuits with light enough weights to maintain constant movement and heavy breathing, the body receives a signal for conditioning, not strength.

• Overwhelm and Plateau: Individuals often get initial results from these methods but quickly plateau because their bodies are overwhelmed by the volume or are not receiving the correct signal for strength adaptation.

• Focus on Fatigue over Progress: The idea of pushing to muscle fatigue or failure in every workout, as seen in some programs (e.g., Mike Mentzer's "Heavy Duty"), is generally not sustainable or optimal for the average person and can lead to overtraining.

The hosts conclude by emphasizing that while there's a time for speed and different training modalities (like metabolic conditioning or "Metcons"), understanding the principles of effective strength training and prioritizing proper form, intention, and rest are crucial for long-term results and avoiding injury.

Rob (00:00)


Rob (00:00)
This is our first episode of Strong Principles, and we're basically putting it together, a podcast for local individuals. Me and Zack were talking about it a while ago. The reason why we put it together was that there was no local podcast, especially in fitness. That's what most of us we're going to be talking about.

Larry (00:19)
Yeah. And so we're located in Vero Beach. You're Rob?

Rob (00:22)
Yep. I'm Rob Dela Cruz. I'm the owner of Vero strength and conditioning. I've been around strength training and conditioning for 35 years. I've been training people for about 25 years, and I've owned this facility for 16.

Zack (00:37)
Yeah, and I'm Zack Bragg. So Rob and I work together. I've been his head coach for the past five or six years, but been doing a long time, about a decade. And yeah, I've just been hitting my feet running. So I saw him a lot on the floor and handle a lot of our personal training. I also manage all of our coaches. We all tag together with our programming. But my main setup, my main niche, you could say, is a rotary-specific program that we run out of our facility at VeroStrength. We target tennis players, golfers, baseball players, anything that's rotary. That's been my main stay for the gym. We're working with a lot of different athletes on athletic and rotary training.

Rob (01:18)
Zack's been with me since he was 14 years old.

Larry (01:20)
That's awesome. I'm the guy with the dad bod.

Rob (01:26)
But the most experienced when it comes to this.

Larry (01:29)
Yeah, Yeah, as far as audio and that thing. But yeah, so I've known Rob for a long time. When Rob started the gym, actually, that's when I was in shape, not in a shape. And I was actually helped Rob a couple of times, did a couple of sessions, and yeah, life got in the way.

Rob (01:53)
Here we are. We'll do one podcast and just dive deep into all our backgrounds and stuff and going into it real deep.

Zack (01:59)
You're a You're the pivotal piece to this, though.

Larry (02:01)
You're the pivotal piece here. Yeah. I think today we want to talk about real training versus fake training, right?

Rob (02:08)
Yeah. What we're going to do is we're going to dive into actual strength training and what it really looks like, because there's a lot of misconceptions that we run into all the time. As fitness is starting to get more popular, you start to see a lot of boot camps and chains start to open up, and we also start to see a lot of different combinations of things. But they're starting You want to use strength in their name because that's a buzzword now, basically. You want to use strength in your name. It was basically what Functional Fitness was 10 years ago. Everyone put in their name, even if you're not really doing it. We're here to really explain what actual strength training really is and what makes it really effective and what's ineffective strength training.

Zack (02:52)
I think what Rob said is the main thing, and with me, because I work with mainly clients now, a lot of one-on-ones, is the misconception is just from their backgrounds. And so they come in and you tell them, we're going to do strength training, and they start running right through a workout. It's almost basically cardio. And so that's what a lot of the gyms and a lot of the facilities that we see are just training. They're not training proper strength. So I think getting an actual understanding of what that looks like, what's required, is important for everybody in order to build muscle.

Larry (03:23)
Yeah, I agree. So basically, if I'm hearing you correctly, you're saying a lot of people, what they're doing is they're They're doing, let's say, a movement like a bench press, but then they're also throwing in a row and just making it more of cardio rather than focusing on the actual strength training aspect of it?

Rob (03:45)
Yes and no. So what's happening is as fitness is starting to grow, franchise models are getting popular. There's a lot of intensity and there's a lot of movement. So what strength training truly looks like, and there's different types, and we can run into it, but what strength training really looks like is is you're doing a strength exercise. And it's not the exercise because everybody's doing squatting, pressing, everything is. It's the intent and the way it's laid out. So let's just go with a classic five reps of five sets of five reps of just a bench press. Two minutes rest between. You have warm up sets, you build up, and you have this rest built in. Now let's go to something that's not strength training. 30 reps here, 20 reps of something, and you're moving through it. It feels like something's going on, but what you're really doing is basically doing condition it. That's what we run into a lot. Then if you throw in a cardiovascular machine, now you're definitely running into more conditioning than you are into strength training.

Zack (04:53)
Yeah, I don't think it's necessarily... So like what you mentioned there, if somebody pairs a bench press with a row, that's actually a really salt. That would actually be a really solid strength program if somebody followed that. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have to focus all in one muscle group. Actually, what we mostly believe in is movement patterns, not necessarily specific muscle groups. So if you came into our facility and we showed you up to the board and took you through a workout, we wouldn't say today we're training chest. We would explain today is a strength day. Here's the phase we're in. We're running this phase for 4-6 weeks. Here's what we're working on. The reason behind that is so that way, A, there's some novelty with Training, so you can phase your training. But also we're focusing on just the movement pattern, getting really good quality movement patterns. And so for your example of doing a bench press with a row, that would be okay, but it's more so the intention. So like Rob was saying, so if you went into a bench press with a row, We had somebody had a really light row and really light bench press, and they can do 10, 15 reps, and they're just moving back and forth as quickly as possible.

Zack (05:54)
It wouldn't have the same stimulus on the body that we'd need for hypertrophy or hyperplasia. It would really just more of a signal of conditioning. It's more so how much tension can you create when you're doing it? How much rest do you have when you're doing it? We can talk more about what good rest periods and how to build tension properly looks like. But it's not exactly the exercise. Really good programming can put together a grouping of exercises and get you a better stimulus than just doing it randomly. But if you were to take somebody who is brand new and just picked an exercise and did proper strength training with them with a proper rest, the proper intention, you could pair it with another exercise, and they'd see benefits from that. Eventually down the road, you want to get them to more programming, but it's not exactly the exercise, more just the intention.

Rob (06:39)
Yes, straight training is actually a lot of neurological. Basically what it is, is there's a lot of practice. To get stronger a lot of times, it's not only that you're physically getting stronger, like all the things of bone density and muscle getting stronger, tendons and ligums, but you're getting better at the movement, too, and exercise. When you put strength training exercises, for instance, a squat, a press, or whatever you're doing, and you start adding a lot of reps, or you're comboing them through continuous circuits, then you're going to start pulling the actual signal away. Then that's when it gets The body has a mixture of signals, and it starts turning into more conditioning.

Larry (07:19)
When you say signal, you mean today, right? I'm going to use me as an example. If I do squats, my knee just balloons up, right? My left knee, specifically, constantly. And it could be multiple things. I feel like I'm a desk jockey by day, right? Because I work from home. I work in a desk. I sit in a desk. So I feel like it's basically a flexibility issue for me. I feel like it's either my feet, because my feet, when I walk, I'm basically like this, right? It's horrible. And so I have that going for me. And then I could tell that my ankles are tight. I could tell that my calves are tight. And then in turn, it's just the hip bone connected to your knee bone scenario. And so it's just a chain of events that basically screw me. And really, at the end of the day, I just got to get up and stretch. But is that what you mean by signal? Like the more you're doing-So what I mean by signaling is the body works off the signals.

Rob (08:26)
So you go and you create a stimulus that you're doing something. Then it sends a signal to change, to either get better at it or break it down or whatever. Change the tissue, yeah. Yeah. But what you're talking about, we work in movement patterns most of the time. I'm not married to any exercise. But The six fundamental movement patterns is squatting. You got to sit and stand up. You got to be able to lunge, and that's basically going backwards, forward, walking upstairs. You need to be able to hinge. You need to be able to basically bend over and pick something up. You need to be able to go ahead and press overhead vertically or horizontal or some version. You need to be able to pull vertically or horizontal, and then you need to be able to carry something. When you're talking about squat blows up your knees, one is we take a look at your movement pattern, what's going on, and two is what version could we do? Could we box squat at a higher box that it wouldn't do that and we can create strength, and then start going a little lower from there or working there, or you might just be sticking with a box squat the whole time.

Rob (09:27)
But with that, now we're sending the squatting signal. Properly. Yeah, properly to get better.

Larry (09:34)
That makes sense.

Zack (09:35)
With you, and again, it goes back to training movement patterns properly, like what Rob said, first, we would take a look at what is your movement pattern now. That's why we think it's so important that you don't just focus on legs. Most trainers, or I don't want to throw that in anybody's mouth, but a lot of trainers, what they might do is they might say, okay, well, squatting hurts your knee. Let's not squat. Let's squat extension. Let's ham string curl.

Larry (09:56)
That's what an orthopedic surgeon would tell me.

Zack (09:58)
That's what they would tell you.

Larry (09:59)
But It takes it for yourself.

Zack (10:00)
The five foundational moves has a squat in it, and we do it in everyday life. That's a movement pattern we have to do. Now, what happens if you have to sit in a chair, if you go to pick up your kid off the ground, whatever you do, you have to use that movement pattern. You can't quad extend your kid up to your shoulders. A lot of times, they just try to wean away from these movement patterns, and they just focus on the muscle groups. Yes, does that send a stimulus for a change in tissue, maybe more bone density? Yes, but it takes away from you as a human being what you should be able to do. Also, you're not getting the actual full benefit of what strength training could be for you.

Rob (10:37)
Yeah, we can dive in. We'll dive into a little deeper, like with machines and then free weights and everything else that works. But Working on movement patterns, what it is, it means that I'm not married to any specific exercise. Like I said, in strength training, everyone's doing kettlebell swings, goblet squats, they're lunging, TRX rows. But it's like the way it's formatted and laid out that's going to make it strength training, which is going to create a stimulus for adaptation. A lot of people get confused on what's going on. What I see happen is in the beginning, when people first... It's movement quality. You got to be able to move. That's why we're looking at the movement patterns. It's once those movement patterns look pretty good, then we can start adding a little bit of load, which is going to send a bigger signal. Then once we do that, you start to get stronger, then it becomes more effective. But what happens in the beginning, a lot of times, one, their movement patterns aren't really good, or maybe they're not very strong, or it just depends on who it is. When they're doing a strength workout, they might feel like they're not doing enough.

Rob (11:39)
Then what you see is like, Oh, I'm going to go jump on a bike after, or I just don't feel like this is enough. In an actuality, it's not in the beginning, but once we get you strong enough, it's going to be. And the thing is, is to hang in there, because if you don't do that, what happens is when you go and do more, is you can overwhelm your body's ability to recover, or if you threw in some conditioning, then now you're blunting the signal.

Larry (12:08)
That makes sense. So that's in the bane of good or real strength training, right? What would be fake in that scenario?

Zack (12:19)
I'm glad you brought that up. I was just about to say, let's talk about what fake training would look like.

Rob (12:25)
For me-When you say fake, I like to say not so much fake. It's just maybe It's less effective or ineffective for actual strength training. Yeah, because like I said, a lot of people are using the word strength. But when an actual person that has been around and doing strength a long time, it doesn't look anything like strength training. It a lot of times gets masked as conditioning.

Zack (12:46)
Yeah. If I have a client walk in the door, you can almost tell right away if they're set up to contract properly for strength training, and I'll use that word, or if they're set up to be able to get more out of less weight and less reps. That's the first thing I'll look at. I see it a lot in both men and women, but a lot of times in women, and it's mostly because they come from maybe an athletic background or maybe they come from another gym where they're trying to move through reps quickly. The first thing that I think a bad strength training workout would look like is what does your tempo look like on your reps? If you're moving just quickly through all your reps and just moving the weight and you're not creating any tension in your body. If I do a row, trying to engage my lat. Now, I can take my arm and pull it, and there's a bunch of other muscles that I can get to pull the row. I could use my shoulder, I could use my bicep. If you're just moving through the weight as quickly as possible, there's no tempo to it, there's no tension to it, we're not going to hit the lat, or it's a very low chance we're going to hit the lat.

Larry (13:49)
When you say row, you mean like the actual- Like a dumbbell row or something? Dumbbell row. Yeah. Not the row machine.

Zack (13:53)
Not the row machine, yeah. So let's talk about a dumbbell row or even a cable row, a barbell row, any of those.

Rob (14:00)
Rep ranges are all over. We would say that. What Zack is saying, but it's when I see higher reps, then you see the actual movement patterns start to break down.

Zack (14:13)
It breeds a lack of tempo, too. If you have 15 reps, if you give a client 15 reps, they're thinking, 15 reps, I got to get through this. Then they just start ripping through the weight. There's a good saying that you should be able to make the first rep feel like the last rep. A lot A lot of times, trainers will just give them, I'll give you 20 reps because on reps 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, then it'll start to burn. But if I can teach you how to properly make sure that that first rep, you feel it in the lat just as much as you do on the last rep, okay, now your timing is good and your tension is good. A good strength tempo would probably be two seconds up, two seconds down, three seconds up, three seconds down, somewhere in there. Would you agree?

Rob (14:51)
Yeah, it's under control. One thing we want to look at, too, is your principles of strength training mixed into whatever you're looking at, whatever program it is, whatever franchise model, whatever. When you're looking at the principles, it's like, do we have progressive overload? They're like, okay, well, what is progressive overload? It's like, okay, are we progressing this exercise from week to week? Is it a similar exercise or at least a movement pattern? In progressive overload, it's like we can add load, which is great. That's really important. We can add reps, we can add tension, we can add complexity of the movement, the Change it to make it a little more complex or a little harder. Those are all really important. But one of the most important is, are you getting better at that movement pattern or that specific exercise from week to week?

Larry (15:43)
Yeah, that makes sense because I'll be honest with you. Specifically in dumbbell row, I just rip right through it. Because I just think like, Oh, yeah, I just got to pick it up, put it down. And so my tension is one second, right? Yeah. Up A hand down, right? But in theory, I see what you're saying. We're like, two seconds up, two seconds down. And that's really going to be what's testing your strength. Because a one second is more of... It's really more of a jerk rather than a lift.

Rob (16:16)
Yeah, don't get me wrong, there's time to move fast. Yeah, exactly. There's time to move fast. We have speed, strength that we work on, but it's how it's laid out. Exactly. And so when you start getting into, let's say, let's get into a group program. So you got the latest franchise model that you're getting into, and now you're going there and we're heading there for 45 minutes. Hey, this is our strength workout mixed with our cardio, and you're doing 45 of this, and we're doing 45 pushups, but 10 of them are halfway decent. The rest are falling apart. I'm under extreme fatigue, and I'm breathing really heavy. Once you start breathing really heavy and start moving and the weight is light enough, your body thinks that it's actually conditioning. You could be there doing jumping jacks, or you can be doing whatever the weights, but it is not getting the signal to get stronger. That's a bad misconception that most people don't understand. What happens is everybody gets a little better at everything in the beginning, and then you plateau, and then you see them, they don't get any stronger. The movement, the quality even starts getting worse.

Rob (17:15)
That's what we tend to see a lot of times.

Zack (17:18)
Going back to his point about the programming, and so are these indicators in there of what a good strength program looks like? Is their tempos laid out? We oftentimes put what the tempo is. What's the intention We use an RPE scale, and so that's a 1 to 10 scale rate of perceived exertion. That's a good way to figure out your weight. Because most of the time, you get somebody who just comes into a gym, they don't know what weight to use, but they can gage 1 to 10. Okay, this is about a seven. This is how difficult this is. We'll write an RPE scale in there. Then the other thing is, we start out most of our clients with one on one training so we can teach them how to properly move, how to properly contract. I say the words tension and contract, basically, can we get the proper muscle groups to fire on any given exercise that we give you? I would say that those are the three things that I look for most with one-on-ones and with classes is, are we reaching the right RPs? Are we at the right tempos? And is our movement pattern, the tension, how we contract, just how good is your technique, how good is your form on any given exercise?

Zack (18:19)
Is it good? Is it sufficient? Is it of the best quality? So that way then you can start getting into some more advanced progressive overload or whatever the program turns into. But I think, in my opinion, a good strength foundation has to have those three indicators. If you don't, then you might just get the wrong stimulus.

Rob (18:37)
Yeah. Programming is really important. It is so important in the way the workout is laid out. A lot of times you'd be so surprised Realize, especially advanced coaches that have been around a while, how simplistic the workout is, but how effective. That's where you're really going to see a coach's education and knowledge. You're going to walk in and you're going to see a typical strength, and it's like, it's three exercises. It's a squat, it's a push, it's a pull, and then they carry for the four, for maybe midline tight in. That's it. You're like, What? That's five reps, five sets of these three moves, and we're just going to move through that, comparative to a jumbal of 20 different exercises with 30 reps. Completely different.

Larry (19:21)
Yeah, I could see that. I definitely want to touch on something because trying to get back into it. I started a I'm so used to doing the Metcons and all that other stuff. I'm going back to foundations of, all right, let's just get back to strength training.

Rob (19:37)
Yeah, when you say Metcon, you're talking about metabolic conditioning, which you're talking about. It could be a combination of different things. They call it mixed modality training. You're doing a combination of basically a circuit, and you're moving through it fast.

Larry (19:48)
Yeah, exactly. Now I'm like, all right, let me just slow things down, lift weight. My goal is to just get some strength back, right? Yeah. So what I started doing is I downloaded a app by Arnold Schroer-Sneakers. It's called the pump app, right? I was like, It's a perfect time to talk about this. So been at it for a little bit off and on because I've been traveling a lot in life. Anyways, worked out yesterday. And it started off with an incline, incline bench, followed by a row, dumbbell row.

Rob (20:28)
Was it supersetting? No. Okay, so single-single. What was your-Three-minute interval.

Larry (20:33)
So three-minute rest. Nice.

Rob (20:35)
In between each one. And then what was the... What is it called? Reps and sets.

Larry (20:40)
Prescribed, it was 12, three sets.

Rob (20:44)
Okay. 12 reps, three sets. That's Rock solid. Yeah.

Larry (20:47)
The back, the dumbbell row was 10, three sets. Everything was three sets with this guy. It's like three-minute rest, two-minute rest for the dumbbell row. Then we moved on to an awkward shoulder press that I've never really done, but I was like, I'll do it. We said at the end. At the end of the bench, everything was dumbbell, by the way.

Rob (21:11)
What was the awkward shoulder press? Was it called the Arnold press, was it?

Larry (21:14)
I don't know, but you're hanging, and then you bring it up like a jerk, like a clean, sorry. And then you press.

Rob (21:22)
So basically it was a dumbbell clean and press?

Larry (21:24)
Yeah, but sitting down.

Rob (21:27)
It's a sitting... There's a sitting, clean, and press. Seated. Yeah, seated.

Larry (21:31)
That's what it was. I was like, All right. I've never done it before, but sure. So I did that. Again, three sets of 10. And then we moved into... I want to say, if I remember correctly, it was maybe curves and then triceps, and then it was planks.

Rob (21:57)
Okay. That's how I did it. Arnold's Arnold's app is going to be solid.

Zack (22:01)
Yeah, I was going to say, you could have just told us you just sprinted backwards, but it was from Arnold. I'm not going to talk shit about him.

Rob (22:06)
There was no way we were going to-No, but the thing is, let's go into rep schemes and sets. I'm going to start out with five by five. You got five reps of five sets. That's a very classic strength training, reps and sets. It does two things. It does one that it works towards muscle building and also works a lot towards It's like this middle level. Then we go down and we're going to go five by threes or five by two. That means you're doing five sets or two reps. That's high percentages of load, but that's really geared to strength. Now let's go above fives. Then we got our Classics. You can have five by sevens, but you normally go, we'll go three by tens, three by twelves, two by 15s, two by 20. You start getting up to the higher ranges. Those are all classic. And what you were doing, they're basically giving you some of the classic-It's a good base model.

Zack (23:00)
Yeah.

Larry (23:02)
Honestly, that's what I felt. So you do upper body, lower body, and they go through different classes. Right now, I'm in the intermediate class.

Rob (23:13)
So is it always three minutes rest?

Larry (23:15)
Pretty much, yeah.

Rob (23:16)
Okay, because the thing is, and we'll get into the rest, so why do we rest? Since you mentioned the three minutes. We'll put a minimum of a minute 30, depends on the exercise. We usually say two minutes, the three minutes at least, and it depends on what we're doing, the demand on the body. But strength training has got more to do with the rest than it actually does the exercise. Because you start doing that same, you would say your whole workout, the same thing, and you don't rest, you still start moving through, and you start circuit-based in it. It's not strength training anymore.

Zack (23:49)
The body responds to the rest period, responds to the strength work, too, but it responds to the rest period. And the stimulus is just not going to be the same. The contraction is It's not going to be the same without the rest. So to your point, that's why when you said it had a three-minute rest in between, I was like, nice. Actually, you could add that to the fourth intention. So if you're walking in a door at a gym or you're looking at a program on an app or whatever it is, and you're trying to identify, is this going to be a good strength program for me? That base model is really good. What Rob was talking about, these sets and reps, is it followed? Is it five by fives or five by four? Is it five by threes? Then does it progress you into three by tens or three? Whatever that looks like, those are good base model numbers that Rob talked about. But then does it have those indicators? Okay, yeah, there's set rest periods. Two to three minutes is what we would say is a minimum for strength training. Okay, yeah. So it has 2-3 minutes in there.

Zack (24:37)
Great. Does it tell you the tempo? Then does it tell you the intention? So I think, yeah, exactly what Rob said. I think that app would be great.

Rob (24:47)
Yeah. And the thing is with the rest, too. It's like, well, why rest so long? I don't feel like I need that much rest. So you got to remember, with strength training, it's neurological. And so it's basically like practicing. But if you think of the way the nervous system works and fatigue works, is video games. You go from red to full energy green. So three minutes, I would say around two minutes, you're starting to get into the greens. You start cutting it down shorter, you're in the reds. So your body is not fully ready neurologically, even to go on and do the demand again and get the same outcome from it. So there is a time to short and rest, but that's usually when you get pretty advanced. That's not before. And usually people start short and rest before.

Zack (25:26)
And why do they do that? Because they feel like they're not You're not doing anything out of the exercise.

Rob (25:30)
Because they're not there yet to-Because they're not there yet to do it.

Larry (25:33)
It could be that, or I could tell you, my wife hates working out. Let me just get rid of this. I just want to get through the workout. You have that clientele, too, where you're just like, Fuck this. I'm out. I just need to get through this workout, and I'm done.

Rob (25:50)
Yeah, you do run into that. There is something of you have to be able to program, and there's some entertainment for the person to be able to feel like they like it. Yeah. But I'll tell you what, when you're doing something that's effective, you know what people really like? Results.

Zack (26:08)
Yeah. So like someone like, sorry to cut you off, but someone like your wife, let's say she got a program off an app or got a program somewhere, and she's like, I only have so much time, so I'm going to rip through it. She would get way more out of rather than trying to get through five circuits of supersets, just go through one circuit and follow the rest periods, follow the intention, and just do that. And rather Rather than being pressed for time with the other thing, just go through the one circuit.

Larry (26:32)
Well, to your point, too, though, now that I'm thinking through this, right? If we are doing tension, and it's the right tension, first rep, same as last rep, you have no choice but to rest.

Zack (26:44)
You have no choice but toThe fatigue that's going to put on the body.

Rob (26:45)
People with good experience, Larry can make heavy loads. I mean, light loads. Light loads. Yeah, that's right.

Zack (26:52)
Rob, how many times have you been working out, and then another member will work out, and they're doing 55s, and they're doing a shoulder press, and then Rob's doing 35s, and they're like, Oh, man, I'm doing more than you. It's like, You don't look like that. You know what I mean? But the point is that you can create tension properly, and you can make lightweight feel heavier. A lot of that comes from knowing what exercise it is. If we're going for a heavy deadlift, that's going to look a lot different than one of us.

Rob (27:17)
Much more neurologically demanding. It depends on how much you're moving and everything else. But the thing is, too, you want to remember that there's a big difference between what's tolerable and then what's optimal. What's for people to get better, especially in the beginning, is not that much. It might just be a couple of days a week of strength training of 2-3 basic exercises, then you're in and out. You could see a lot of results. Where you run into problems, you see is when people, they pack in a lot and too much, and they overwhelm their abilities of where they're at.

Larry (27:50)
Okay, I have a question. I have a buddy of mine who doesn't like to work out, right? But he wants to get in the shape, so it's quite the conundrum.

Rob (28:00)
His name's not Larry, is it? No, it's not Larry.

Larry (28:02)
Although I don't like... But in all seriousness, he's been watching YouTube, all this other stuff. What he ran into is, there's a guy, he was a bodybuilder, Metzer.

Rob (28:19)
Mike Metzer.

Larry (28:19)
Yeah. Heavy duty. Yup, heavy duty. Apparently, his take is just do... Let's just take bench press. Do bench press until you fatigue, and then you're done.

Rob (28:33)
Yeah. The thing is, when you're listening, you got to be careful when you're listening to certain things because you're listening to somebody that's not the norm. That program has been around a long time and has only worked for several individuals. A lot of times, you don't want to go to fatigue. If you go to fatigue, one, usually there's failure coming in right after that, and two, you can overwhelm your body's ability to get better. So if you go and you do too much, you don't get better. You're just trying to recover. So you got to be careful with that. Yeah, there wouldn't be much sustainability. Less is more.

Larry (29:08)
So it would be like me just saying, I'm going to go with David Goggans right now. Yeah.

Rob (29:14)
And I'm not a huge- Would you be stupid? No. Okay. Makes sense. Because like I said, there's a big difference between what's optimal and what's tolerable. And for some reason in the fitness industry, most people gear towards tolerable. They look for soreness, which is not a good indicator of a good workout. Now, feeling you did something is one thing. When you first start, there's soreness is going to happen. But a lot of times, soreness, especially really bad soreness, is you overwhelmed your body to recover. So now it's not going to adapt. It's just going to go to recover because the first thing it wants to do is recover. Then it's going to send some signaling to go further and adapt and get better. But first thing is going to recover. So if you made it so bad that it's just barely trying to scrape to recovery, you're not going to get any better. Yeah.

Larry (30:01)
Makes sense.

Zack (30:04)
Yeah. So let's talk about then... Obviously, we want this podcast to be on a local level. So we're talking to the same things we preach to a lot of our members and a lot of our clientele, but we might get someone who just live in the area or who are around the area, what could they do if they wanted to start a strength program that they know will work and that they know it's beneficial? What would you say the first thing they should do is?

Rob (30:29)
Come to zero strength. Yeah. First thing I would say to do is first to start looking at programs and listening to people, what's going on. Like I said, is that strength training has a lot more to do with the rest periods than it does the actual exercises. Start slow and easy one day a week. A lot of times, we just say one day a week. Most of the time, we're more personal. That's how we start.

Larry (30:55)
That's interesting. I know you're not going to agree with this, but I ran yesterday, but I didn't run-run. I did a walk-run for a mile just to get my feet wet. And the way I did the walk-run was I did a minute 40 walk, 20 second run, just intervals constantly.

Rob (31:14)
And there's nothing I mean, there's nothing wrong with running. Running is a natural human thing to do and done correctly and working on technique.

Larry (31:21)
Well, yeah. It's just immediately just going straight into a mile. I don't know if that's smart, especially when I don't have flexibility. There's a lot of issues there. That's why I was But I got Brooks. Anyways, I forgot how to call this. Did you do it in...

Rob (31:38)
So now we'll get into strength and conditioning mixed a little bit before we end, I guess, real quick. Yeah, no. Did you do it the same day that you did?

Larry (31:46)
So I did run in the morning. Okay. And then in the evening, I worked out.

Rob (31:50)
Okay. So that's separating it. Yeah.

Larry (31:52)
So what I was going to say is, if you're going to work out, you definitely would advise to Stay away from certain trainers or just don't really want to call that out because that's part.

Zack (32:06)
Depends on what your goal is, I think. If you're a goal, if somebody who has maybe a lot of ailments, someone like you, for example, you feel like your mobility is bad, you got a bad knee. I don't think a good goal for you would be to, let's just see how good of shape I can get in as quick of time as possible. That should be maybe a goal later on, but right now, we should just get our body moving properly, get rid of these ailments. But if somebody, let's say somebody had no issues, no injuries, they're already in pretty good shape, they worked out in the past, and their goal now is they want to get better cardio, they want to get fitter, they want to be able to run. It just depends on what your goal is. You want to hire a trainer or follow a class based off that goal. But no matter what your goal is, it doesn't matter. There should be, in our philosophy, there should be some strength training implement in there no matter what. Even if it's just one day a week or two days a week, there should always be in there.

Rob (32:58)
There's a lot of good trainers in town And I would... You want to educate yourself a little bit, and you want to interview a little bit, see what they say. Do you like it? Is this geared towards something that you were thinking? So that's what you want to do.

Larry (33:12)
That's a great point, right? Because I know we're about to wrap up, but I think one thing to keep in mind is that if you're heavy or you're unsatisfied with yourself, you didn't get that way overnight. Correct. So getting back in the shape that you want to be shouldn't be overnight.

Rob (33:28)
Yeah. So what happens a lot to Larry is there's a lot of promises that you got to be careful about, like all kinds of different facilities and different programs. If it's not a sustainable approach, then you're going to run into issues. And a lot of times we start out real slow. Then as we get slow, hey, one day a week, then we start going to two days a week. All right, then let's see how you do three days a week. But you'd be really surprised how much results you can get. Also is you got to remember the way the body works. When you go When you do something really fast to it, it's going to have pushback, and it's not going to be able to sustain that. You want to take this approach that you're going to be able to do this for a lifetime, not the next six weeks, and then you're going to have to take a rest.

Zack (34:13)
If you don't have a sustainable approach, you won't have a sustained effect. You need to pick a program that you can stay on. I think to your point, and talk about what we were talking about earlier, if you're looking for a good trainer or if you're looking for a good program, if you come into their gym and they just throw you right into a workout, It's normally not going to be geared towards a good program, just from what we've seen. It should always be an assessment. It should always be a movement assessment first. If you came into our facility, the first thing we'd do is we'd sit you down, talk about your injuries, talk about your workout background, how old are you, what's your daily lifestyle like. Once we find out all those indicators, then we take you through. We have 13 basic movements that we take you through, and then we score you based on those. There's never a pass or fail with any assessment, and it should always be that way. But there is, Okay, here's what we know we have to work on and fix before we would to get you into a class program or a strength program.

Zack (35:03)
Again, that goes back to proper movement patterns. I think if you're looking for a good one, if they start off with an assessment, and then you could ask the questions, Well, in our strength training, how many days a week are we be doing it? If they just try to jump you right into five, they're just trying to make money. But if we just say, Hey, I think we should just start with one. I think we should start with two. Okay, well, now he knows he's trying to take a sustainable outlook on how I'm going to train and then start asking other questions. Okay, well, what body part should I be training? Well, we're going to push and pull. We're going to squat, hinge, and carry. If he says those things, okay, so now you're starting to find good indicators that this is going to be a good trainer or this is going to be a good class for me.

Rob (35:37)
Yeah, and you're going to hear him say something about a fundamental movement patterns, and that's where you want to spend the most of your time at. They want to progress from what's simplest to complex. That's what you're going to look for when you go into there, and you want to hear those words. But we spend the most time on those moving patterns. Yeah.

Larry (35:56)
Great advice. All right. Cool.

Zack (35:59)
Wrap it up. Yeah. Thanks, boys.

Rob (36:01)
All right. Thank you.