Can How You Rest Between Sets Effect Your Performance?

Hey, Athletes! Can How You Rest Between Sets Effect Your Performance? - Episode of The Garage Gym Athlete Podcast is up!

Can How You Rest Between Sets Effect Your Performance?

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IN THIS 42-MINUTE EPISODE WE DISCUSS:

• Jerred and Joe what to do between sets
• They go through a study on the topic
• The guys give their take on what you should do between sets
• And A LOT MORE!!

Diving Deeper…

If you want to go a little bit deeper on this episode, here are some links for you: 

Reference these studies for this week!

• Effects of active vs. passive interset rest among physiological and perceptual outcomes in bench press exercise

Garage Gym Athlete Workout of the Week 

Don't forget to watch today's podcast!

• Can How You Rest Between Sets Effect Your Performance?

Thanks for listening to the podcast, and if you have any questions be sure to add it to the comments below!

To becoming better!

- Jerred

Podcast Transcript

Jerred: [00:00:00] Have you ever wondered if the type of rest you take between sets at the gym could affect your performance? And what if I told you that the way you rest could impact how much power and velocity you lose during a workout and how you can implement very simple strategies in between sets to see. Better results and strength and overall fitness.

That's what we'll be diving into today in today's podcast. This is the garage gym athlete podcast, and we're here to build autonomous athletes and put phenomenal programming into every garage, basement, and spare bedroom out there. I'm Jared Moon and I'm with Joe Courtney. We are strength and conditioning coaches who have turned over 20, 000 people into garage gym athletes over the last decade, and we're here to reduce the information overload that exists in the health and fitness industry.

Today, we're going to do that by covering relevant science and give actionable takeaways, not only from the data, but from our years of experience. So let's dive in.

All right, [00:01:00] let's dive right into it. Joe, what the hell should we be doing in between sets? I don't know what to do with my hands type question here. Because on your phone, yeah, you get on your phone, right? Like you, you check you first, you post your workout to Instagram. Then after in between every set, you just.

Post to see if anybody's liking what you post on Instagram. That's what you should be doing between sets, right?

Joe: That's usually, yeah, that instant affirmation.

Jerred: We've actually looked at studies in the past where being on your phone Lou lowers a little bit of your mental capacity, those lowers a little bit of your focus and you have worse performance.

And so instead of what you should not be doing, you should not be on your phone. What should you be doing in between sets? That's what we're diving into today. So we have a study really cool. The name of the study is effects of active versus passive interset rest. Among physiological and perceptual outcomes in bench press exercise.

This study was done in 2023. So I'm just going to hit the highlights real quick of the [00:02:00] study. And then we can dive into our thoughts and everything else. Not just of the study, but some of the results. So 19 trained men between 18 and 24 years old who could bench press at least 80 percent of their body weight and had been training for at least two years participated in the study.

And the big reason why behind doing the study is they just wanted to see. You know what happens to specifically velocity, power loss, blood lactate levels and effort perception if they had people. Rest actively. And we'll talk about what that looks like or rest passively in between different sets of bench press.

And so everyone was their own they did like a crossover design. So you ended up being your own control. Workouts were separated by 72 hours. I'm not going to get into all those details. Sometimes I could feel like it gets a little bit boring. If you want to dive into it, feel free, but ultimately they had them doing what they call their power max on a Smith machine.

And so they would. Trying to see how fast people could move weight. And [00:03:00] then they did different workouts at the 72 hour interval. And really what they were having them do was either. After they would do these sets, they would do nothing, just rest, or they would continue to do something, but they would be doing chest press at five to 10 percent of their one rep max, which I find very interesting because if you bench press 200 pounds, that means in between sets, you're just going to be lifting five to 10 pounds.

So this is very minimal weight. And then they look to see what this did. Like I said, on blood lactate. Power velocity loss, which we've looked at a lot over the years reduction in power or velocity is a big factor in your recovery. It's actually how a lot of studies measure how well you recovered.

You are from exercises. If you start losing some of your. Your velocity and power typically in a jump is how they're testing it. And then they just want to look at effort of perception as well. So that's the study design. We can get more into the [00:04:00] takeaways in a second and all that kind of stuff.

But did you have anything that you want to say specific to study design protocol, programming, anything like that?

Joe: Not quite. I wasn't like a huge fan of it overall. But. I think the takeaway is easy enough. I did really like the power max part like that. I haven't seen. I don't think we've really seen before.

I think that'd be cool for a test of what people should do. Could do with studies for with the power max. That was very interesting to take. Finding their peak power at different percentages that they tested. However, it is there is an asterisk that this study was done

Jerred: on a Smith machine. Yeah, I'm starting not to mind that as much like I used to, but I get it.

From a scientific standpoint, like I just, I get it. Like I get why they have to do it. And especially when you're measuring power. So one thing that they were doing is they do one set times three reps at 30, percent of one rep max. And the load at which max power was achieved was considered the power max for each subject.

So they would lift these basically [00:05:00] for speed. I actually really liked that part of the design because I feel like most people screw up what we would call Dynamic efforts, right? And we program dynamic efforts in garage gym athlete we make sure that we're taking power into account with all this stuff.

So if you Want to be a part of a program like that, and you're not already, you can go to garagegymouthate. com, sign up for a free trial, see what really good programming that utilizes science looks like. Anyway, we do all this stuff, and so I was happy to see, other than the Smith Machine part, like I said, I agree with you, but I think they're starting to wear me down, where it's just Yep, we're doing leg extensions, and we're doing Smith Machine, like this is how we measure shit in science.

For peak

Joe: power, I think semi assisted is, I don't think it's too bad, because they just want you to be as explosive as possible.

Jerred: And they're comparing it amongst different like sets and rep schemes and percentages. So I think it's okay. But ultimately, what I think was really cool was that they did that right.

But then also the amount they lifted in between the sets. And I think that's probably the most important part here is five to 10 percent of your one rep max [00:06:00] is what they're having people do. And they didn't specifically say in the study we have just have to assume. But it, the assumption is they were resting two minutes and that they were doing repetitions with that amount of weight for the full two minutes.

Okay. So that is the active rest. So if I, again, if I were to bench press 200 pounds just picking an easy math number there. And I want to then use 10 pounds, which would be the upper end of that. I'm just lifting like bench pressing 10 pounds. For two full minutes, right? I'm just doing, and then I do my next set.

So it's not, not really resting versus just sitting there and doing nothing. So yeah, that's ultimately what we looked at and I'll get, I'll cut to the chase here and then we can talk about how I think this applies and how you think this applies to other things. Ultimately the active rest outperformed to doing nothing.

So let's see lifters who performed active rest consisting of low loads, seated, chest press five to 10 percent of one rent max in between [00:07:00] bench press sets tended to maintain velocity and power better during sets and tended to have lower blood lactate concentrations than when they passively rested.

Rep performed to failure and RPE were unaffected by the rest strategy. So if you're exercising to failure or you overall, your RPE, that didn't really change, which RPE not changing, I think is a good thing because they did measure a subjective outcome, right? They were just like, how tired are you? How do you feel with a different active things?

And that didn't really change as much. So ultimately active rest in this one study is. Better, but there's a lot of other literature and other things I want to unpack here in this one. Any thoughts, comments on that on which part just the overall outcome active rest being better.

Joe: Yeah I think that's I think it's a easy I guess good takeaway.

I don't necessarily completely I, it's an easy thing to to start to do but that is when you're training velocity and power, but they did find [00:08:00] that the reps to failure weren't affected. So like overall volume wasn't enough, but if you are, if your aim is, velocity and power, then maybe.

Don't do nothing just move a little bit. And I don't, I didn't, I guess I might've missed that they were doing, you said they're pressing for two minutes. I feel like you can get burned out pretty easily from that. So that could be subjective to whoever is doing this, just moving some, even if it's like band, like a really like band press out or like something.

Jerred: Yeah, the study didn't specifically say, so that's why you have to like, we just have to assume that they were doing it for the rest period because that would be active rest. If you're resting two minutes, like resting, whatever you're doing in between those two minutes, we just have to assume because the authors actually didn't say very clearly in the study that it was for two full minutes, but I think that's the assumption we have to make.

So they, but again, we're talking about 10 pounds here. 10 pounds for two minutes. Is that a lot? I don't know.

Joe: I think you can burn out from

Jerred: that for sure. Yeah. I don't know. Like I can do, [00:09:00] I'm trying to think of how fast I'm time based like pushups for one minute, burn me out, but pushups are a significant portion of your body weight.

I want to try it. I haven't tried this. I haven't tried specifically like with a bench press too. So anyway, so you're, you don't agree with the study as much. You think it's a bad idea to do active rest?

Joe: No, I don't necessarily disagree. I think it's going to be going to depend on you and your, like your level and what you're, and what you're doing.

And also, yeah, like I said, it's, if it's velocity or could make. It could, if that was the emphasis. But if you're doing maybe strength endurance or something like that, then I don't know if there's, 'cause they said that it the volume didn't didn't change the reps to failure, didn't change.

It's an easy buy-in, but it's just. I don't know. Maybe it's just more of an opinion thing.

Jerred: Yeah. It's against what this study says. So it's just an opinion. I guess it was just like,

Joe: how much is it actually gaining you to be active during the rest? Yeah, what's the upside? Yeah, because your velocity [00:10:00] will go up a little bit, but your volume isn't going up.

Main thing that you're trying to get better at is velocity. Maybe over time after a while, that a little bit, being a little bit faster will make a bit of a difference. In that regard, yes, but it's not something that you absolutely need to like, Hey, anytime you work out, you need to be moving in between sets because.

If you move too much, then you might actually be, there could be a drawback, which. Their protocol for what they did in between sets wasn't even highlighted. So it's hard to say how much you do or don't need to move. It was ambiguous in that regard, which is weird because that's the whole point.

Jerred: Yeah. And so I'm glad that you're talking about this power velocity, like how much does it actually matter if that's what you're going for? Because that's the direction I took it. So I have three. Things to unpack from this study. The first one is understanding lactate. I think that's maybe the most important takeaway from this study.

Two is the Goldilocks principles to active rest. And then three, why do power and velocity even matter? So that's what I'm going to [00:11:00] dive into now. So I talked about lactate. Predominantly few episodes ago at this point probably in the one nineties region, if you're going to go back and look for this as far as podcast number but I went in depth on lactate and why it matters.

So I'm not going to do that as much now, but that is one of the main things that they were measuring was the decrease in lactate. And so what you have to know about lactate is. It gets utilized when we're using glucose and this is going to be a very like botched scientific description of this. So don't hold me to it.

I did the more like in the weeds example in a different episode, but basically your body uses glucose. It produces lactate when it produces lactate, your body can take in oxygen. And attach it to lactate and it can go back into being used. I think the the Corey cycle. So your body can use lactate as an energy, as in more energy to do more things.

People used to [00:12:00] think it was only a by product, but the actual thing that the, is the by product is that it increases the acidity in your, and your body, if you can't attach enough oxygen molecules to it. So that's when you can no longer, when you have this, like they call you like people are like, Oh, you got to lactate buildup or whatever.

It's really your body's inability to recycle and use lactate. That's a problem that's causing you to become more acidic. That makes you stop exercising. And so how do we get past that? The real answer is you gotta be fitter or be at lower intensities. And we've talked about this a lot, but if your body can reuse lactate.

And you, it can get it back in to the system. Then you can exercise for longer. I did another episode several weeks ago about prepping for a hundred mile race with running race with, very little time. And I'm actually still talking to this guy, consulting with him. And this is everything I'm trying to teach him and go through with him on the heart [00:13:00] rate side of it, as he goes through the race.

I was just talking to him yesterday and I was like, look, man, lactate is everything for you in this race. That's why you need to pay attention to your heart rate. If your heart rate starts getting up and you're only at mile 20 and your heart rate will no longer come down because you've done a lot of interval training, Joe.

And so I'm sure you noticed this, but if you're doing a minute on minute off, you feel good at first, right? But if we're doing 15 of those by minute 15, what is your one minute recovery look like?

Joe: I probably won't even drop out of

Jerred: zone two. Like you, or you mean you'll be upper zones, right?

Yeah. You'll never drop back down into zone two. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Down at the bottom of it. Yeah, exactly. So that's what happens is you end up in this deficit. In that other episode, I talked about it like a credit card that you can no longer pay back. And that's, what's going to happen to this guy in this race.

Like eventually his heart rate just. He won't be able to utilize lactate. And that's what I'm telling him to pay attention to is do these run walks, make sure your body's recycling that lactate as much as possible. So that's why they measured lactate in [00:14:00] this study. And that's why this might be advantageous.

This is the mechanism behind it, because what's happening is. What they're finding, at least in this study, smaller study, is that if you just sit there, the lactate's just accumulating. If you're not doing anything, the lactate's just accumulating. Your body's not reusing it as well. But if you start moving your body, and this is why you should do a cool down after.

After any exercise is because you want to start moving your body so your body can start to reuse some of that lactate for energy, because if it doesn't need to be reused, it's not going to. So you have to put a very small energy demand on your body for it to start wanting to reuse that lactate. When I say small energy demand, I'm talking about very light cardio, very slow movement, or very just.

Not intense movement, very low intensity movement and your body's Oh yeah, okay. We have a lot of lactate. Let's keep using that then eventually be as recycled you'll recover faster. So I think that's why this works. That's the mechanism behind why active rest is working. [00:15:00] Now, And that's just the science behind it.

So that's why lactate was so important in this study. And lactate was less than the people who did the active rest as opposed to just sitting there. Now, the second thing I I labeled it as the Goldilocks principle to active rest, because how much is too much active rest and how much is not enough.

There's a lot of other literature where they had people do things like squats, like air squats in between sets of squats to failure to see if it helped. But it was too demanding and all of those studies where people are either doing pushups or squats or 20 percent of their wonder at max, you perform worse on subsequent sets.

So you have to find the right amount. You can't work out in between your workout. If that makes sense. Like I, I had a guy who, a friend who in college who did this and it drove me crazy. Maybe just cause I'm like such a program, let's just follow the program. Can we follow the program? Like it'd be leg day.

And we'd be doing squats. And in between squats, he would walk [00:16:00] over, this was pre garage gym stuff. He'd walk over to the dumbbell rack and start doing curls. And it just drove me insane. I'm like, dude. We'll do biceps a different day. We'll do, we'll have an arm day. Can we wait, like, why are you trying to add it in?

I don't have enough biceps. Yeah, so anyway, that stuff is too much. That's too much for this active rest principle to work. You don't want to go lift weights. You don't want to do more working out in between your working out. But it is, if you can continue to move your body in some low capacity, it might be beneficial.

Okay, so in this study, I think it's awesome that they Labeled it five to 10 percent because never in my life as a strength and conditioning coach, have I seen any benefit to lifting five to 10 percent of your winner at max. That's something I was thinking about. I was reading the study. If you ask me, Hey, what does 70 to a hundred percent do?

I can tell you if you ask me what, let's just say 30 to 60 percent does. I can tell you if you ask me what, let's just even say 10 to 20%. I [00:17:00] can make an argument. For what it would do. Now, if you ask me, okay, what if I'm listing between five and 10 percent of my one or max, what does that do? I would have never had an answer for you until today.

I could be like, okay here's the only case in which you'd want to lift five to 10 percent of your one or max. And it's, if you're just wanting to try and get more active rest to lower your blood lactate and maintain power and velocity. Now, if you're lifting less than 5%, I don't have an answer for that.

So now I have an answer for 95 percent of why you should lift different percentages in a workout, except for that one 5%. So anyway, that's the second thing is the Goldilocks principle. Just knowing how much active rest is okay. It looks like five to 10 percent of a one rep max seems to be okay. But also a lot of research saying that you can just hop on a biker or walk on a treadmill or walk or just move around.

And that was another point I think to, that I think you would agree with more. I don't know what you do in between exercise sets. But I never just sit there like I [00:18:00] never do a hard set and then I'm just like, okay, where's the seat? I sit and I just wait Like I'm always moving around or like doing something and to be honest in my opinion that might be enough To see the results here that they're talking about.

Like I think if you're just still moving around, what do you do? In between sets,

Joe: it depends on what the exercise is. Press nothing really takes me out of it with press, but if it's like, so squats are dead, but those are the heavy ones, the bad ones. If it's on the strength endurance side, the really taxing I'm my heart rates high, I might.

I might go, hands on my knees, which we covered in the past. So that helps our low your heart rate. I might sit down for a couple of seconds, but I usually am getting up not long after I don't sit for a full two minutes. I'll sit for maybe 20, 30 seconds while my heart rate's really high.

And then I'll pace around, I'll start walking around. So I do keep moving in that regard because even sitting and, leaning over it's just not that great of a position and [00:19:00] press. Yeah, I'm just walking around. I might be moving around things, but I haven't done like actual exercises.

That's what I wanted to focus on for focus on for the takeaway for this versus, cause they did seated chest press, which nobody

Jerred: has. Yeah. And just, I don't know what I'm going to do. Say I'm doing barbell bench press today and I want to implement this principle. I guess I could go, I don't know.

My bench press max is it's not 200. It's definitely, I don't know what it, maybe it's 250, 275, 300. I have no idea, but it's definitely higher. So let's say I could go to 20 pound dumbbells or 15 pound dumbbells. Let's just call it 15 pound dumbbells. That does seem like a lot. Two minutes of 15 pound dumbbell presses, two minutes of those just continuous, even if it's slow and controlled.

My brain tells me that would fatigue me for my next set. But I'm also like the science doesn't agree with you. So I just, I want to test

Joe: it. But it does. And it doesn't [00:20:00] necessarily agree with it though, because it doesn't, they never said what they did to me. It just comes down to what you alluded before, but it comes down to blood flow.

So do something to keep blood flow going, to keep your muscles going. So for me, for as far as the bench or even. Frick press goes like you might grab two 10 pound weights and just do arms, arm swings up, down side, like some sort of, that's more shoulder. And you can even lay down and do that.

If you want just swing around the change plates for a couple of reps, sit it down, rest in between. So you're not necessarily doing this exercise is five to 10 percent exercise the entire two minutes. You do some, you stop, you do a little bit more. You're still, working out the lactate. You're still.

Keeping the blood flow to those muscles, but you're not like doing it so much that you're taxing. And like my first thought for squats is okay, what the hell are you going to do for squats? Because five to 10%, that's not even an air squat.

Jerred: So maybe you'd have to do leg extensions. You'd have to do like a ankle weighted leg extensions in all [00:21:00] honesty.

It

Joe: was that or. My thought was like, if you do pace around, because walking around, it's still something you just do one air squat, like every 20 seconds, air squat, walk, stop, pause 20 seconds, air squat. So like

Jerred: still I don't know, like I think walking, yeah, I think a bike

Joe: or like high, like slow, high knees, like you just bring your knees up like a high March.

Jerred: Yeah, I think something like that, like you don't need a ton. Cause I know there's a specific study that tried that and air squats were too much there. And that might even be, I don't know how much you're actually squatting in an air squat, but if I would say I had a 400 pound back squat, 10 percent of that

Joe: is, it's gotta be at least 50 percent of your body weight, probably 60 to 70, honestly.

Jerred: Yeah. So even at that math, an air squat still too much which makes sense. Okay. So the one last thing I did want to say on and this was one of your points was like, it didn't really, it didn't matter as much when we got to reps performed to failure and overall RPE, but it did matter for power [00:22:00] and velocity loss.

And a lot of people might be like, who cares? And so I want to talk a little bit more about that because it's something that we've covered just over the years is why power is important. So like in sport performance specifically, this is very important if you're only trying to build some muscle or whatever, or even just, I don't want to say, I'm not going to say strength really.

If you just, it's only hypertrophy. If you're really just looking to build muscle, this isn't as important, but if you want strength or you want performance. It is really important to focus on power and velocity of your movement. And so it's one of the key factors in whether or not you are actually athletic, in my opinion, is if you have power and velocity that's why I hate.

What what I was doing until I changed my programming, which is like more like hypertrophy based lifting and zone two running. I feel like just makes you just a super slow ass athlete. And you can just feel it. You feel like you move differently. I have to have power based movements.

In my programming. So I completely changed up my programming, even within body geometry to make sure, Hey, [00:23:00] power's here every damn workout. Cause not having, it makes me feel like a, an old grandpa. So anyway, power and velocity are very important because if you're moving something fast, that is what strength really is the ability to move something quickly.

And you do not want to miss this element in your program. Like I just mentioned, you can be on a hypertrophy, I'm building muscle program and doing a lot of cardio, and that's great. And that might even be the best for longevity. But if you are like me and like Joe in any capacity where some athleticism still matters to you I don't want to get hurt when I'm like just playing soccer in the backyard of my son because I can't cut or I can't move, like I can't do anything explosive without it.

Like risking an injury, then this stuff should matter to you. And so anyway, this active rest helps you maintain power and velocity for longer throughout a workout. So like you said, Joe, maybe this matters over time. I think that's the exact takeaway is like, [00:24:00] if I were to implement this active rest strategy into my current training and all of our training is more athletic in nature at garage gym athlete, then maybe it does give me a five to 10 percent boost every workout, let's just call it 5%.

And. And that compounded over time is probably enough for significant results in your strength, your power in your overall athleticism, because it's also been shown that once you lose that power and velocity, your workout is not like what you do after that is not as important. Like it's almost useless.

If you say you're moving the bar at two meters per second. And set one, two meters per second, set two, two meters per second, set three, two meters per second, set four, like two meters per second. But then you get fatigued and now you're dropping down to 1. 3 meters per second. A slow lift is not that beneficial anymore, unless we're talking about hypertrophy.

But [00:25:00] if we're talking about someone who wants to build power, velocity, and actual strength. The speed or speed attempt of that lift is so important. So I think that it really does matter. But how much, like you're saying, what's the actual difference? Because say you and I are carbon copies of one another and you do passive rest and I do active rest and we maintain the same amount of power all the way through set five.

But I can do set six faster than you, but that's it. It's only one set difference because it's not like passive rest makes you incapacitated to where you can't still lift something fast. So it might only be one set difference, but maybe that one set like that's enough to gain a competitive edge if you're an actual athlete competing in something, or if you're just more serious about your training, that might be enough to where like you do want to focus on it to get that last little edge.

So I do think that it matters. It's not an, it can't, I can't see it being an overwhelming amount, but it's just interesting that the science points us in that direction, that active rest can keep us a little bit more [00:26:00] powerful and faster for longer during the workout, and that's something that I definitely want to.

Want to pursue and look into more,

Joe: so further application question wise. So people have bought in to moving more, doing something in between their sets. When and what type of workouts where, you know, whether what percentage range, because I doubt 85, 80 plus percent is going to make that much of a difference doing this.

Cause you're not really. Doing that much with velocity. So what would be the percentage range that you would want people to let, that they're lifting that, that their workouts program for that you want people to do this

Jerred: active rest. Okay. So the actual percentages to where this active rest would be, they're looking at

Joe: their workout and they're going, okay, I have this today.

This is when I should be doing

Jerred: active rest. Yeah. I would say. 30 to 70%, it probably still be beneficial. Probably once you get up in even 70 to 75, for some people like more advanced athletes, anything above 75, you're gonna start slowing down. It's probably not as beneficial. So anytime you're lifting in that range, I would say that it's.

It's useful. [00:27:00] Cool. Yeah. And then getting into the actual using of this. So this is one study there've been, I think I found nine other studies that have covered this topic and they've done it in different ways. So looking at all the literature and trying to give the garage gym athlete, like a takeaway for this is more of what we were talking about earlier.

Find don't get so wrapped around the axle on lifting five to 10 percent of your max in the same lift. I don't think that's as important. I think what I was talking about before, like blood flow, lactate getting reused in the system. Those things are important. And where I find this really beneficial because I have all of the concept to me concept to row machines, the ergs, I have the biker, I have the skier and I have the rower.

And so I do think that you should try to keep it localized. This is just my theory. So I'm stepping outside of the science. If I have a leg workout. I'm probably going to hop on the biker, right? And if I'm doing an upper body workout, like arms or something, I, maybe I do [00:28:00] the steer. And then if it is like more of a full body workout, or I'm just not sure, I'm just going to use the rower because the rower is going to hit everything.

And so I honestly think those are the three best. You could just walk if you don't have any of those things. Yeah, deadlift. I would do the roller for sure. So I think you, you could just walk and see a lot of this benefit that we're talking about and lactate and still maintain that power and velocity.

But I do think that some localization, that's what this study gave to me is like some localization might be important. So localization meaning, yeah, if I'm doing the deadlift, I'm doing the roller from doing squat, I'm doing the biker, if I'm doing the press, I'm doing the skier, so just trying to keep them in the same muscle groups might be important.

So that's my takeaway for the garage gym athlete. Try to do something between your sets. If you're the guy or gal who lays down between sets, stop doing that. You should have stopped doing that a long time ago. There are, there's a time and place for it, but it's normally like when you're doing 10 by 10 back squat and like you're on set nine, maybe that it's okay to lay down.

But other than that, keep moving some of the things Joe mentioned, swinging plates, [00:29:00] whatever. I'm doing like little things here and there. And just keep moving and it could show some benefit and try it for a couple of weeks and see if you actually feel like you're getting stronger, faster.

Joe: I actually am supposed to bench today, so I could, I

Jerred: could maybe try it. Give it a shot. Are you going to do five to 10 percent for two minutes? I'm going to do my plate thing. Just try it one set. Let me know if they're one set. I actually just want to know if you're burned out. So I don't know what the exact programming is for the bench.

Cause I have to work out later today too, but it's. If you're doing, I think

Joe: it would be 10

Jerred: pound plates. Yeah. That's what I want to know. I want to know if do your first set and then lift for two minutes and then see if your second set just sucks. That's it. Don't do it any more than that.

But if you're like, I feel like, cause I feel like bench is one of those exercises where you can just lose it. Like you get tired and I'm not, it's not working anymore. Bench press is one of those exercises. So try it out. Let us know on the next episode, how it worked. You just one set. If you're like, yeah, that second [00:30:00] set was trash because I did two minutes of exercising between the exercise.

But if you're like, I actually felt great. I felt like subjectively, I felt like I was moving the weight faster. That'd be cool to know too. So let us know. I'll probably experiment with it as well, just because I'm curious.

So if you've ever wondered what to do between sets, it is not play on your phone. It is not whatever the hell out, lay down. It's not sit down. It's none of those things. It should be some sort of movement. You don't have to go overboard with it, but try to move between sets and you'll clean your garage.

Yeah. I actually do that sometimes. Like when my garage gets messy, I'm like. All right in between rests, I'm putting these plates away and putting these things away. Like sometimes I'm just doing that. So that might be all you need to do too. But I don't want to go off on a huge tangent because I think I could say this for another episode, but this is a huge, check Mark for zone two training, because it's what this is really saying is if your [00:31:00] body's a beast at reutilizing lactate, it makes you better at lifting.

And you want to know how you can train to make your body a lot better at using lactate zone two training, just in general. So now we're starting to see worlds collide, right? Concurrent training, strength and endurance helping each other. If we just are okay with taking one leap to the others, like they're saying, Hey, if your body can, yeah.

If your body can clear lactate really fast, which is the ultimate takeaway. Then you're going to perform better in the workout. And we're like, okay we know how to clear lactate really fast and train to do that. That's zone two. So more zone two training is gonna make me better at lifting. It is to some degree, as long as you're not only doing slow lifting, you're actually interested in doing fast, more powerful stuff.

So anyway. That's my final takeaway for the garage gym athlete. And yeah, like I said before, if you want to see this in action, go to garagegymathlete. com sign up for a free trial. You can see us we program this stuff. We don't program what to do in between sets, but [00:32:00] we program dynamic efforts. We pro program zone two.

We program all these things from other scientific stuff that, that we've read and researched that we've done and things that we've tested on ourselves. And now maybe you just throw that in. Throw in the active rest. We don't need to program that for people. You can just start adding that into your programming right now.

Speaking of training, man, how's your training going?

Joe: I guess, this isn't like huge news, but I do have one decent update. Huge news. I, for the first time. Ever since, we had all of our tracks have switched to Shred.

Jerred: Wow! How's that going?

Joe: I'm liking it so far, yeah. I like the, every time, cause I, the little behind the scenes, I input a lot of the workouts for each side and I manage how all the workouts go out.

VD programs and does everything with Shred. Yeah. So I've, I, that's like the most hands off track that I've ever had, that I had. I just see it from a glance. And his structure is way different than how I program and then how you program that, [00:33:00] how Marco programs, all of us program very differently. And at a glance, I've always seen shred as man, there's a lot going on.

This is, it looks a little complicated. There's also these exercises that I've never heard of.

Jerred: Really good though. Yeah. So I'm

Joe: like, all right I've been known hard to kill for a couple of cycles now. I'm not really. Interested in going like super heavy or super like in endurance challenging that's what the hard skills focused on right now.

So okay, I think I, I have more, I don't have a hard goal right now, it's more of aesthetics and then I still want to keep lifting and maybe even building before my gym goes away for two months because we're about to move. So I was like, okay, shred, I think is a good time to go. So I jumped on it and I've actually really liked the structure.

I think maybe because just because it's different but I am really enjoying it because I'll get my super sets in and get my lifting and then it ends with a nice circuit, a nice like burn of either, more conditioning or like hypertrophy. And. Yeah, going good. I also got, plus with all those new toys that I said last episode, the cable machine, which I doing pushdowns for the first time was my triceps were super sore.

The bench, cause I can actually bench now [00:34:00] and the landmine and the belt squat. We don't really program belt squat, but it's still something you can use. So all those things now I can use, especially

Jerred: in tread. Yeah. VD is the man. Like I really enjoy his programming. Every person who programs, like you said, is a little bit different.

But what's awesome about VD is just like his like fitness background. He's just been in, in it for so long. Like me. He's just been doing it for such a long time. Like he's seen all the bro stuff. He's seen the CrossFit stuff he's seen, he knows the EO3 methodology that we program and everything, but he's really good about taking just all of his experience and putting it into a track.

That's why I really liked the shred track. And yeah, it is. I feel the same way sometimes. If you, we've talked about this four or five, Mike mentally fatigued. It's hard for me to walk into a. Training session where I have to use 19 different instruments and a lot of changes and stuff.

But if you can get over that, it's phenomenal programming. There's just there's a lot going on.

Joe: So I have a lot of days I'll just like, the more, if I'll look at the workout, but now I'll look at it the night before, just to think about okay, what I'll do for each exercise. If I'll have to change, [00:35:00] modify, or okay.

This says this, but I know it as this kind of thing. So okay, just a quick familiarization and yeah, it's been going fine. It's going

Jerred: good. Yeah, I do. I do the same thing now. All right. I have for a while. Like I need to know everything going into the workout. I don't, cause I we're talking about like active rest.

I don't like being on my phone at all during a training session. Like I like to turn on, do not disturb. Don't text me. Don't call me because our training sessions are very efficient. But they're not efficient if you're busy doing something else, they can easily be an hour and a half if you're taking seven minutes.

On your phone or like whatever. So I try to shut everything out and just okay, I know what I'm doing. I know what the exercises are. Let's just go get it done. And then I can get it done

Joe: faster. I've actually been pretty surprised because a lot of times, especially, looking at shred, all this stuff going on your people with at first change the shred that are not used to it.

I was actually finishing my workouts between 50 and 55 minutes. Yeah. Cause some of the sets I could blow through, I, maybe I'm just so used to a certain training wise, I could just go right through. I don't, I didn't have to rest all that long. And then, but then I'll rest longer for something else.

Then the circuit at the end, maybe I'm just knocking out, but [00:36:00] yeah, it's still staying within all those blocks. Maybe it does help to look ahead though, because I know what to prepare for, what the emphasis is.

Jerred: Training for me, yeah, just 50 K training and body geometry. What I'm most excited about though, is I mentioned in the podcast that I updated body geometry to add power.

Power's already in there and I know not everybody listening knows the full body geometry methodology, but real quick, very quick. One of the main principles is there are 13 different movement competency streams. All right. So like a squat competency stream within the competency stream, there are seven levels of movement.

So there's 13 of these, every 13 has seven. Just keep that in your head for a second. The, and what we do is we program these movement competency streams over three days in the course of a week. That's how body geometry works three day system. And if you do everything, all the movement competency streams in the week.

You have what [00:37:00] I believe to be one of the most well rounded programs on planet Earth. Straight from a strength perspective. And it follows a lot of science and there are a lot of rules. I expanded it. It took me about two days. I expanded it from 13 competency streams. There are now 16 competency streams.

And I expanded every competency stream from 7 levels to 10 levels. I massively enhanced body geometry. Basically, just because of what I was noticing about the zone two training feeling a little bit slower here and there, and I didn't want body geometry to play into that. I wanted to make sure there's a speed element, but still enough of an isolation element for hypertrophy.

And then we're still hitting all of the stuff. So anyway, that's what I've been working on and that's what I've been testing. And so far, I absolutely love it. Like it's, if I could. We have that question we used to ask all the time. If you could have one piece of inch, one, one piece of equipment to train with the rest of your life, what would it be if I can only have one programming method to use for the rest of my [00:38:00] life, it would be body geometry.

Because I did the math on like how many combinations of workouts it could come, you could do. So they're like. There's day one, day two, day three, there's over a million for each. Cause if you think about their 16 competency streams, each one has 10. There are over a million variations. So I can't even do every body geometry workout possibility in existence.

Like I can't, I don't have 3 million workout training sessions left in my life. I have nowhere close to that amount. So anyway, I'm super stoked about it. All that to say. Coming to garage gym athlete near you soon. So probably be seeing that a lot and seeing body geometry 2. 0 in 2024 at the beginning.

So we'll announce more of that, but that's what I've been super excited about working on and building out and now testing, I'll be testing it for the next two months before the new year and hopefully we can roll it out to garage gym athlete as a whole in our, in one of our next tracks.

Joe: Yeah.

We're going to have several new [00:39:00] free programs

Jerred: coming out. Yeah. Lots of new stuff. Coming to garage gym athlete. We'll end it there. I don't want to, we don't want to spoil anything yet. If you are a member of garage gym athlete, really appreciate you. You see like we're always working towards making things better and improving that, what we have and bringing it to you.

And then anyone who's interested, if you're still listening to the podcast. Go to garage gym athlete.com and sign up for a free trial. We'd love to have you be a part of the community. Try some of this training out, see if it works for you. It, and it's just a trial. If you don't like it, you don't have to stick around.

But I think that you will wanna stick around after you get to test it out. But that's it for this one. Remember, if you don't kill comfort will kill you.

Joe: Thanks for listening to the Garage Gym Athlete podcast. We wanna find out more. Check out our training, or just know more about us at the garage gym athlete.com.[00:40:00]