Can Micro-dosing Strength Training Improve Performance?

Hey, Athletes! Can Micro-dosing Strength Training Improve Performance? - Episode of The Garage Gym Athlete Podcast is up!

Can Micro-dosing Strength Training Improve Performance?

• Subscribe on any device HERE 

IN THIS 28-MINUTE EPISODE WE DISCUSS:

• Jerred and Joe discuss a study on micro-dosing
• They look at a presentation at NSCA’s Coaches Conference
• How we may use it and expanding on this concept in detail.
• 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!

• No study this week

 Garage Gym Athlete Workout of the Week 

• Can Micro-dosing Strength Training Improve 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

Joe: [00:00:00] Welcome to the garage gym athlete podcast, where we talk about fitness, health, and anything to help you become the most optimal human beings. Let's dive in.

Jerred: All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Garage Gym Athlete Podcast. Jared Moon here with Joe Courtney. How's it going, Joe? How's

Joe: it going, man?

Good,

Jerred: good. Yeah. I'm doing great. Life good? Training good?

Joe: Yeah. Having some fun doing some of the recording stuff that we've been doing.

Jerred: Yeah. New content on, uh, well, you did it on meal prep.

Joe: Yep. I did a video on meal prep from start to finish of a week's worth of lunch and breakfast.

Jerred: So I watched that. I can tell how much of a chef you are, even with all your little finer points on like the sharpness of the knife, what to do with the extra broccoli stalks.

I try to give little

Joe: tips here and

Jerred: there. That's good. I was cutting broccoli today and I was like, using this [00:01:00] tip I learned from Joe in the YouTube video that he made for Garage Gym Athletes. So yeah, if you're a Garage Gym Athlete out there, You want to know some meal prep tips? Go check out Joe's newest video.

I would say mine, I think mine's even easier though. Might have to do a video. Probably. Probably doesn't taste so good.

Joe: Mine's not the, yeah, so I, there's, there's simplicity to mine, but it's, it's, I also like to have certain, certain quality of food.

Jerred: Hey, don't, don't throw any shade, all right? No, I, I, I'm just, just, just for me.

Uh, so we had that video and then I, podcast. Um, You know, my more recent video talking about calisthenics, breaking down the programming and and you can expect more, more videos like that coming from us. So if you're not subscribed to the YouTube channel. Go over to YouTube and just search garage gym athlete, and you will find a subscribe to that channel.

And boom, other than that, most everything does come to the [00:02:00] podcast, unless it just doesn't make sense. Like the food prep didn't make sense. Me at the whiteboard doesn't make sense. Um, so we will record sometimes in video sometimes. So go check it out. Uh, today we're talking about microdosing, not the fun kind.

It's microdosing strength training. Um, so I, I jokingly say that because I didn't, I didn't know what the world of microdosing was until we watched this presentation, but you can microdose all sorts of drugs and everything else. So the actual definition of microdosing or My definition of it is where you're taking a small amount of something.

It's typically in the medical field, uh, like actual drugs, like you're taking a small dose and there's still a therapeutic effect, uh, but you're not risking chance of side effects. That's kind of my definition and my definition is important because how I plan to use this information. So what we watched was a presentation called micro dosing [00:03:00] strength training, a conceptual framework.

And this was from the 2022 NSCA coaches conference. So National Strength and Conditioning Association by a professor named Paul Comfort. So I want to give credit where credit is due. Um, and I am. Super excited about this information, probably more than most people would be. Um, I think it's like, how much I dove into this and like, how big I think this information could be is, is huge.

But if you like programming and the stuff that I talk about with programming, and you like concurrent training, wearing the concurrent training hat, uh, then you definitely... Need to listen to this podcast to the end. I have a lot to say about it. Um, are your thoughts overall? Well, let me just first say what micro dish strength training is, is where you're taking a total set of volume, right?

Typically to improve in strength training, you have to lift a certain amount of volume. This is true for hypertrophy, muscle growth, [00:04:00] or just straight strength training. You have to lift a certain amount of volume to see the benefit. And so say we just have that total volume. Let's say the total volume was 10, 000 pounds.

Well, you could lift, um, five times per week. Doing 2, 000 worth of volume every single time that would be micro dosing it, or you could do two sessions per week where you lift 5, 000 of total volume just twice a week, and that's kind of what they're talking about with micro dosing because the entire world is moving to concurrent training.

I think I called this in like 2018. Um, it's just happening, right? That's that's how we own the domain name. Concurrent training dot com. Just that's what everyone does. That's what everyone will do eventually, just because it's proven and it's taking a while for the rest of the world to figure it out. But I think everybody will.

And it seems like we're headed in that direction. But now we get into microdosing strength training. You can either do like a traditional split. If you're trying to do concurrent training where you're like, [00:05:00] okay, lift day, conditioning day, lift day, conditioning day, or you could microdose it instead of hitting like three sessions per week or two sessions per week on strength training.

You could just do a little bit like 15 minutes in some of these sites, 15 minutes of strength training, but make sure you're hitting the same amount of volume. And you can see the same benefit or we'll talk about the pros and cons of it all. So that is what microdosing strength training the kind of the idea that we're going over today And it has a lot of implications specifically for concurrent training if you're just a strength athlete I don't think that this matters as much but if you are someone who wants to be good at multiple different things Or you love concurrent training This is huge.

This is a huge presentation. Um, and we're kind of at the front end of this. Um, I'm sure there's still more research to be done, but Joe, what did you think? Overall presentation just kind of broad, any takeaways from it?

Joe: I mean, well, first I'm sad you didn't tell your, your joke about his name. Um, that you did Mr.

Jerred: Comfort or Dr. Comfort. Yeah, it's just, he, there's no way he likes [00:06:00] not a fan of your book

Joe: yet. Um, so I, I think this is, this is pretty cool. There's. There's been a few times where a bunch of times where I brought up and we've even brought up, um, minimal effective dose. And I like that part of the presentation.

He specifically talks about the difference between micro dosing and minimal effective dose because I thought they could have been similar, but they're not. And, and it makes total sense and on paper, minimal. Or micro dosing does to me make a lot of sense because it's just, you have a set, a certain set of volume that you want to get.

This is how another way that you can get your volume and it's more of like building in contingencies so that you're not completely crippling the volume that you're getting because if you miss a day or something like that. So, well, I think on paper, it sounds great, especially for if you get busy.

There's also there's still certain situations that I don't think it's worth the effort to. Sort of break up everything or that you might be doing or, um, might cause you to think too much [00:07:00] into micro dosing. Like it's some sort of secret. There's been some situations where you could it. It was very cool.

And I think for certain people, it could be really, really good. Yeah, so like on paper, it sounds good because of you have a certain low that you want to lift per week, so it sounds good, but in certain situations to me, like it just it still isn't like the perfect or wouldn't work as well, but it was still kind of encouraging to see for, you know, people who get who athletes who get busy or are juggling multiple sports or something like that.

Jerred: Where do you see it not working out? Like, where do you see it not being a good, good application? Well,

Joe: so my first thought was, um. So load isn't is actually address it later on load is good for just regular strength, but not something like hypertrophy. It's more about the stimulus. And it's like you want that fatigue that certain amount at the time.

So that was my first thing was hypertrophy. And then I guess [00:08:00] in strength endurance, you could kind of break it up if you just do like maybe one really intense. Endurance set strength instead of like a couple of different sets, you just break up those into a couple different times. So I guess specifically it would be hypertrophy, which they did, um, mentioned in the webinar.

Jerred: Yeah, I think if you were to do the hypertrophy, um, I mean, volume still important in hypertrophy, but the most important thing in hypertrophy. Is is stimulus. It's getting all the muscle fibers recruited going to failure. I kind of talked about that in the last podcast I did. Um, so I do think that you're right there.

Um, so I wrote down three major points of like how this could be applicable. And we've kind of been doing micro micro dosing strength training. For a long time, like it's, it's been a part of our methodology, because if you look at how, how we teach specifically, like, you know, three, three coaches, like what a daily breakdown is, and like strength is just one of those categories, we're kind of micro dosing everything.

And we [00:09:00] found through practical research, if you will, like just programming for athletes that it works and it can still make people stronger, where I think it doesn't work. And this isn't what the presentation is about is I don't think you can micro dose. Endurance training. I don't think you can do. I think you can to some degree, like high intensity stuff.

You could do like 15 minutes a day or whatever spread out across a longer timeline, but you can't microdose endurance training and like significant like go run a marathon, right? Like you can't. It doesn't work on like the higher end of the spectrum. So my three big takeaways were one. And this is part of his presentation was what's awesome about micro dosing is one that you protect the downside because an example they give is like if you're doing two sessions per week of strength training and you miss a session because you got busy or like whatever something happened, you've now missed 50% of your training volume that was required that week to improve.

That's quite a bit, right? And that all happens. We all have that random day where those kind of things happen. [00:10:00] But if you're micro dosing for 15 minute sessions across the week and you miss one, you've only missed 25% of your training volume for the week. You still got in 75%. That's that's huge. And that it doesn't play out like over.

You might not think that's a big deal on a Like a weekly basis, but it's a bigger deal if that happens to you a lot. Like if you have, if there's a day every week or multiple days per month where you run into something where, yeah, it's, I missed a day because it got busy, something happened, whatever. Like you're missing precious, valuable volume that's going to make you better.

So I think that was one of my biggest takeaways was you get to protect the downside with microdosing. I think that's why it's really awesome. Uh, the second one I had was, and this one was pretty big, he said, specifically from the research they were doing, he said, and I have it in quotes, like, more frequent strength [00:11:00] stimuli may decrease mixed signaling effects.

So if you are aware, you've been listening to the podcast, concurrent training is awesome. Right. Concurrent training is where you're doing like some strength training or body building, hypertrophy stuff. And then you're mixing it with some sort of conditioning modality. It could be running, could be cycling, could be mixed modal conditioning, but the biggest con with concurrent training is what they are calling the concurrent training effect now.

Um, and that is where. When you do them too close in conjunction, or you do them in too large of dosages, they start to interfere with one another. It was originally called the interference effect, right? And now they call it the concurrent training effect. To where you're not going to see a huge upside for The strength work that you did or the hypertrophy work that you did or the endurance work that you did, like they start to kind of negate each other a little bit.

It's still, I always argue that it's like, I'd rather have, I'd rather do both and get the 70% of the benefit of each as opposed to only [00:12:00] do one and get a hundred percent of the benefit. That's always been my take in concurrent training. But what he's saying is. In strength training specifically, if you break it out instead of like twice a week, if you do it four times per week, this frequent frequency, um, and it's a decreased in time, it's only 15 minutes.

There's not going to be as much of an interference effect or what he said, signaling effects. So you're still going to be able to see just as much upside from the training if you break it out. And so this is where I think it's huge. This is where I think it's huge for concurrent training. And we're going to have to learn more about this.

I already think from how we've programmed over the years that we're going to prove that this is true. That doing a little bit of everything every single day or breaking it up over a week or like how over a month, how we do like doing it, how we do, I think is going to be the, the best way to go about it.

And the science is like slowly. Catching up to that. It's like, Hey, if we don't go too [00:13:00] much in any one category, we just, we do a, we sample all of it. That's going to be better. We're not going to have as much of an interference effect and we're going to still see progress in all the areas that we're trying to train.

So I think that one was huge. And then the last thing, um, I kind of wrote this down as a question because what, what he was kind of pointing out is that this could go one of two ways. He doesn't like deliberately say this, but it's either going to be. This is another way to approach strength training, like, yeah, you can, you can do this and it will be just as good.

So now you're at this point where you're like, yeah, okay, well, if it's just as good, which one works better to my schedule, you can pick. But, I also think, given his research and some of the things that he was saying, especially if you're doing concurrent training, the, the decrease, uh, mixing of signaling stimuli, all that kind of stuff, this could be a superior methodology.

And that's what we don't know yet. And I think that [00:14:00] was the biggest thing. And what has me most excited about this line of research is that it could actually be superior for concurrent training. It'll never be superior way to do strength training. They've kind of already figured that out, right? Like there's, that's kind of figured out, honestly, like strength training is kind of figured out endurance training is kind of figured out where I think that we're starting to overlap.

And what we don't have is figured out is concurrent training, but this for concurrent training specifically, this may be the superior methodology. I think we're right on the, on the forefront of that, because if we can see just as much results from four 15 minute sessions of strength training, and it's not going to hurt our endurance training at all, and we're doing both, we don't have as much signaling effects going on, then this is going to be superior, superior training methodology.

And I think that's what has me most fired up about this kind of research. And also why you have to just kind of be on top of this crap, like you have to always be looking at the research and looking at the programming, or you're just going to think that how you do it is the [00:15:00] best, like, Oh yeah, I. I run in the morning and I lift weights at night, or I run today, I lift weights tomorrow.

That's okay to a certain point, but it's not the superior method. And that's always what I'm looking for is like, what's the, the best thing. So I know I rambled on for a long time there, Joe, but do you have anything to throw in there? Yeah.

Joe: So you're saying that, so taking a micro dosing could be a more beneficial way to program concurrent training.

Jerred: Yeah. I think it, I don't know for certain, but it may be the superior method for doing concurrent training programming. So I know

Joe: a lot of our. You know, just sometimes of our tracks, we'll have kind of dedicated strength days and dedicated condition days. So would you kind of test out or fade to doing, you know, this 15, 20 minutes of strength and then three blocks of conditioning and just kind of engineering

Jerred: it that way?

Yeah, I mean on hard to kill, I've done, I've done it both ways, like I've done hard to kill where there's more of a strength focused day and there's more of a conditioning focused day, but I've also done a complete [00:16:00] opposite where it's like you hit a block to a block and a half of strength training and then we have a whole bunch of other crap to do like we have three other blocks, three and a half other blocks, you know, of training.

So I've done both. I haven't like compared to see like if we had more results with one or the other, but yeah. I do think the next cycle I program I'll probably be trying more of this methodology, like sprinkling in strength across our four mandatory days and adding in other stuff. But where it becomes a problem is because the main reason I, I tend to do like strength and conditioning days separated in my programming, there's there are two reasons is one for me and I know for a lot of other athletes, it's just easier mentally to focus on like one modality for the day.

And that's probably the biggest reason I program that is because, well, I mean, one, you won't have any concurrent training effect if you're separating days, because if it's past four hours, the concurrent training effect is greatly minimized. So one is just [00:17:00] the mental side of it. But two is what I mentioned kind of at the beginning is I don't think it, I've always kind of thought like it didn't take that much strength work to like maintain strength or build a little bit of strength.

Um, but endurance is like the opposite of that. It's like all endurance needs is time. It needs a lot of time and it's like annoying how much time endurance needs. Like if you really want to build it up, like you can be in really good shape, like a, like CrossFit style, right? Like if you just went in like that, that's like the, the CrossFit methodology these days, right?

It's like. Do a strength, quick little strength bout, and then you do this like 15 minute conditioning all out session. Right? Like that's the modality. But what are you good at at the end of the day, after you've done 15 minutes of high intensity training, like maybe you've increased your VO2 max a little bit, but you still don't have actual endurance.

You don't have endurance at the 30 minute mark. You don't have endurance at the 45 minute mark. You sure as hell don't have endurance at the 90 minute mark. Like you, you haven't trained any of those [00:18:00] modalities. Um, and so you're not actually, you're not as well rounded as you think you are. Like that's what CrossFit, I think they're like the most well rounded athletes, but they're kind of not.

They're really just, they're short burst athletes. You know, they're more like a, like an NFL football player. You know, like you don't take a someone from the NFL and haven't played soccer. They would die. They would just absolutely die because they can't, they can't run that much. Um, and so I do think. Um, mixing both is fine until you get into the endurance way.

And so that's that was my second reason is like if I need athletes to improve endurance or if that's a target of ours. I can't give you just 15 minutes of endurance training four times per week and call it good because I know that we're not actually moving the needle forward.

Joe: Yeah, that makes sense. Um, I did like that.

Um, that there was there was a time where you mentioned, like, even with this minimal, um, the micro doses, your intensity still has to be high. So you still have to be hitting those strength. Intervals are the strength [00:19:00] sessions fairly intensely to keep that up to to to hit the certain like, um, performance threshold.

But later on, he went on to mention athlete autonomy, which we mentioned. We did a study on a while back. And that's essentially like if you have these micro dosing said you have your programming through the week, depending on what you have coming up, the athlete autonomy side is to decide what workouts you would rather do on that day, whatever you feeling and then if you're feeling like doing squats that day.

Then, and it's not programmed for another day or two, just move your squat day up to that day. If you're going to hit it more intensely on that day to get the most out of that particular strength session. And I, I liked the date that they mentioned that. And that's, that's all something that we, that we've, we try and put out there.

It's not like as in your face, but you know, our, our, our program comes out four days per week. And we always say, you know, reorder your days, however you need to, whatever you want. And it's partially due to the, that athlete

Jerred: autonomy. Yeah, I think being knowing yourself really well and what you want to do, [00:20:00] uh, I used to do that all the time, like I'm not on the hard to code track right now, so I'm pretty much sticking to what's what I've programmed for myself in this new program, but like I would move days around all the time because I would just like come out in the gym and just like Not be in the mood to do something like, you know, not, not in the mood to like, uh, lift something heavy or maybe I didn't want to run or, or whatever.

And so, like, I would, I would move my days around. And what you're saying also, something I hit on in, in all this talk I've been talking about with calisthenics is that, uh, and I really harped on this in the podcast I did last week, like, how you move matters. Like how you move matters, and I'm not talking about your form.

I'm talking about like the intensity to make sure that you're trying hard, the effort, like all that needs to be there, because if you just go through the motions, you'll never have the aesthetics that you want. You'll never have the performance that you want. And so I think if you do this, it's very important.

Like if you go down to 15 minute strength training sessions. Um, it's just [00:21:00] like calisthenics. If you go down to that, like now you have to make sure that you are dialed in and you're trying, you're giving your best effort here. This is also why I think it can be more beneficial in concurrent training, because if I say like, Hey, I just need you to focus on strength training for 15 minutes.

Give me your best effort and strength training for 15 minutes. You can do that, right? You can pay attention for 15 minutes and like have the focus or whatever. And then if it's a run afterwards or something a little bit more mindless. Now you can like kind of unplug. You just got to get the work done.

That's a little bit easier. You might see more benefit as opposed to a strength training session. Let's just say is an hour or 90 minutes in some other programs. And by like minute 40, you're like, I think I'm done, but I'm going to try and finish everything that was programmed here. You're not really getting as much benefit from just going through the motion of those last final sets.

It's another reason why I think microdosing strength training in a concurrent training program might, might end up being superior. Yeah, that

Joe: makes sense. [00:22:00]

Jerred: And two of the studies, so he did one, um, so you can look up the presentation that we talked about. I'm sure you could just google it. It's on the NSCA's website.

It's nsca. tv, uh, microdosing strength training, a conceptual framework. If you want to watch this presentation, it's about 50 minutes long, but he talks about a lot of other studies in here. He's working on one. It might actually be done because this presentation was done in 2022. And now we're like middle of 2023.

So he, his, his work could be done, but he talked about other studies that had been done. Um, one was of the military with 290 people and it was, it's called, um, impact of low volume concurrent strength training distribution on muscular adaptation, 290 people. They did micro training for, so for 15 minutes.

And 15 minute endurance bouts weekly or classical training, which was one 60 minute strength session and one minute and one 60 minute endurance training session [00:23:00] weekly. And then they had a control group that did two 60 minute standard military physical sessions. And the conclusion, uh, they went into all sorts of I guess I'll read the results.

There were no group difference between micro training and classical training in measures of strength. Meaning that they, they were the same, right? And standing long jumped remained similar while shot put out, shot, shot put performance was reduced in all three groups, which is odd. Uh, pull up performance increased in micro training and classical training.

Knee extensor. Increased in all groups. I don't want to get into elbow flexors and all that crap. Basically, here's the conclusion. Weekly distribution of low volume concurrent training completed as either eight 15 minute bouts or two 60 minute sessions of which 50 was 50% was strength training did not impact strength gains in the real world.

So they're, they're basically saying there, if this is more of, there wasn't that concurrent [00:24:00] training effect, interference effect. And then there was another study, um, called adaptations to short frequent sessions of endurance and strength training are similar to longer, less frequent exercise sessions when the total volume is the same.

And I feel like when they name their studies that I don't have to read anything else because they just say everything in the name of the study. Um, but it said that there was no significant differences, uh, between, The micro training group or the classical training group. So this one had 29 subjects and they completed eight week controlled parallel group training intervention.

One group performed nine 15 minute training sessions weekly. And whereas the second group completed the exactly exact same training volume on a weekly basis, but they did it as three 45 minute sessions. And so each session comprised exclusively of strength, high intensity, cardiovascular training, or muscular endurance training.

Um, and. In conclusion, similar [00:25:00] training adaptations can be attained with short, frequent exercise sessions or longer, less frequent sessions, but where the total volume of weekly training performed is the same. So there's already been a good amount of research done in recent history saying like you can do it.

Like I said, the only thing I don't think is going to work on is endurance, but it's looking like if you're looking to minimize the interference effect. And interfere and minimize the concurrent training effect and you still want to see all the results You want to maximize concurrent training? It seems like micro dosing your strength training may be the best approach And I don't think we have enough data to say that's the absolute truth But anytime i've looked at concurrent training research and i've looked at a lot of it I've generally always had a problem with the programming like that's always been my biggest thing is like Without saying micro dosing strength training.

That's kind of what I wanted I was like, can you micro dose it more because they'd always train Just two separate training programs, you know, and that's where I used to call it like the [00:26:00] pickles and ice cream approach, right? Is These things just don't go together They would try to take a typical like long strength Program and then also an endurance program and put them together and then look at the interference effect But when yeah when you're running for 90 minutes a day and then you do you also have a 90 minute strength session Right after you're gonna have an interference effect your body's like what the hell just happened I just trained for 90 minutes, like chill out, like, let me rest for a little bit.

And that's, that's always been my biggest problem with concurrent training research is like, they're doing too much. They're doing too much in either modality. And you're obviously going to have some sort of interference effect, but we might mitigate or completely get rid of it. If we just. Microdose strength training, which would mean you're taking more of an endurance split, right?

If you're if we're like, hey, we're gonna do 15 minutes and I might try this I might try this in my own training right now But 15 minutes of strength training four times per week, but then still run for like an hour per day on average I might try that [00:27:00] because I think I think ultimately I'd be fine. It might be better for my, my strength that way, as opposed to run strength, run strength, run strength, so on and so forth.

Joe: Yeah. And we have a lot of athletes that will go into seasons or times where they're gearing up for a race. They, they want to do a triathlon. They want to do a longer, um, ultra or something like that. And, and to which the case they will. They'll back down their training. They might do one or two days of our stuff, but they still have a lot of other endurance training to do.

Knowing that you're going into that microdosing could definitely be a really good, um, way to, way to spread that out because if you're following one of our tracks, but you still need to do the endurance side, you know, look at those, even if you're taking, cause a lot of, a lot of our training has specific strength days, take those strength days and divide, divide it in half, split it across another day, and then.

Because that might typically be two because then there's your four strength days on top of whatever endurance you're doing. I think that could be, you definitely have to have some foresight and some [00:28:00] planning to when to when those seasons and things are happening. But I think you're going to get the best out of it.

Jerred: Yeah, I think that that's, that's huge if you want to do a race. Because again, I'm just used to working with our athletes where everybody wants everything, right? Like when they they are training for a triathlon, they're like, they also want to be. On a strength program, hitting all the volume that they want to hit, like, cause they don't want to lose strength or something.

And so I, I do think what you're saying, it would be perfect. It was like, Hey, just go to 15 minute training sessions. And I think the hardest thing in programming this, if you haven't programmed a lot of work workouts, or you don't have a methodology for it is how much volume to program. Like what is enough strength, the volume.

You know, for if I'm going to do 15 minute training sessions, what's enough? I think that's the hardest thing for people to figure out. We have actual, like, calculations behind this, like, um, that we teach in our EO3 coaching course, like actual mathematical equations to [00:29:00] calculate volume, um, for hitting this, like, micro dosing effect.

And then you can cross check your volume with a formula to make sure that you're not hitting up too much volume for any one person. Um, so you can get way more into the weeds with this stuff. I don't think that that would be beneficial on a podcast. That might be more like a YouTube whiteboard video that I could do on that stuff, but there are very appropriate ways to, uh, put in enough strength training volume.

That's effective, kind of like that minimal effective dose, but I would more call it like just optimal dosing. Not like minimal effective. It's like just optimal because I would, I would phrase like how we do volume as optimal for knowing that we're doing other things because if you're going to go try to program this yourself, you can't take some other strength program that you found, whether it's program we created like one man, one barbell or like one of these other power lifting programs and then just say, okay, I'm going to do that.

But I'm gonna break it up into six training sessions. [00:30:00] I'm do 15 minutes per week. You're still in the wrong frame of mind because what you're thinking is you're trying to take. A power lifters program where the only goal is to get stronger. There is no, like, I also want to reduce my mile time or run a half marathon or triathlon or whatever.

And then you're trying to add all that volume into something else. That never works. It just never works. It will only result in injury. So there are ways to, to get into like exactly what the optimal dosing is, but I'm not going to cover all that right now. It'd be way too much. We'd be here another hour and a half.

Joe: I was interested if this, if this came to your mind, because I thought about it, so we already went over that micro dosing. It might not be great for hypertrophy, but there might be other things that they could benefit. And to me, uh, if you were to plan out like programming wise a cycle, I think. I would focus on either maximal strength efforts or dynamic strength efforts, because both of those typically you need a decent amount of recovery.

And the more sets you do, I [00:31:00] mean, you can still hit those, those, uh, strength areas, but it might not be as good as the earlier set. So like dynamic efforts, if you have a, you know, 15 minute EMOM of squats, maybe around minute nine, you're not moving quite as fast. But if you micro dose those out, split that in half and do, you know, Uh, on two different days, do sets of, you know, only eight sets of those or seven sets of those, whatever it is, all of those dynamic efforts are going to be much more, much stronger across the board.

And then those later sets are still going to be just as strong and, and, uh, more dynamic as it would be if you put those whole things together. So that was another thing that I thought of for a benefit of micro dosing those certain strengths. Uh, adaptations can you can even, um, get more out of?

Jerred: Yeah. And it's got to feel weird, right?

Like I think in practice, if you try to do this yourself, it would be a little bit scary because you're not going to feel that fatigued. You're probably going to do like, like you're saying, if I did two [00:32:00] sets of my dynamic efforts, like dynamic efforts are already low volume, right? They're faster speed.

And so you don't feel much from those most of the time anyway. So if you're like, That's it. Like I'm, I'm done for the day. That's all I have to do. Like, it might feel a little bit weird, but research is pointing like, Hey, this is still fine. You're still going to see progress. And I would argue that you can probably still benefit from the hypertrophy side of this, but it's going to be a, the reason I think it's going to be a lot harder is because typically with hypertrophy, there's so much, um, uh, like isolation work.

Like you have to do so much crap in a, in a bodybuilding style program. That's honestly why I still can't bring myself to do bodybuilding style programs. Is I can't, I can't do three sets on my biceps. Like I just, I had something broken my brain a long time ago to where I'm just like, this is so boring.

This is the most boring thing I could possibly do. I'm sure if you're like really motivated to look a certain way, I'm, I'm perfectly fine with how I look. So I don't really care. But like, I, I think that's why it wouldn't [00:33:00] work. But I would argue that. If you were going for hypertrophy, just general muscle strength, not like my arms need to be the biggest or like I want my triceps to really do this or my delts to do that.

You're not in that level. You're like, I just want some more muscle mass in general. Then I think that this would work because you could still do compound movements. Like a back squat, program it for hypertrophy, still making sure you're getting the volume sets and reps. So it's programmed for hypertrophy and still only knock out 15 minutes, but it'd have to be a compound movement and you'd have to be talking about the things I talked about last week where it's like we're taking the reps to failure.

We're getting the maximum, you know, muscle recruitment, fiber recruitment when, when we're lifting all those kinds of things. I think you could still see some. Some muscle gain. So I don't want people to think that's impossible, but if you're trying to, again, put a bodybuilding program into 15 minutes, it's not going to work.

Cause like a standard bodybuilding splits, minimum 60 minutes, typically 90 minutes to hit every single, like, make sure you're working out your thumbs and like your ankles and all that kind of stuff. [00:34:00] Exactly. Cool. I don't, I don't have anything else. You good? No. Yeah. Cool. Well, we can, we can roll on this one.

Microdosing strength training. Uh, we'll be trying this out at garage gym athlete. We've already done it. Um, unknowingly, not really knowing what it's called. It was just kind of what we did for a long time. Um, so this isn't brand new programming stuff for, but Stuff for us, but something you will start to see more of, uh, at garage, gym athlete, and I'm going to dive into this research a lot more because it even kind of coincides with the programming I'm looking at now.

It's like the, where I need the most work as endurance. So I have an endurance focus split, but like, how can I program, I don't want to get weaker necessarily, or I don't want to lose muscle mass. And I talked about those things in the last podcast, but how can I keep going about those things? So if you want to see science backed programming.

Uh, you know, in an app, you can go to garagegymathlete. com, sign up for a free trial, and start trying out some of our training. And for all of our athletes who already know this stuff [00:35:00] works, and they love it, thank you so much for being a part of the community and for sticking around. Remember, if you don't kill comfort, comfort will kill you.

Joe: Not whoever comfort. The local