Podcast 228 // Can you have it all in your training? | School of Calisthenics

This week on a podcast, we're going to answer a question from the community. Now, if you know Jocko well, you'll know that he likes a little bit of alliteration, and that's not a quite alliteration cuz it's a Q and a C, but it's a pretty good go for a Monday morning. We didn't think it could go anywhere today. Jocko is in his camper van in Devon, coming to you live off his hotspot. I'm at home. We've We've got minimal script planned. This is literally as raw as it gets. Jocko, good morning. Uh uh good morning. Well, a delay. I bet the the after production um team will obviously the they'll you won't notice delays as you're as you're listening to this cuz obviously we'll have had that all sorted out. So, what is before we get into the question worried I'm worried that the production team is going to is going to bin us off after this one today. Production team might say no more. You know, that other production team that's not definitely not me. Just just wet the appetite of like what's the what's the theme of of of the question, not necessarily the whole question, but the theme of the question. Uh that's a good point. I've got forgotten the algorithm. I know I've not told people what we're going to do in the first 3 seconds. Um we're going to talk about training stimuli, our stimulus, and can you get multiple adaptations at the same time? This is a question a lot of people want to know the answer to, and it's come from our great friend, Mr. Wes Lymans, and we're going to answer that for him today after we've told you about what an incredible opportunity it is to go and use all of those training stimuli in one superb event, which is a Spartan Race. Yes, we have got to obviously thank the sponsors of the podcast, um Spartan Race, and they have been lucky enough and grateful We're grateful enough because of their um what's the right word? What's the word I'm looking for? Um Generosity? Generosity, yes. Now, they've given 53 spaces to come and join us at a Spartan Race. Now, they're starting to not be many left, but you get to join us for free by simply tagging or taking a photo or video of you training for a said Spartan race and tag importantly Spartan race. Sorry, hashtag Spartan race @spartan and then also tag us so we can see it @schoolofcalisthenics and importantly send this send it to us in a direct message so we can see. We validate all of those things and then we will send you the free code. Now, you can join any Spartan race that you want. Link is in the description of the of the podcast. You can do anyone you want. Okay, but it would be nice if you can to come and join us on the 16th of July for the one in the Midlands. And we're doing the morning race. There's a team called School of Calisthenics, obviously, and we're doing the 21k. Aren't we, Timbo? Yeah, do you want me to tell you how my training is going for the said 21k Spartan race, the beast? Well, I'll be all right with the running bit, but I don't know that I'll be strong enough to pull myself across any of the obstacles. That's my worry. Well, this is going to put a lot of people at ease because if you're worried about not having done enough training for such an event, don't worry cuz I have done none as well. So, we're all going to be in the same boat. I have just continued doing what I've always been doing or what I've been doing in recent times and done nothing in specific. I have done no running. Well, which Literally no running. So, that is where I'm at. We'll do an episode afterwards of like how good is CrossFit training and calisthenics for Spartan multi races. And you'll get to see. Shall I let you into another secret? on. I'm not doing that much CrossFit either AT THE MOMENT. SO, LET'S SAVE THAT FOR ANOTHER DAY ABOUT HOW I AM strategically not preparing for a Spartan race Um, as a 41-year-old male with a significant still remaining level of audacity with my I think my natural athletic ability is. Let's call it a taper. But we're going to get into it because it's Yeah, taper. Been tapering for the last 2 years for an event that I didn't know that I was doing. Um, anyway, I will look good. That the point important thing is I might look in pretty good nick, which is going to be important at around kilometer one and less important if I can't make it to kilometer 22. 21. But anyway, we're getting bogged down in introduction to Jaco as usual. Let's get into the answering the question from Wesley about different training stimuli because I think a lot of people have this question these days cuz everyone wants to be Everybody wants a bit of everything, so let's tell you how to get a bit of all of that and what the opportunity cost is. Roll that jingle. Listen, players. You're listening to the Movement Strength and Play Podcast by the School of Calisthenics. Here are your hosts, Tim and Jaco. So, Timbo, you are officially question master for this one. You have the question. Um, let's hear it. Well, I'm going to paraphrase it for you cuz it's uh otherwise it's a bit long-winded. But basically, the question from Wesley is that he understands that you can get different adaptations through different stimuli, okay? First rule of training is going to be specific adaptations to imposed demand. You get what you train for. So, if you lift heavy, you get good at lifting heavy weights. If you run long distances, you get good at running long distances. The body will respond to the stress that you place upon it. So, what Wesley's question is is is it possible to get different adaptations within 1 week? So, let's say he's got 5 days to train. Can he do some endurance type training on a Monday and Friday, some hypertrophy on a Tuesday and Thursday, and some power strength training on a Wednesday? He says this is the bit that I like particularly and I'm just going to put it in there, but is the body going to be able to recognize the stimulus or is it not worth setting up a training week like this and it's better to therefore better to do different blocks of specific training where you might focus on one thing like just going to do an endurance block, just going to do a hypertrophy block and those might be 6 to 8 to 12 weeks long. Now Jocko, I know that you will lean on my detailed and expert understanding of the science of periodization, loose. But I'm going to let you go first with your let's go for some general context that will probably resonate better with the people than when I start banging on about boring stuff that's in textbooks that nobody wants to read. No, I was thinking there's a a song that springs to mind. I know I started last week's podcast with a song. It reminds me It reminds me of um Baz Luhrmann's Wear Sunscreen where it's like the long-term benefits of and so basically I'm going to give you just some a person personal experience and Tim's going to give you the science. Um One to so and I'll use I'll It's It's good actually. Sorry to interrupt Jocko. It's good to do it this way around because if I go first, it'll be a very short podcast. But that's just I'm wetting the appetite for what I'm about to say. Yeah, perfect. Um And and and and another little bit of context and to show that there's more than one sort of question, but someone else had sent a message and got got deep into the algorithm actually because this was literally just over the weekend. Um Hi Jocko and Tim, long time SOC podcast admirer. Tick, okay. Um they didn't actually say what their name was. On Instagram it's intermittently underscore fast. So if you are on Admirer. Shout out. Yeah. Admirer, nice. And it's a it's it's not exactly the same question, but the context is the same for what I was going to just wanted to share from a personal experience. And they basically were like, "Oh, I've been getting into some like long distance running as well. Started with some like 5K runs, etc. Um but I love doing calisthenics as well. How do you do muscle-ups and all that type of stuff? Um still maintain like an athletic sort of like look to the body, so there's that element in their mind going as well, but do all that running. Um and sort of uh I felt a it's a bit weird personally. I felt a bit bad sort of writing it, but I was like I just I've This is the This is my truth and this is just honestly is like you can't I was like I am nowhere near as strong as I was at things like pull-ups or whatever else as strong now as I was a year ago or probably 2 years ago because I'm not doing as much of that and I'm doing more running. And you can't have everything. And I haven't done a muscle-up in months. One cuz I ain't got anywhere to do them. We've talked about this before. Um but two, it's just not a priority right now for me to be able to I still do some handstands and stuff like that, but my training is more based around like simpler calisthenics movements. We're still working like base level stuff, but I'm probably just going I'm edging towards some more strength endurance work, not maximum strength stuff. So I can't I I'm aware that I can't have it all. I've fallen into the trap many times before like trying to have it all and you just make very little progress on anything. Because I've start I've signed up to do a a stupid ultra marathon event and I've been running up a few hills a few months ago going um yeah, this is hurting and all that extra weight on your biceps is not really helping right now, is it? So it's almost like and then seeing really skinny people just floating up hills and you're like probably it's and then I'm like probably could do with losing some weight, but then I'm like but I don't want to don't want to lose weight. And then there's this battle of like oh, I don't want to be skinny, but then I don't want to be heavy. And it's like you can't have everything. And I think it's a nice little element breeding on from one of the podcasts we did recently where you were talking about I would Yeah, go on. Well, I was just going to say where you were talking about look um just train how you want to train to see you with those Oh, this isn't a delay, Jack. This isn't a delay. This is a camp of And Delay. Let me get All I'm saying is that just You're the editing department not going to like this one. that your You said something the other week that was like, "I just need to do what I enjoy doing in training and then how my body looks afterwards like that's just how it looks that's and that's fine." And I think there's a nice ring to that um message as well. This is aside from the question, but will you feel Do you feel that you will enjoy how your body looks when you have got your those short shorts with the high side split and those endurance type looking legs, you know what I mean? I um going for a training methodology based on something I heard um Brian Mackenzie say a while ago that after 10 mi all that happens is your body is just chewing up your own muscle. So, he was like he's done a 100-mi ultra Yeah. based on never running more than 10 mi in training. He'll have done a lot of 10 mi presumably in training maybe like for every day for however or I don't know, but the and and he was saying like actually if you build more strength then you've got a little bit more base to lose rather and before you completely break down. Um so, I'm going for a little bit more of that and uh and we'll see um rather than doing like an absolute insane amount of um mileage, but maybe we'll see we'll see we'll see. Um So, yeah, you can't have everything, but the flip side the caveat to it from just personal experience when playing rugby and I was lucky enough to play in a professional environment where we had all of our training laid out and done for us. We did do endurance, we did do repeat sprints, we did do agility, we did do strength, we did do power, and we also did all of the rugby training as well. So, and that would be in literally in one week. We would do a whole host of those things. Now, all that meant was as a rugby player you needed an element of those um the those those abilities, so you train those men modalities, but you're not the greatest distance runner, you're not the greatest repeat sprint ability, you're not the strongest, you're not the most powerful, but you're an accumulation of those things cuz that's what that sport provides. And I think when I flipped that round to go, "Now, well, now we're just training for like for life, really." Going, "Well, what do I want to be able to do rather than like what that is going to be like in terms of like from a from a what we were doing from rugby." Um I just use that example cuz we both know that. Um and then just building your training around that, which ultimately comes back to what you said the other the other week in the podcast we were going, "I would do what I enjoy doing a lot of." Not not to then shy away from things that are going to make you better that you still need to do cuz it's like a weakness thing, but um focus a little bit on that unless you're um you know, you're training as a you know, who knows, there may be the odd professional athlete that listens to our podcast and then they obviously can't go into training and say, "Hey, Simon and Jack have said I just need to do what I want to do, so I'm doing bicep curls today." And they're like a swimmer and you're like, "Maybe not." Probably not. Um just let's just me just cover off that sports one if if anyone's listening who is playing at a team sport and thinking about what that looks like. It's extremely difficult for most people in season to get significant gains because you've got this issue around training and recovery from match play as well. So, typically in season from a sports performance perspective, we're looking at maintenance. You might get some incremental gains when you depending on what the fixture layout is like. But let's say that for example, if you're training twice a week, you've got a game at the weekend and that would be anything from like you used to train twice a week, Jaco, on the pitch, right? I guess. Uh on the field and like Three times? Four times? How many times a week? four on the field or something like that. Yeah. So being able to kind of maximize those what we would call technical sessions, you don't want to go and smash yourself in the gym so that you then actually can't perform the technical element of the of the sport or you're then tired for a for a weekend. So this would be a typical one for rugby players would be like Wednesday train legs because you you might train you might play Saturday or Sunday. You do your legs, you then got to probably a relatively harder training session at the beginning of the week, maybe Tuesday, Wednesday because you're then going to try and taper down for the weekend. So you just got this kind of constant thing of like when are you going to do this high high intensity work? So just bear that in mind and that's typically why a lot of the preseason element for sports teams will be important because you're just going to try and bank as much as you can in the beginning early phases when you're not playing or you're in your preseason fixtures and then you're looking to basically maintain that and nudge that along for the rest of the season until you repeat the process of following year. Jaco, any closing thoughts on that before I move on? Um something you've mentioned a phrase you've mentioned before, minimum effective dose during the season is is what's like a a really good S&C coach is going to do with you. Um and as always there's there's there's um there's the odd like sort of freak performance in there that um we we did have guys um like PBing on a few things like back squat and stuff like in season but that would be someone that's like not getting not forwards. Like it tended to be someone like a fly half or something like that where you know, you've not been hammered all all game and um you're not carrying loads of niggles and stuff cuz some sometimes it was it'd be a case of like not even just maintenance, it'd be like just put the body back together as best as possible before the following game the week after. Um but it depends on people's um people's competitions. They may be they may may be performed weekly. I mean, I always think of things like, you know, ice hockey and they play like Friday, Saturday, Sunday or they play at least twice at a weekend. I'm like, how the hell do they do that? But yeah. And then you got all the people they play 120 games a season. 120 games. How does your rotator cuff crazy. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, it's all right cuz sometimes you don't even hit the ball and that's okay. That's part of the sport, actually. If you hit it, there's actually an anomaly. Um there's there's been minimal expectation to actually hit the ball. I've been to a baseball game once. It's really boring. Uh oh, gosh, that might rub some people the wrong way. Um All right. Okay, let me get into a little bit of So, that's kind of That wasn't your question, Wesley, but we thought we fancied answering a bit about sports performance cuz that's what we know. So, now let's talk a little bit more about general general population approach to periodization. So, the short answer, and we are now 15 minutes into your uh to your question is yes, you can train multiple stimuli at the same time. And the simplest thing that I can do for you in this one is just tell you that it all comes at a cost of or you're basically trading off against the what you would get if you just did one big block of training. So, what I mean by that is if you're going to go and do hypertrophy training cuz it's probably the best example I can give you. If you do one or two days of hypertrophy a week, that will give you something, but it won't be as good as if you were doing 5 days of hypertrophy a week. And that sounds like really simple and probably you're like, yeah, it's obvious to him. But with hypertrophy, one of the biggest things you need to do is get volume in. So, we need to be hitting between 10 and 20 sets per muscle group per week at an appropriate intensity. So, if you if you're kind of getting four sets of eight in on the chest and on a on a on a Tuesday and doing another four sets of eight or five sets of something on a on a Thursday, and you wanted to try and do a whole total body split, like it's just going to be difficult for you to accumulate the kind of volume that you need across the week. Now, let's throw on top of that you go and do some endurance work on a Monday, Friday. Well, you've got to for hypertrophy to work, you've got to be in a calorie surplus. So, you need to be making sure that you're eating enough to offset what you're going to go and do from an endurance perspective where you might go and chew through 5-600 calories in a workout or if you're doing super distance stuff, you could easily go and chew through a thousand. That's going to be potentially detrimental to your hypertrophy gains because the body won't build muscle unless you're in a surplus. The power stuff kind of fits in fine with that, right? So, maximal strength is kind of more like a neural adaptation with the power stuff on top of it. So, when you do that, how that fits in depends on the level of of fatigue. So, if you are wanting to do something like that, like a mixed um mixed phase training, we often call this like a conjugate phase or sorry, concurrent phase where you've got multiple things operating or or targeting at the same time. The best thing you can probably think about is maybe splitting those into trying to get two adaptations that are complementary around the same time. There's no reason like in sports as Jack has said, you might have an endurance type day at the back end of the week. At the beginning of the week, you might do max strength power stuff when in theory you've had a rest day and you're a bit fresher. You might throw a hypertrophy session in. Like those sorts of things work quite well. The strength adaptations work quite well. So, power and maximal strength at the beginning of the week, maybe go hypertrophy and strength endurance towards the end of the week. The endurance type work though, how you're doing your conditioning stuff is going to need to fit in a little bit strategically around that because you probably would want to be doing that again at strategic times during the week. But realizing that all of that stuff in the same week is just going to be detrimental to any indepen- individual um adaptation that you're going to get from a specific stimulus. So, to wrap all of that together, yes, 100% you can do it. The body will respond. How you strategically put those together is going to determine how effective it is and just be realistic in that you are not going to get as strong from doing a a concurrent type approach. We've got lots of things going on than you would do if you were just doing four sessions of maximal strength lifting a week and a fitness session for example. It's so it's just just a trade-off. So it's down to deciding whatever you want, how you want to mix it, how important those adaptations are to you and just know that you are going to get what you train for and the optimal way it is needs to fit what you want basically. Jacko, did I do a decent enough job on explaining all that? Yeah. No, um it it it's I love I always like the way you you explain things um clearly even even if you think oh it's going to be science-y and people are going to be confusing or something. It's not. It's it's clear and it made it just made me think then towards as you were coming uh towards the end then I was thinking like well if I break in my mind sort of break down an example got like well what do what do we reckon an Olympic weightlifter does? He doesn't like go swimming. He doesn't go like cycling because it's just he's going to focus purely or he or she is going to focus purely on like literally like the Olympic lifts. They're probably the the training becomes very narrow the better you want to be at just one thing. And it actually makes me think of like the podcast we did with the WeMove guys about like be more of a generalist. Well then you got it's because you like doing lots of different things. It You get We always say this don't we like you get what you train for. Um I had one time anything to add in to the calorie surplus element um which I call the Ross Edgley diet. Um everyone saw what happened to Ross Edgley as he swam around the UK. He got bigger. He was swimming 12 hours a day um and it's a case of like at the weekend I ran 40 miles and um you just eating as you're training is the um is is the secret in eating It's one of the things I love about doing lots of running is eating a lot. It feels just like snack time constantly. Yeah. Yeah. If I wrap this up Wesley with a little bit I'm talking Wesley now directly but there's anybody who's listening in finding this interesting. If I wrap this up with a little bit of kind of what I would do as a person not training for a specific sports objective but looking for a more concurrent type approach my training so I'm not kind of like just all in. So I don't like just doing strength work these days because it makes me feel like I'm not fit. I don't like that. So having some level of conditioning. So I'll typically at the moment thread through one primary strength focus throughout my week. So that would at the moment be some general kind of conditioning type base level work around general preparation phase with a lean towards hypertrophy rep ranges. Because I'm basically building towards some more max strength stuff and just coming through just slight adjustment in my training. So I'm typically working six to 10 rep ranges. Three to five sets at the moment. Probably training five times a week but one to two of those sessions will be a purely condition based focus. So as in my conditioning I mean fitness. So at the box I train at now there's a intervals based session three times a week and I drop into one if not two of those depending on what the week looks like and it is just a combination of like moderate intensity erg stuff so like conditioning pieces on rowers and bikes and ski ergs that sort of thing. Some running involved in it. There'll be some body weight stuff involved in it. There might be some kettlebells, some dumbbell work. It's just like a big kind of standard CrossFit style hit type move class. But without any of the complex movements in there like Olympic lifting and and gymnastics, calisthenics, that sort of stuff other than like pull-ups typically. So what that means is that I can focus on the one major objective, but I'm going to supplement it with the other stuff, which makes me one feel good, but also makes me kind of make sure that I'm kind of just keeping these other the other balls in play. What I don't typically try and do is have a max strength or power type focus at the same time as a hypertrophy focus, and then try and stay fit at the same time because I just can't get that amount of volume in during the week. I feel like something doesn't get the get doesn't get the focus that it needs. And the the landing point on this one for me is that I take a much longer term view on my on my training now. So, rather than trying to get all of this in the next 6 to 8 weeks, I typically now think about 6 months. So, rather than kind of going um I want all these things now, I'm kind of thinking how do I get a couple of these things now with a view to laying the foundations to get better results from the next phase. So, to give you my last final example, if you build more muscle, bigger muscles can produce more force. Therefore, if you go into a maximum strength phase, you've got basically a bigger tank to play with. So, hypertrophy is useful in building more max strength. If you build more max strength, you get more power adaptations because neurally you start to do better work around priming the system to then go and be explosive. So, you can have these themes as you go through, but if you're doing a max strength blog, there's no reason why you can't throw a cheeky foot pump in on a Friday if that makes you feel good. Like, just realize that you are not going to turn into a bodybuilder by doing that. And let's be say like you can then also Sorry, I'm going down a rabbit hole now. I didn't think I was going to do this, but you can also get bigger from max strength training. So, just because it's five reps and not six, doesn't mean you're not going to get a hypertrophy gain. Powerlifters are pretty big people. And there's benefits of working across that rep range. So, like five or six reps is pretty good, and 12 to 15 reps is also pretty good for hypertrophy. So, you really don't start diving into the detail, and I I hope if if that if that sounds confusing, go back to what I said first and make it simple, and then understand that get that nailed down first, and then you can move to kind of a a bit where you really starting to kind of play a little bit more with reps and sets and variables and and that sort of thing. Um for those people that want a bit of a mixed approach, it's possible Jaco, isn't it? I'm going to tease it and put it out there we might have something coming for you which might be of interest in the future. Keep your ears peeled. Ears peeled or eyes What is it? Eyes peeled. Eyes peeled. Ears ears properly ears. Keep your ears to the ground. Pricked ears pricked, eyes peeled. Whatever this might be something coming which might be helping a little bit as to this regard in terms of people that want some more structure to their training program designed by people who maybe have got a bit of skin in the game. You heard it here first. That's just to make it be crystal clear the scorecard. Thanks for bringing that up. Uh they would never have guessed that. They would never have guessed it we were some point when it's ready going to be launching a weekly training uh designed program that people just literally goes to the gym and go right what have I got on this week and here's the reps and sets. They would never have thought that I was talking about that. Yeah. I reckon you should put that in an app, too, Tim. That would be good, wouldn't it, if it was straight onto somebody's phone? Anyway, but uh with no set time frames as of yet. Can't commit to that yet. But coming soon. I hope that's been useful. Coming soon. Yeah, so yeah, I hope that's been If anyone's got any other questions off the back of that, this is a massive subject and it really it the easiest way to go is it just it depends. But understand that you the real basic principles as a recap you get what you train for. If you try and do everything at the same time, you put it's like my analogy I normally use is like blackjack, right? You're playing lots of different hands at the same time. You're not you spread betting, so you're not putting down all of your cash you've got onto one hand. Therefore, the wins that you get are going to be smaller and sometimes you lose rather than winning. The best way to play jet blackjack to get the best amount of returns probably to put the most amount of money down on a single hand cuz you're going to be betting more on a single adaptation. But that's not what we always want. So just accept that spread betting is useful, but you got to kind of maybe do it with the expectation of being realistic about what you're going to get. And done. And to to to to finish on a quote from uh Billy's girlfriend um in White Men Can't Jump, sometimes when you win, you really lose, and sometimes when you lose, you really win. The You must have seen White Men Can't Jump. Hey Billy, let's do Billy. Um anyway, on that bombshell Let's sign us off, Tim. That's enough of that for today. Until next week, keep exploring your physical potential with movement, strength, and play. Class dismissed.