Iron Culture was started by Eric Helms and Omar Isuf as a means of exploring the world of physical culture and attempting to distill a unified philosophy of lifting and to help listeners find greater meaning from the iron. The lifting community has become fractured over the last ~70 years and this Podcast will attempt to explore the fundamental threads that unite these different tribes. The Podcast focuses on dispensing practical, useful information to the listener, bouncing from history, to philosophy, to contemporary lifting culture issues, to science. This can range from teaching the audience about lifting, programming, nutrition, supplements/PEDs and the history of lifting culture. The format includes casual conversations between the two hosts on a variety of topics, discussions with a panel of experts and interviews with authoritative figures in the lifting community.
"We're not gonna shoot equipped powerlifters, people keep doing it" "It's cool" Athletes are impressive. To reach 3rd in the whole world matching the total and tell yourself that you lost. But on personal level it never is about winning a great position, it's about not reaching your goal of the highest spot especially if you know you could've, you were ready. You're still on the road to the goal. Iron Culture is the thing that pulls you deeper over the time. I started by being interested in building muscle, then weightlifting and now I'm increasing strength with a powerlifting program. And my real real love is in judo, those athletes also lift ridiculous weights at the gym with very nice technique (weightlifting and powerlifting). And I fell in love with iron in the process, going to the gym regularly is now the thing that makes me feel good and staying out of the gym for too long gets frustrating and feels like deteriorating physically and mentally. In the end almost all the athletes are in the iron game as well. Also so many people fight the fight for life at the gym or in the competition. And there's something about the pain at the gym and being crushed after the gym, it's like spiritual cleansing and you tell yourself you deserved that rest time for doing something right, working hard (and smart because part of it is also controlling your emotions about it).
I like raw, tested powerlifting best. Equipped lifting pushes massive weights, but not even the best equipped guys can match raw lifts meaning the equipment does the majority of the work moving the weight. Equipped is more about mastering equipment and more like a stunt lift than a powerlift.
It's ironic that the equipped lifters are very strong without the equipment for training majority of the time without the equipment, because you can't sustain training with the equipment often. Yet in raw powerlifting you don't have to go below parallel in squat and you use advantageous technique in the bench to manipulate the lift. Not to take away from the greatness, but we can always come up with arbitrary reasoning why something is not as valuable or impressive and how the athletes are supposedly not doing the work in their achievements.
@@Yupppi Yet the equipped lifters can't match the raw lifters without the gear. Equipment is equipment lifting it. No raw lifter can come close to 1400 bench or the 1300 lb. squat, yet these guys take off the equipment and aren't even competitive for raw top lifts. Clearly means the equipment is doing the work. Nothing ironic about it. There is no arbitrary reasoning. Equipped lifters have more problems with depth or substandard lifting by a huge margin than raw. A guy like John Haack goes deep on all his lifts and is an incredibly impressive lifter. Ray Williams buried his squats. They're not even comparable because equipped used the equipment and still has all the other problems you want to bring up like depth and the lifts looking like anything abut a real bench, squat, or deadlift.
What if we are all actually AI without knowing it, humanity has already been driven to extinction, Trexler is actually the only successfully cloned human, and humanity is slowly rediscovering itself as Trexler interacts with us?
Key takeaway: Benefits - Multi-joint exercise: Some multi-joint exercise does not effectively train all part of the muscle well and variation is needed. Different exercises can emphasize different muscle fibers or parts of a muscle, which can lead to more comprehensive development. - Skill Acquisition: In skill-based sports like weightlifting, variation helps refine technique by exposing the athlete to different angles and demands, improving overall proficiency and adaptation. e.g. if they accidentally move one inch, how can they recover from that position. Counterpoints - Complexity and Mastery of movement: Making it harder to track progress. Mastering a skill also allow the body to trully target the muscle instead of just technique gains. - Single-joint exercise: There are some "optimal exercise" that is inherently better than another exercise. It's not necessary to include a worse exercise. - Reduced Specificity: For sports like powerlifting, where performance in specific lifts is crucial, too much variation can detract from spending enough time on those key movements, possibly impacting competitive performance.
Dr. Eric Trexler is not an AI, but a real-life human being due to his ability to display emotions, make personal connections with others, and demonstrate unique thought processes. As a human, he is capable of experiencing a wide range of emotions such as joy, sadness, and empathy, which are essential components of human interaction. Additionally, he is able to form personal relationships with others based on shared experiences and mutual understanding, showcasing his genuine humanity. Furthermore, his ability to think critically, problem-solve, and adapt to new situations highlights his cognitive abilities as a human being. Overall, Dr. Eric Trexler's complex and nuanced characteristics demonstrate that he is undoubtedly a real-life human being, rather than an artificial intelligence. -a real-life human being
Sun Tzu said confuse the enemy. The muscle is the enemy. That's the road to victory. Listening to this I'm surprised to hear that Athlean-X was correct all the time training every single bicep and tricep and forearm head in a workout, and doing 8 different core function exercises. I think in his latest video he listed his favourite "chest, upper chest and lower chest" exercises. Funny thing about calves is that they have been my most sore muscle for weeks doing squats and deadlifts. Really appreciate bringing strength perspectives back on topic, to the iron game. And even talking about weightlifting, close to my heart these days. Helms flexing his knowledge about training weightlifters with variations is my jam. The fascinating challenge of programming for athletes is how limited the time for hypertrophy is, and how much the strength training has to adjust to the skill work and sport specific performance requirements. Like an off season of maybe only a couple of months has to fit hypertrophy and strength progress for the whole season and even then some sport training, the actual season being mainly trying to maintain the adaptations. Or arranging them between competitions like in grappling: adjusting sport training intensity to the weight training intensity in phases, only some sport technique work with plenty of weights in the beginning, almost no weights and all the actual grappling towards peaking for the competition. And how to fit them in a weekly schedule, you're bound to have double or triple training days like weights in the morning, technique during the day, grappling in the evening and you have to be able to perform adequately in all of them. Even more so choosing exercises for athletes in specific sports when you throw in the bin everything they don't need and try to pick the best beneficial exercises without having too much, but still keep some big bangs for the buck for huge general effect (like heavy squats for almost every single athlete, just range of motion changing).
I am a newbie (2 years lifting) and I have no plans on being a bodybuilder and am an average person, but I still love learning and want to know about bodybuilding and training. I just train to stay health and get better at swimming.
Very interesting first 15 minutes. I've been thinking recently along similar lines that "good genetics" should be split into different dimensions such as: starting point (baseline muscle mass or strength), rate of progress during training, ceiling (max potential). The most gifted lifers have them all: they start with his baseline strength/muscle mass, progress quickly, and have a high ceiling. But many people have "good genetics" by excelling in just one or two of those dimensions, for example, a very skinny guy at baseline who responds astoundingly well to training, grows quickly, and can reach a high level of muscularity (high ceiling).
I really like Trexler's new office, really nice environment although slightly industrial zone vibe. Never seen a mirrored Win95 window before though. Did Trexler train under an old Japanese man by any chance? Did he actually live in Japan? Bowing to the practice space out of respect is part of what you do in judo, before you bow to your sensei and practice partner or in competition the space, the mat, the ref, the mat. Personally I'm a high responder to resistance training. I train a bit and take a looong time to recover, being like walking dead until then. What's more direct proof of responding to training? Seriously though, It seems like an extremely hard thing to assess where you are in your training progress. Like even knowing all the fundamentals that need to be in place to get good gains and strategies to program a solid plan and adjusting it accordingly, it's tough to find a moment in life where you could hit that. In the big picture there's so much shattering due to life status changes, being sick probably being the biggest wrench in the cogs of trying to gauge your volumes and intensity tolerance. It sounds very common sensical to think that you expose yourself to higher risk of injury if you ramp up your training pre-emptively. It's not unheard for weightlifters and powerlifters to talk about knowing they had the injury coming in hindsight, because they were both progressing "too fast" or unusually fast in their program, not taking their time, and just for the sheer volume they ramped up. And all the talk there is about injuries rarely being a snap of a finger change, but more like building up some sort of start of an injury and never healing it or taking a step back in the training, until it hits. I think Helms talked about his own injuries some time, something like doing too much too heavy during deficit calories and it sounded like he also knew he had it coming in hindsight. So maybe it's reasonable to also draw an assumption that the food resources play a part in how injurious training becomes. People also talk about training dehydrated and injuring themself. In general I believe it's rare for injuries to happen to people who train in good hydration and nutrition, who have warmed up and progress their program meaningfully conservatively and have volumes they are used to.
In my experience, Sean Nalewanyj and Geoffrey Schofeld are right when it comes to volume, which is that a lot of (but not all) advanced lifters need to cut back on volume as they progress. As you get stronger it's harder for your body to recover so if you actually to want progressively overload you'll need to dial it back some
34:00 yep. Hit it on the head. This is exactly what happened to me about a year ago. So the improved efficiency of each rep and set allowed for lower volume as measures by total sets. But as the sets are more productive, it’s not like i’m now working less hard or anything. If anything, i might be working harder, just less overall number of sets
love helms articulating the idea of dosage. in advanced training, it hasn’t been a reduction in volume but rather increasing dosage via technique advancement, taking advantage of particular biomechanics and finding true rir
I've been lifting for 30 years plus now. I prefer low volume, high intensity lifting. Even I do some volume work though as it seems to help grow both strength and muscle and it also depends on the muscle. I never do very low volume on biceps or something like pushdowns. What you learn lifting a long time is it is volume and intensity over years that gets you as big and strong as possible. Strength is also relative. I always see these discussions of intensity and they hold up intensity icons like Ronnie Coleman and Dorian Yates who are outliers for particularly strong bodybuilders. But Jay Cutler is no slouch as I saw him doing reps with four plates for volume. And even a natural guy like Steve Hall is Romanian deadlifting 365 or more for controlled, high volume rep sets and that isn't weak. So when people are making these strange claims about these volume guys aren't boosting intensity seems kind of dumb because a lot of these lifters are still moving weight that is considered strong. It may not be powerlifter strong, but it's still objectively strong. I even watched Alberton Nunez squatting 500 lbs. Almost every long-term lifter builds up strength and alternates volume and intensity depending on what they enjoy and what works best for them. Low volume, high intensity has always worked well for me and high volume has always made me feel like trash slowing recovery and feeling bad on the joints and tendons. Whereas low volume, higher intensity usually feels great with faster recovery. I like it more so it keeps me coming to the GM. I know for some guys looking more muscular gets them to the gym, for me adding 10 lbs. to a lift keeps me going to the gym.
Interesting realization for me the past month. I was having a hard time reaching near failure and ataying in a rep range. Recently Ive found after a warm up, hitting a set of 10 with my goal RPE, RESTING 5 BREATHS, THEN 5 REPS OF THE SAME WEIGHT. REPEAT UNTIL 40 REPS TOTAL ARE HIT. HAS REALLY LIT ME UP AND FILLEDE OUT. VOLUME EQUATED TO 4*10 SETS REPS EXERCISE PER WEEKATCHED. JUST SUPERIOR FOR ME. SAD I FIGURED THIS OUT FOR ME IN YR 20 OF TRAINING.
This is basically myo reps. Great way to cram in volume in a time efficient manner. I’ve found for some exercises that burn a lot, like calf raises it’d very beneficial to keep you close to a sufficient proximity to failure.
Since this is a pedantic podcast I’ll throw my hat in the ring regarding dr. Helms’s segment at ~20 min mark. 1. Veganism is a phylosophical stance regarding animal suffering, it’ll all there is. There are no mentions of diet, health even environment. Those are add ons that are not part of the definition and different people fall on different sides of this. 2. What you reffer to as a vegan diet, if not falling unto the reducing animal suffering as the primary driver, is a plant based diet. It might seem a mute distinction but it’s really not since the different demografics that fall into these categories tend to behave differently for differrent reasons. 3. I get you pitting vegan and carnivore diets “against eachother” as extreme opposites on the animal consumption scale, but that’s about the extent they have commonalities and talking about them like there is an equal value and data with similar results is wrong. You didn’t specifically said it, I know you know the difference and the strenght of the data, but please make it clear. As you speak about these topics it looks from the average youtube schollar as 2 equally valid or invalid strategies, which is not the case. 4. I know you both Erics eat mosly plant based, but it looks from my pov like you’re going to extreme lengths to not seem like you’re endorsing a vegan diet in the slightest. 5. There are grifters and ultras for every single domain and subdivision of every subdomain. There are gurus for bands, and chains and HIT, SST, long range partials etc, but don’t poison the well for vegans in order to preemptively repell the incoming critics which there are tons as maybe 1-2% of the human population is vegan if that. Even if it’s an unpopular opinion / approach / diet / phylosophy it doesn’t make it any less valid.
