How I Train Upper Body Using ATG Principles

Okay, so we're going to go for decline. Press 10 by 10 into row 10 by 10. I'm going to talk you through it as we go. Yeah, you keep counting them for me. So I've got this skinny bench I think Ben Pakulski might have popularized. Does take away from stability, but it gives you a bit of extra range of motion with the scapulas, which I'm a big fan of. Okay, so I'm gonna work through this volume. Goal is to accumulate some work, build some capacity for volume. Now we can work on speed still. This sort of weight can do speed development, can work on different positions. I'm a big fan of changing the exercise. Slight variations. You should have your testing movements. But then if the goal is to be athletic, then you want to be strong in every position. There's no benefit to being really weak out here, strong in here. Choosing one position and above the others doesn't really work like that in the real world. There are coaches out there who think there are magical positions. And 90 degrees has something magical about it. You know, Jay Schroeder kind of popularized that idea. I'm not sure who else before that. Maybe some Russian stuff, but it doesn't instinctively make sense. Easy 10, right. So I've done my heavy work. These aren't meant to be hard. They're meant to be accumulating tolerance in the tissue, building metabolic capacity, building some muscle. But they are going to help. When I go back to doing heavy work, It can go strictly on the minute with each of the movements. I'm just going back to back, so it gives me a little bit more time to talk to you guys in between. I don't think it's going to make any difference whether I rest a little bit longer after the presses before I go into the rows or not. If I wanted to be more time efficient, I could just do this as kind of like a drop set or a down ladder to maybe go like 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3. We got no time pressure, and it's 20 minutes easy. Done. Huge fan of being on the clock, being accountable, being measurable. You could progress the weight on these, but probably makes more sense to progress with reps. Maybe once you're doing 12s, go heavier for fives or sixes or eights, depending on how big the jump is in the dumbbells. So, yeah, I've done the heavy work. I did 20 minutes of standing press on the minute and then 20 minutes of chin ups. Maya's building a castle here in the background. Did you? Yeah. Wow. It's looking good. 10. 10. 10. I did 10 again this time. Yeah. You can see working harder with the 20 kilo dumbbells and with the 10 kilo ones. So those ones are 10 kilos, these ones are 20. So these are double twice as heavy as those ones. Now it's also an opportunity to play with tempo, play positions, reversible. Strength we know is the key. Tension we know is the key. We're talking about athletic ability. It's not so much about reps, it's more about the accumulation of tension. Building our tolerance to tension in terms of volume, in terms of speed and in terms of load. So how fast can you receive tension, how much load can you use for tension and how much total work can you get done? It also matters which positions you receive that tension into. And then we want to zoom out and look at the balance of tension across the body. It. A couple of bonus reps there. Do you have the idea? I'm doing 10 sets decline bench. 10 sets of decline bench on the minute. Well, on the second minute with Rose as well, it doesn't really matter to me too much exactly how I get them done. Okay. This isn't really the main movement and I don't have heavier dumbbells. So yeah, I could do seated, you know, press or make it harder in a different way. Could do sets of 20. But goal is not really to tax myself too much with these after I've done the heavy work. And then this afternoon I'll do arms work. Biceps and triceps. Yeah. Didn't know you're going to make it pretty by throwing things on me while I'm lifting. Probably shouldn't do that just in case I drop the weights or something. So if you wanted to go for a short range variation of the row, you would go face down. Obviously you can't get the long range here because the ground's in the way. So that's a very muscle dominant movement, meaning that's going to increase the neurological connection to the muscle. It's not so connective tissue dominant because the connective tissue isn't under tension. So the essence of the short range training is to increase muscle activation. And obviously there are certain positions that we really need to have. So sometimes short range is the only option. Specificity to keep a muscle healthy. We should have strength in the short range and strength in the long range. You see, with children or animals in nature, they won't have those imbalances. When we strength train, we know that we develop most strength around the part of the movement where we work the hardest. Even if you're training full range of motion, most strength development is around the sticking point, which means it's in the middle, which means you're creating an imbalance in the muscle where the long and the short range aren't well developed. So that's sort of when a push becomes a pull. Yes, it's bringing the biceps into it, but it's also challenging the chest. As I get out there, really feel the chest as well as the biceps. So chest and biceps do kind of work together in these sorts of movements. You notice in the flies, but then flies, we don't tend to go as heavy relative to what you can press. Some people do flies with more weight than this. So I go for short range with lighter dumbbells, gonna be able to get off significantly higher. So you can see if I'm doing those shorter reps, kind of makes sense to go for a bit longer. Time on detention makes sense. But obviously there's a lot more tension in that. If I do four 0x0 reps with this, you know, up, pause at the top, slowly down. This kind of movement, there's a lot less work being done in 10 seconds than if I'm up the top. You're banging out those partials, drop catching weight. So time under tension. He's really poor measure of the quality of tension and therefore the training effect. The training effect is going to be mainly dictated by the quality of the tension. I'm playing around probably a little bit more than I usually would if it wasn't on camera. Just showing your rep is not a rep. Every one of these repetitions has its place and could be used in a certain circumstance partly to build resilience and to build athletic ability or to solve a specific problem. With the orange car here we've got my favorite, the green car. And there are some more over here as well. You can see with those ones getting to a bit more long range. The blue car. So long range, meaning I'm getting a stretch in the posterior deltoids in the rhomboids. Purple calf. If I'm getting a stretch in the muscles, then we now know from the latest research stuff that Charles Pollican was doing 20 years ago, that if there's more stretch, then there's going to be more muscle mass added. Okay. So it matters about the connective tissue length at the time that you're creating muscular tension. It. Nice and warm out here. Sun's out. Getting some reps done. Kids are playing life's good. Worked hard to get to this position for a long time where I own my own time and I can dedicate my learning to things that I'm passionate about where I think I can make the most positive impact in the world. Some ways you could say I'm retired, but yeah, often do 60 or 80 hours of work a week as well, but not every week. And a lot of it doesn't feel like work. Even though it is my job, it is what people pay me for. So that's probably the best case scenario. You know, where you do have responsibility and you are making contribution. You also love what you do as well. You get the time with the people that you want to have the time with. It's. Sneaking out of my intensity guide there. They're pretty tense. Start to lower it down. More of a planche position. Something like the first part of the back lever strength and a lot of tension to the biceps and the chest. Nearly finished. So yeah, I'm starting to get to some fatigue there. Those last few styles of reps and longer sets taking a little bit out. There's a lot of total tension with this work but it's still time efficient. 60 minutes on the clock. We've been out here for 80 minutes. Did a little bit before that. I could definitely go, I could definitely shorten the time that it takes to do this and I get 90% of the result. So, you know, I quite like it like this. For a lot of people these would already be short rests and probably be a short workout for a lot of elite lifters, power lifters, weightlifters. Sam. So the astute amongst you might recognize that the relative intensity of this significantly higher on the presses because I used a lot of the sets on tens but I'm not too worried about it. I get a lot of back work done with the pull up, chin up volume. And when you re lock off those reps at the top, you do work hard on the retractors. So they tend to do as many rows as say a lot of power lifters who don't necessarily do the, the chin up volume or get the strict chest bars. So hope you got something out of that. Love to hear your biggest take home something that you're working on your training. Drop me a line and let's get stronger together.