How RELAXING Your Face Makes You STRONGER
Keegan Smith explains how staying mentally calm during training reduces perceived effort and improves recovery. A relaxed face and controlled pacing let you accumulate more volume with less stress on your system, making training adaptations more about brain tolerance than dramatic physical changes.
Chapters
Like the strongest powerlifter in the world at the moment.
What's coming to mind when you see this powerlifting?
Well, the reason I was pointing up is because he tends it talks about going pretty fast. The intention is that all reps are fast, and I think that's kept him fresher, but he's always going to post his heaviest shit on his Instagram.
How does your mental state affect your recovery? Like, you were talking today in today's session about being more loose and not trying to grind it, not really tensing up. Does this, like, impact the recovery and.
The process of recovery? What you're trying to do when you train is teach the body that it's safe. And mostly, like, our physiology doesn't change that much when we have massive improvements in endurance or strength output, power output, what you can actually really detect in terms of, like, measurable muscle gain or changes in bone density or tendon mass, like, there are changes. The physiology does shift, but not really considerably relative to the amount of difference that you see between people. Like someone who trains a lot of the ergometers, the rowing machine, the cycling inside, they look almost the same as someone who doesn't train them. But then you put them on the thing and there's such a big difference. And it's mostly the software. It's not so much the hardware, it's mostly the ability for the brain to be like, okay, I'm okay with this, let's go. Whereas when the brain freaks out, the brain is saying, let's shut it down. Too much pain, too much risk. We don't know what happens after this. Like, let's stop. Because the body doesn't want you to put yourself into such a state of disrepair, fatigue damage that it can't recover from. So it's mostly about this game of not freaking yourself out. And basically, if you keep freaking yourself out every time you train, it's going to be more difficult to motivate yourself to come back, because you're coming back to a life or death situation, and people don't want to be in life or death situations twice a day, every day. Steroids can help with this because you will see a dip in hormones if you consistently push to failure. So the guys that are on steroids are able to push to failure or closer to failure more often and still feel better. But if you're natural and you're pushing near failure all the time, but it's not even whether you fail or not, it's not even the weight that's on the bar, it could be. You could be using 100% of your max. Let's say your bench press max is 140 and you're. You, you know, you go for one at 140, you're going to get super psyched up and it's going to be really stressful. But if you put that pins in a third of the way down and you press that 140, it's going to be easy. So it's the same weight. It's the same weight on your. On your bones and everything. Of course, the. It's heavier when it's at the bottom, but it's not really the weight. It's more like how much perceived effort and how much grind you're putting into the thing. So if you're doing the 140 and you're pressing it out for lockouts, you could do 10 sets of three lockouts with 140 and not be very stressful. Or you could go for one single repetition in the full range and it'd be super stressful.
I think this circles back to the conversation we had about, like, using more load you can handle by changing the range. What Insima and Mark Bell talk about a lot, and I tried it for myself, is like consciously keeping a relaxed face while lifting, even if you're putting in a decent amount of effort. For me, it changed a lot how my body and brain perceived what I did. Did you play around with this as well?
100% all the time. Like, I'm always trying to make it look easy. The harder it gets, the more I want to make it look easy, and it makes a huge impact. I think we maxed out on this leg press time machine the other day. It was 50 repetitions. I cheated on Lucas's count and started counting, you know, 1, 1, 1, 2, 3. And I made him do about 65 reps on there. And it was challenging for you. I want to show you, okay, you can work hard and you're going to be fine. But then you see when the other guys got on, people are freaking out. Big breaths, big pauses. And then it was hard for me as well. But you could see my. The way I dealt with it on my face and practiced mentally was different. And yeah, it's for sure it's a strategy. You see it if you watch CrossFit. Like, CrossFit's tough and they're working hard. But you always see, or almost always see, the guys that are at the top are able to retain calm. And as soon as you start freaking out, like, mentally and, and, and you can see it in the face. The, like, it's going to be very difficult to hold on. I'm not saying it can never happen in a performance, but you don't want to be doing this regularly in training. So, yeah, if you're going to have one or two hard reps per session where you, where you like really scream or something, okay, like, maybe, but definitely not all the time. And I think, like, you don't even need to be doing it ever, really. Like, you can make progress over a long time, especially if your goal is like basketball or backflips or something else. Like, what are you getting super excited about for in the gym? You don't even need that extra, extra effort. You just need to accumulate work close enough that it's going to transfer to your best, so your best effort keeps going up. The calmer you can do that, the better you're going to be for your other training, the more repeatable the sessions are going to be and you got lower risk of injury, which is a huge thing as well.
Like, for me, I was always pushing too hard in the gym. Like I had like two, three, maybe four good sessions where I could, I was able to kind of make progress, add a little bit more weight, but then I would stall and I would never consistently make the progress I wanted. So I was plateauing basically every four to five weeks.
Yeah.
And it's not fun, it's demoralizing. I kept on going, obviously, but I would have been better off and would have made more progress if I would just take it easy, make the easy sessions count and then build on top of that.
Yeah. So we have to learn to cycle, load, and to reset. So one way to do this, one simple strategy is to do like, light session, medium session, heavy session, light session, medium session, heavy session. And if only. Every third session you're looking to make some progress. Those other sessions are nice and calm. You're going to make more progress. You're going to be able to stay for longer on the thing. If you want to go up every session, then you have to keep changing exercises. So if you go up, or parameters at least, but generally you go up, up, up for maybe three to six sessions in a row over two to three weeks. And then you change the movement. But when you change the movement, you go back to something that's easier, then you go up, up, up, then you go down. And that, this, this is, you have to cycle in some way. And there's, there's various ways to cycle, but what's Even more important than cycling is keeping the intensity lower and focusing on volume. So if you want to push the ones up, focus on two to five repetitions for volume. And as the amount of weight that you can do for 10 sets of two goes up, five sets of five, 10 sets of five, 20 sets of five. If you are continually increasing the volume of weight, the volume and the intensity that you can handle close enough to the one, then your one's going to go up. Like, you know, if you're doing 10 sets of two with what used to be your one rep maximum, which is going to happen in four to eight weeks of training in this style, then you can keep going. If you want your five to be really high because you're focused more on body composition, then you want to work more so in the. I mean, you can work below it as well. You can work anywhere between ones and tens or twenties. If you're improving in all of them, then your 5 rep max is going to go up, your 8 rep max is going to go up and you're going to look better. That's the simple truth of it. But by focusing just on pushing up the five repetition maximum, it can definitely work for some young healthy guys like you see with kino bodies. Gregor Gallagher, I think, has been one of the most popular coaches for young men to improve their body composition because he has got extreme results and he followed another guy's system, Lean, Gaines, Martin Burkham, I think his name is. It's cool story, it's cool history, but it's not super reliable because of what you're talking about, because you can burn out, because you can get injured. It doesn't work well for me to do these reverse periods where it's like heavy 8, heavy 6, heavy 4, because what's heavy and if you try and go too heavy and you're grinding and you're kind of burning out, you're getting more risk of injury. You're going straight into a fairly heavy set of eight. It's just not as reliable as building up volume. The most reliable mass system that we've seen is CrossFit because it's consistently training with a high volume. It has its own problems and challenges and you have to go to a CrossFit box and you have to wear colored socks and stuff that goes with CrossFit. But that idea of accumulating a lot of easy volume, it always works.
If you want to join new athlete and train like we do, we have all the links you need in the description down below that you can also check out the documentary I made about New Athlete Project and all the other good stuff. Follow Keegan on ig. He was dropping some gold there for every once in a while. See you inside. Have a good one.
