The Most Important Conversation The Strength World Isn't Having - Long vs Short Range Strength

Welcome back. Extreme range strength. Now we're really going to dive into it today. So we've set the frame of. There's something different going on in atg. There's a reason why Keegan was so impressed, why the world of strength training is being flipped on its head. There's something serious that is happening and we need to understand what it is so that we can deeply believe in the process and be able to apply it and customize it and know exactly what we're doing. And rather than just kind of blindly following a formula, which you're probably not interested in, if that's, you know, the reason you join this is to deeply understand and to be able to apply with dexterity. So there is a new era of strength. When the Nokia came out, people were really excited about it. I remember getting my first one and playing Snake and being able to talk to my friends and it was fantastic. Right. There's nothing wrong with all the ways of getting things done in terms of strength, but at some point there's better technology that comes along and nobody's buying Nokias anymore. Right? That's what's happening in the world of strength now. People are still going to want to train the strength sports, you know, competition, strength sports, but people who are training for the benefits of their body just to feel good, which is a lot of people and athletes, the reason why they train is to enhance their performance. There is a new technology in town and it's better than training for strength competitions. Even those who are training for strength competitions will use the new technology. So nobody is using a Nokia now. You can get those things done with the new technology. So what you're going to see is CrossFitters. I've already got lots of CrossFit coaches and CrossFit gyms that absolutely love ATG. They love athletic truth strength and they know that it's the perfect plugin for their members so they get to keep people healthier for longer. You're going to see the same thing happening in bodybuilding. You're going to see the same thing happening in lots of areas. So this technology applies to all the strength sports, but it definitely is changing the game for athletes and for everyday joes. So, yes, we have this human ability death march that's going on. We need to do something about this ticking time bomb situation is not acceptable. If you look at the statistics of joint replacements of orthopedic injuries, et cetera. It needs to be changed now. We're not going to flip this on its head overnight. We're not at war with anyone. We just want to end this scenario. We want people to experience the best of their physicality. And look, accidents are still going to happen. There are still going to be challenges and it's going to take a long time to make a significant impact on the whole, global population, whole. Hopefully within the next few years we can get this message to every human. I think it is possible, foreseeable that everybody will know of this solution one way or another over the next few years. And that's our job. So the modern physical education actually lacks the accountability of engineering. When you go and build a bridge, if the bridge falls down, that's a big news. The science of bridge building, the science involved in engineering and construction is so much more developed than what we see in the world of strength. And that's something that we need to change. So human engineering, the human performance enhancement, the human ability enhancement journey needs to be as well put together, if not better than what we see in the world of bridge building. Because ultimately it's the human experience which is the most valuable and the one that needs to be enhanced. As I was sharing in the introduction, most of what we do today in the gym is based on circus training, which became strength competitions where it's feats of strength that are being performed and then that's morphed into all sorts of different systems of rehabilitation. Some of what we do in ATG was actually arrived at. You can see Jefferson curls. And these sorts of movements were actually part of the post war or rehabilitation programs. But now that wisdom has kind of been lost and we're going in all sorts of different directions with strength training, into yoga, into Pilates, it's all just strength training. But the underlying philosophy, the underlying technology is what you're going to understand through extreme range strength. And that's going to give you the tools to know what is going to make the difference when with your programs. Okay, so the outlier in performance and durability, the outliers, they're doing different things. They're not training like the everyday Joe is. And the best athletes who last the longest are also trained differently. They're looking for different solutions, different answers. You can see this, you know, Ben does a really good job of explaining this with people like Kadir Ziani with Stefan Holm, Holm with George Hackenschmidt. So these outliers who achieve to an extreme level for a long period of time, they're doing different things and they actually happen to be applying the technology of extreme range strength, whether they're conscious of exactly what they're doing or whether they've just stumbled across it doesn't really matter. What you see is that they are applying these things and now you're going to be able to as well. So watch this. We don't go backwards. Once one person discovers something and then there's someone else as an early adopter, eventually it spreads. The truth cannot be unlearned, right? So a lot of people, once they've experienced, let's look at some other trends. Let's look at paleo nutrition, let's look at ketogenic diet, let's look at carnivore diet. Once people go down these paths and they experience, okay, this is just better, they don't go backwards. Very rarely. Truth can't be unlearned. Once you understand what you're learning in extreme range strength, once you've followed athletic truth programs, you just can't be convinced that there's no value there, that it doesn't work. So the decentralization of information right now, the decentralization in the information age is the stage that we're going through now. So anybody can access the best information through YouTube, through Instagram. The challenge is to decipher which is the best stuff and which is not. And that can be very, very tricky in the world of athletic development and strength training. With your understanding of what I'm about to explain to you today, you will have new criteria to understand exactly what is going on and why it's working. So disruption is the new normal. We're seeing disruption in every industry. It had to happen in physical development, in strength training, and it is happening. CrossFit was a serious disruption to the gym market and that spawned a new era of community gyms and made strength and conditioning available to the public. That happened in the early 2000s, really boomed from 2010. You're going to see now human strength training, not a sport, but engineered human ability. I think you're going to see exactly what we see in that image. I want to single out Charles Poliquin here. Ben speaks about him a lot. He was a very, very strong minded individual. He's a genius. He put together knowledge and systems beyond anything that anyone else, beyond the contribution of anyone else in the world of strength. He built on the shoulders of lots of different giants and he was always quoting the different people that ideas came from. His work is pivotal and foundational in athletic truth group and what you're learning about in extreme range strength. So the least understood concept in strength is that muscles have an elastic component and they have like a winching ratcheting component. And you might think, well, I know that, of course, everybody knows that muscles have tendons and fascial component that are attached to them. And then they have a component that is pulling to shorten that this ratcheting effect, the actin and myosin. What I didn't understand what took me 20 years was that the exercises that you choose have different components of these within them. It's an absolute game changer in terms of your understanding of strength. And from now on you completely understand exactly why athletic truth group training programs are completely different to anything else that you see in the strength world. From my knowledge, there's no one else who's applying this technology like zero. I've looked at thousands of programs. I've studied all the best coaches. There are a lot of great coaches out there, mostly for strength sports, as in powerlifting, weightlifting, strongman, etc. But I don't know anyone who understands this concept and it's applying it other than athletic truth group. And now some of the students. But I haven't heard anyone explaining exactly what's going on. Okay, so remodeling movements, long range strength. The remodeling movements are the ones that use long range strength. So the muscle will be at length and the connective tissue component, the elastic component of the muscle will be under tension together with the muscular component. Okay, so I'm going to go through this over and over again. Different. We've got a whole lecture about long range strength. But I want you to understand by the end of this, the goal is today is to understand what the remodeling movements are and then what the rewiring movements are. Okay, so this is for me, the biggest breakthrough. This is when I saw Ben's work in 2018. I'm like, he gets this and he's taken it to the extreme that I hadn't seen anyone else do, especially in lower body training. But even Charles did not take strength training to this extreme. Okay, so what you see here is because you've got shoulder extension as well as elbow extension, the bicep is under a lot more pressure, so there's already connective tissue stretching. Okay, so long range strength is when you have tension already on the connective tissues and then the exercise requires a lot of tension as well. Okay. So the muscles create tension as well. Don't worry if you're getting a little bit confused, it will become very, very clear as you go. So connective tissue dominant exercises. This is a connective tissue dominant Exercise. This is a remodeling movement where as you do this, you will be able to passively extend the shoulders a lot further or actively using the back of the posterior delts, the triceps, etc. Okay. So these movements have a huge impact on the connective tissues and we're going to go through that in more detail. Okay, so understanding long range strength when the connective tissue is already under pressure or when it's put under a lot of pressure within the exercise, especially from two joints being put under tension. Like in this exercise, we have the shoulder extended, we also have the elbow extended. So because both joints are under tension, these are maximum tension exercises. These are long range strength exercises. So you can have these at the extreme and then you can have them to lesser extremes. This is how we need to be categorizing. Every time we see exercise selection, we need to look at the sequencing of this within a training program, the total volume of each within a program. Without that, we just kind of guessing and we don't really know what we're doing. We're just using exercises and we're thinking, this trains biceps, which is old technology. This is the Nokia. Charles went beyond this. My understanding is that Ben has taken that to another level, that ATG has taken that to another level, and that we're taking that to another level together, combining this technology across every joint of the body, the new athletic troops. So understanding long range strength. These exercises are highly inflammatory. We need to understand that it's highly inflammatory to do this in a very different way to spider curls. Okay? Highly inflammatory. They cause internal bleeding and they cause restructuring. Now that can be great or that can be catastrophic. This is why we need to know what we're doing as coaches. These are the more anabolic movements because there's so much tissue damage, we're creating a lot of tissue damage. If we create a lot of tissue damage, then we're going to cause more muscle growth. These are the anabolic exercises. New muscles created to replace damaged cells. And we're going to actually lengthen the muscle. We're going to change the fascicle length. We don't need to get into the weeds of the science of this. What we need is to understand the concepts, the philosophy and be able to get that idea across to, to the people that we're working with. Hopefully some of what we're talking about, you already had some understanding of a feeling for, or you can see it within the programs. I can explain, and we're going to explain exactly how this fits in with all of the sequencing of acg, when you go through zero, this technology is there. When you go through other programs, it's not there. The way you develop athletes, the way you build beasts, is through this. Okay, look down here at the bottom. These are the exercises that make shit athletes great, right? So what you're going to notice is that a lot of what's going on in the athletic development world, the popular stuff that you see is basically polishing. If you can see my image there, I'm polishing a turd, right? So you polish a turd by doing a lot of neurological exercises when the structure is not there, we need to upgrade the structure. It's the structural upgrade that made Charles Poliquin a great coach. And Charles understood exactly this concept that I'm talking about today. He didn't believe in taking it to the extremes. He didn't do flat bench curls. From what I saw. I never saw them in his program. Now, I believe he avoided the extremes of outer range, maybe because it was too hard on his tendons. I know that he regretted not gaining more flexibility. I don't know why it wasn't taken to the extreme in his system. But he did value the range, and he put a lot of effort into art, into winning flexibility program. They were recommending for a while the PIMS technique. All of these methods were based around getting us this outer range, this long range. Okay. So these exercises tend to be better with lower repetitions. If we're using them for strength, like if we're going close to the maximum weight that we can handle, then we want to use lower repetitions because tension is really the goal, and they're going to cause a lot of damage. Now, if we're doing them light early in a rehabilitation phase or when we're introducing the movements, and of course, we might want to use some higher repetitions, they're going to cause a lot of connective tissue remodeling. Is this ringing any bells? Is this sounding like it's something important? Right. They're going to have a longer recovery cycle. This is why the KOT squat is generally only done sparingly. Okay. So when we have knee flexion and hip extension at the same time, then we're causing a lot of connective tissue challenge, especially if we're near maximal intensity. And so it's going to take longer to recover. So these exercises need to be used more sparingly. They are eccentric dominant exercises, which means they're good to use slow eccentrics with and slow tempo. Now, you notice with an exercise like an rdl, an exercise like a Kot squat, you tend to want to be slow with it. When you're doing these sorts of curls. When people first do them, they don't move this fast, they move slowly because it's like, oh, and you're feeling out that end position. Right. So the eccentric dominant exercises, where you want to go slower with them, as you become more advanced, you'll build more tension by going faster. You'll see. Now Ben is going faster with his Kot squats. That's because it's become more advanced. If you look at Cheetah doing his Nordics, he's almost dropping down and exploding up in the, in the Nordic. So rather than going slower through that movement, he's showing mastery in terms of connective tissue strength to be able to execute that movement quickly. Generally, Powerlifters will go slow on the eccentric and often they don't have, they have very poor long range strength because they don't train it. If you watch the Mark Bell podcast with Ben Patrick, which I hope you did, you would have seen the high speed back squat. That absolutely blew the minds of Mark Bell and the guys in the podcast. He, he squatted down fast and stood up in a fraction of a second with an extremely heavy weight. So that athlete would have much better developed this system, much better to be able to go faster in a healthy way. So load is supported by the connective tissues in these movements. Now we have another type of movement. So we have two broad categories. We have these long range strength remodeling movements and then we have rewiring movements. Short range strength, actin myosin. I don't want you to look at this stuff here on the right. Strength training textbooks. There's enough people who know that stuff. Let's leave that to them. In my opinion, I don't, I don't need, you know, I studied this stuff at university. I'm not going back and studying what's going on. The latest in ATP and ADP in actin myosin. What we need to understand is that a movement can be accomplished without resting on the connective tissue. We all know this, but we don't apply it to our strength training philosophy. At least it took me 20 years to understand this and to have it really clear in my head of whether I'm using a rewiring movement. I'm using a remodeling movement. So short range strength, lower inflammation, less structural damage. Okay. Because you're not pulling on the connective tissue so far so hard you have just the weight pulling on the connective tissue and not the resting end range position. Okay? You're going to see the images coming up. So if I'm losing you, just stick with me. We've got a whole lecture series, a whole lecture coming up on short range strength. And then we're going to go through this joint by joint across the whole body in this course. So you're going to know this inside out. It's going to be second nature to you and it's going to be confusing why other people don't understand this. If you are just picking this up like a flash and it's all just making sense to you, that's great too. And you may be, you know, you may be a movement genius. You may be well ahead of me in the pack of rate of learning of this stuff because it took me a while to get my head around it. And it's fine. It doesn't matter how long it takes you to understand it. It matters that you get it and that you apply it and that you join this top 1% of coaches who understand athletic truth. Okay, so lower inflammation. What they're going to do is increase neural drive nerve density. So within the poliquid programs, people who've studied that system will know that there were phases of intensification and there were phases of accumulation. So these are the accumulation exercises. The other exercises are the intensification exercises. It doesn't mean you can't change the reps. It's not black and white. But understanding these concepts will help you to program with much more dexterity, especially around injuries and limitations. So you're going to increase nerve density by using these exercises because they tolerate much higher repetitions and repetitions are what are going to create neural density. Yes, you can learn through shock experiences, but most learning, best learning comes through constant space repetition. Okay, so as we learn this over the next two years, this stuff is going to become second nature to you. You're going to be comfortable talking about it, explaining it, teaching it. Because of the repetition, muscle soreness then is less. There's less time required between sessions compared to connective tissue soreness. What exercises would you fit into this category? Within the ATG system? If we're focusing on the knees, think what's a short range exercise that creates little muscle soreness that can be done often? Reverse step ups sleds. If you go really heavy on reverse step ups, you're still using a lot of muscle tension. And if you have Achilles issues, then it's not a short range. Exercise for the Achilles. But for the knee, the step ups are short range exercise because the knee can close all the way to where the cheeks are on the snakes. Snakes are on the cheeks. The knee has that range ability. So when we do reverse sledge rags, we're not using a much connective tissue. And that is the magic of the rokp. Concentric only decreases the connective tissue as well. These are concentric dominant movements by nature. And then within the sled work there is no eccentric phase which is what makes them so powerful. So important exclusive use causes decreased fascia length or fascicle length. So you're going to shorten the muscle, you're going to shorten the connective tissue. If you only use these movements and you'll hear Ben speak about this when talking about sleds. And then you got to stretch. Okay? So you do your sled work and then you go stretch. That was where the couch stretch really came in. Now we're focusing more on working towards the human knee extension. Because the human knee extension is really the epitome, like the extreme of quadricep length. So being able to use that position and it depends on the connective tissue tolerance of the person. You can have really strong muscles and really weak tendons. That is the recipe for disaster and that is the way most people are strength training. So we're focusing on short range strength, we're not focusing on long range strength. And therefore the connective tissues are not being remodeled. And therefore we have a lot more injuries than we need to have. So we need to be aware. These exercises are great. They increase neural drive, they have low inflammatory component, they don't cause a lot of muscle soreness, but they need to be balanced. We still need to get that end range strength, those end range positions. These aren't going to be the best exercises for muscle hypertrophy. We've already said because of the less tissue damage means less muscle hypertrophy. Now doesn't mean you can't get sore with these movements. If you go hard and heavy, then you can definitely get sore because the muscles are still working. It will tend to be more muscle soreness and muscular soreness. With these exercises it's very unlikely you're going to blow your tendons up because they're only being put under tension by the muscle. They're not being put under tension by the joint position and muscles, they're not already under tension. So these exercises are often limited by the connective tissue of the opposing movements, which become clearer in the. When we look at some of the animations for those movements. So is the body protecting against the full muscle rupture? Back lever, especially with the hands around the other way on the back lever, is the most common way for biceps to tear. Achilles tears when people are running backwards and then they run forward. Okay, so you maximally load up the Achilles and it pops 30, 40, 50 year old men. Especially common is the body protecting against full muscle tendon rupture. If so, then it's a long range exercise. If not, then it may be a short range exercise. All right, so remodeling, rewiring movements. Is the body protecting against rupture? Is the muscle, is the movement crampy? Okay, so let's compare and contrast. In this one, you're more likely to feel a cramp in the bicep. Even more so if you extend, if you flex the shoulder further, if he lifts the bar above the back of his head or further towards his head, that muscle is going to get even shorter and it's going to feel crampy. So that would make it definitely a rewiring movement. If it's crampy, it's rewiring. If the body's protecting against rupture, then it's a remodeling movement. It's a long movement. And ketchic tricep, we know it's on a length here. Okay, so this is a length, dominant movement, along range movement. It's a remodeling movement. Okay, that's going to cause more muscle hypertrophy than this. A lot of people have made jokes about tricep kickbacks. Who's laughing now? Patrick? Step up. Poliquin. Step up. A tricep kickbacks for the lower body. Okay, so these inner range movements are actually great. They're just not the best hypertrophy movements. And in terms of overall training, you may not have the time for tricep extensions, but it definitely can be really useful to do some inner range tricep work. And I'm going to show you more efficient ways doing that and where you sequence them. So we use these for muscle activation when we don't want to stress the connective tissue. It's very common to get tendon issues in the tricep. Have you had them bench pressing, et cetera? You may have had issues with your tricep tendon. This is one way to get around that. Is the body protecting against full rupture. Is it crampy? Okay, so this one is crampy. And if he extends the shoulder even further or if he stands up a bit more. It also matters which is the heaviest part of the movement. So the heaviest part of the movement is when the forearm is parallel to the floor. Right. And this one, the heaviest part of the movement again, when the forearm is parallel to the floor. Okay. So we have to look at when the movement is actually difficult. In this, the elbows are extending in both movements, but because the shoulder is flexed here versus the shoulder being extended, that completely changes the output of the movement. Everybody gets taught full range of motion. We need full range of motion in our strength training. Both of these are full range of motion exercises in the traditional way of looking at it. What we need to differentiate, better terminology here is long range and short range. Okay? So that when the forearm is parallel to the floor, there's very little connective tissue tension. It's all just the muscle ratcheting effect, the active myosin. In the bottom of this, the arms actually want to pop up. If he drops the weight, his arms are going to pop up because the connective tissue is under so much pressure. So the connective tissue is helping them get out of the bottom. You're going to understand this really, really well when we go through the individual lectures on these movements. But that pops us out of the bottom of the movement on bench press. Okay, So how do I use this? Why does this even matter? Hopefully you already understand why this matters. Hopefully you've had penny drop moments within this lecture where you go, okay, now I understand strength training to a much greater extent than I did before. Now I understand why Keegan decided to put everything behind atg, to give up real movement, give up everything that I've been creating to get behind athletic truth. This concept in itself, this is extreme range strength. And there's a lot more details that we can go through about how to apply this joint by joint, all across the body, how the neurological system underpins it. I believe this is the most important, or at least one of the most important concepts that you can discover as a coach. So how do you use this? By now, you know that exercise selection isn't only about gaining strength in the range it is trained. Okay? So you'll hear a lot of people talking about strength is gained in the range that it's trained. It's a quote from Charles Poliquin. Yes, that's important, but it's not only about that. What's really important is the type of adaptations that come in that range. Okay. And the two joint pressure and the two joint positions around, especially muscles that cross two joints. Okay? So Exercise selection is also determined by the type of adaptations created in the connective tissue and the muscle motor units. Will there be a lot of connective tissue damage? Will there be muscular damage? Will the athlete become tight? Will systemic inflammation increase? Now you know how to answer these questions. That puts you in a highly advantageous position. Now you hold the keys. Now you hold the secrets. Now you hold power that most coaches have never understood or experienced. They may have inadvertently or indirectly discovered this at one joint or another different ways. Like most people understand that tricep kickbacks are not the best exercise, but they don't necessarily know why. They think it's because you can't handle that much weight. It's not because you can't handle much weight. It's because the anabolic component of the exercise is small. It's because it's a neurological exercise instead of an anabolic exercise. So when we understand that across every joint in the body, we can have an impact that we couldn't have before. So conclusion. You now have an upgraded criteria for exercise selection. You have a better understanding of the implications of those selections, hopefully. I think that's really clear at this stage. You know which exercises are more anabolic and have longer connective tissue recovery times. You know which movements rely on neural drive and muscular recovery. Okay, so if any of that is not 100% clear for you at the moment, that's fine. We're going to go further with it. Don't be afraid to re listen to this lecture and I'd love to hear your biggest take home your penny drop moments. Yes, Ultimately what we want for you is to be able to get these world changing results. Coach champions. For people to be raving about the results they're getting when they're working with you, I believe that the information that we've shared today is going to put you in a much better position to do that. So Charles is looking at you here. How are you going to apply this? Are you going to take this to the nth degree? Are you going to embody this? Are you going to change the world with this knowledge? We can change the world. It's always changing. And for sure, the world of strength has changed so much in the last 10 years. It's going to change a lot in the next 10 years. The question is, in which direction will it change? There are a lot of technologies out there that are trying to do all these things with robots and with electric shocks and that sort of thing. What we really need is human engineering to be enhanced. And I believe that we have the opportunity to do that. Next we're going to be talking about short range strength. We're going to understand much more deeply what we've spoken about today. And if we get it all right, we'll all end up with arms like this. No, we won't. But what Charles is telling us in this image is embody your message. Do something, do the impossible, do what couldn't be done if you could do what couldn't be done. If you can get results that others weren't able to get, then life will get better. Opportunities will become greater for you. So I want to thank Charles for this. I want to thank Ben Patrick for the opportunity to present my understanding of why athletic truth is so important, why it's changing the world, how we can transform human ability. Lastly, I want to thank you. You're the one that makes this possible. I wouldn't be sharing this, presenting this if it wasn't for your enthusiasm and energy to be a better coach, to get to the top. I've coached world champions, now I want you to coach world champions. I want you to do whatever it is that you want to do. If you want to work in elderly homes, go and do that. If you want to change youth sport, let's get that done. If you want to change soccer, rugby, whatever it is, Ben and I are fully behind you to go out and change the world with this knowledge. It works. I was kind of half doing this when I worked with the world champion City Roosters. We set an all time defensive record for 0 scorelines of opposing teams. We won the regular season, the finals, the grand final, the world Club Challenge, the club championship. I've had the chance to work with Sonny Bill Williams, the highest played player, the player to sign the highest biggest contract in rugby league history. So effectively the LeBron James of rugby league. I've done a number of one to one camps with him, including a month long just over a year ago under the guidance of Ben and his technology. So this stuff really works. It has been applied. I've used it with rugby sevens players and all sorts of athletes. It is the best of the best as far as my relentless research has taken me. And I think you see with Ben the results that are coming from this technology. Let's do this.