Welcome to barbell logic rewind Welcome to barbell logic podcast. I'm Scott Hamburg and I got of course Matt Reynolds with us today And we're going to talk about grinding in the past. We talked about yeah. Yeah, it's like college age Not that kind of grinding that kind of grinding. Do you know that the okay nevermind? I was gonna Go ahead. Well, no, it's fine. I'm not gonna go there So I was gonna tell a story my wife and I but I don't know in our early years.  Yeah, we were the You just blew my mind. Sorry. So a couple of episodes ago We talked about you know things that cause people to follow in your progression You know pitfalls right and one of them is not knowing how to grind and so we we've got enough to say about this We can make a whole episode. Yeah about it. How do you grind properly? So take it what throw on a TLC album? Is it what it was right no, that's not it at all That was your go to my mind's telling me no But my body My body's telling me We said a bunch of followers. That's our Kelly. That's our Kelly by the way, so that's bumpy owner.  Yeah, you can't tell it's moving Yeah, so let's start with what people think is going on So before we like joke about it and talk about the real serious part of this I taught my mom who's 63 how to how to deadlift. She's not listening to this So because I'm already saying bumping grind by our Kelly But I taught her how to deadlift and she had great form She had actually was I was really surprised how good her form was and it got her out to her first 100-pound deadlift she did with 100 pounds and Started pull the bar and the bar moves incredibly fast all the way to lock out right and the whole time It's moving she was she said oh my god. Oh my god. It's so heavy. It's so heavy. It's so he's talking Right. She's talking during the thing and and she said it back down and she said oh son son That's so heavy right indicator number one if you can talk so heavy.  Yeah, if you're not doing what you do what we do. Yeah, you go get a friend one You know, of course hundred pounds right the thing is is the bar speed Told me that it wasn't heavy when I say it's not heavy. I don't mean just not heavy to humanity in general I mean it wasn't heavy to her right because it bar move fast That's not a grind right so our brains are built with a governor like an engine is it says If it starts to move slow put it back down right but we have to learn how to overcome that and when the bar moves Insanely slow we keep pulling or we keep pushing or we keep squatting or whatever it is And so we have to learn how to grind because at the end of linear progression Everything is a grind the first rep is usually decent grind and the second rep is a big grind and the third and fourth and fifth are Insane right grinds right and we can't continue to make progress and we can't get that refinement that we talk about every Episode without learning how to do this. So if you have been coached by me This is most easily learned on the deadlift because the deadlift starts at the bottom. I Tell my clients. I've told every person who's ever been coached by me. I want five full Seconds of grind before you put the bar down so they start to deadlift even and I tell them even if you're positive That you can't get the weight I still have to have a five full seconds of grind because I need an appropriate stress To be able to recover from and then adapt to get stronger and my body doesn't know to benefit from that You benefit from it. Of course you benefit from it, right? Like it's a it's a huge ill my body doesn't know if I hit the weight or not The only thing that knows that I hit the weight or not is my brain is my own psyche is my own Confidence factor and so if I pull on 700 pounds Which is near my max 725 is my my max I pull in 700 pounds and it stops at like mid-shin To be able to barasti, you know two three inches below the knee and I grind and shake Yep, and the bar just won't move and I grind on it for two three four five Okay, it's not gonna go and I set it down six seconds, right?  There was nothing to adapt to That's the problem. Yeah, that's why we have to learn how to grind and so you tell these people I mean I've heard you've told me I've heard you tell 100 people five seconds of full effort Yep, and I'll start the dead left and you count back five four three So that's a big deal.  I'll tell you when you can quit Yep, and I'm gonna put it down It tells you know if somebody's been training and I've been coaching them for a little while that'll work Yeah, the five four three two one thing helps more for people that are newer into training if they trust me I can tell them, you know Oh Put it down and they'll put it down and they get their good grind in and so every lift has a spot. That's tough Right. It's typically when one extents her hands off to another.  Yep, and that's hard It's no man's land does two muscle groups are not at their most efficient at that place It's kind of interesting. It's kind of funny for all the years. I've coached I've never actually considered it the way you're saying it, but you're exactly right It's when it when one muscle group, which is like kind of the major force in the lift Disapates and hands off to the next muscle group and there's obviously overlap. Yeah, that's where the sticking point is Right. So where's the sticking point on the bench press at the bench press is when your pecs are handing it off to Try so that's exactly right. It's exactly when it happens, right? So in the beginning, it's all like pecs and front delts and then there's transitions away from the pecs and front delts into the Tri-seps and at that point where it transitions, that's where the sticking point is Yes, and it's sort of normally two joints main the way I see it is two main joints in the lift like in the squat It's a knee in the hip, right? So you're almost out of your knee extension. Yep, and then you're in your hip extension That's the hard spot. So your hamstrings.  It's okay and it's okay for the bar to move slow What's where it should move slow? By the way, if you miss it at another spot, it's a form issue That's right or psychological. Yeah So I had I went through a spell on the squat where I would get about five inches off the bottom Which is that spot. Yep. I've maybe eight, you know, I don't know five to eight inches somewhere in there And it literally felt like the floor disappeared like there was nothing to push against It wasn't that I didn't grind I couldn't And I have a friend his name is Dick Grinchinger.   Yeah, right. So I'm gonna tell my guitar exposes you I'm gonna tell my guitar story. This is my grinding story So when I came to him, I was already an okay guitarist Okay, and he wrote all of his own materials I got to like chapter seven of these materials. He wrote and I'll never forget. I got to exercise seven C And I would play And he would put on like a click track or like a drum track and you just play with the drum track And I would stop He said looks gotta you know when you play music you can't stop like you can make a mistake But this but you know people are dancing people are listening you got to go on man The drummer's still drumming the bass player still you got to play All right from the top three two play play play and I get to the spot and stop.  He said go home go home practice this don't stop.  I'm like, I don't know what that means But the guy it got broke me like a glass rod man I cried and cried and cried and held to you 34 I don't know something like that And so we talked about it and I found we finally Spent enough time on it that I learned When it got hard. I literally couldn't see anything page went blank. I couldn't even see the music And it had some root and like some fear of failure or something like that, right? You know, so I just wouldn't even do it, right?  I said man, you know This is what's happening and describe it to me Says the same thing dude. Remember? I'm like, oh, yeah Remember he said here's what I want you to do He said in that liminal time like when you're in bed and you're not asleep yet But you're relaxed and you know, you're in that kind of liminal space You know, he said I want you to visualize That place where it gets really hard as a membrane It's like parallel to the ground And he said when when you're when you're relaxed and he said I want you to picture yourself Pushing and pushing through that membrane He said I want you to do that every time that you're You have nothing else to do I want you to visualize that And So when it gets hard You push to that membrane and it's just a membrane That's all it is And you just push through that that's good And I went back the week next time Like I don't know I was on a four-day split at the time I think and so I didn't it wasn't you know the next day or whatever. So I had a little bit of time And I could push Yeah So anyway, I don't know if that's everybody's problem But there's stuff going on. Sure. There's a lot of you know, 90% of the time people Um, just are quitting too early. You know, they're just quitting too early But sometimes we have to practice that mentally. We have to go through the mental exercise like what am I going to think? What is my experience going to be when I'm squatting here? How am I going to do this? Because if if you try to figure out how you're going to grind when you're when it's time to grind it's too late Yeah, right too late. You have to you've got to visualize it through it now the idea of the membrane You know like a drum head, right?  You have to visualize it and think about what am I going to do when that happens? What is that going to feel like and how will I deal with it at that time? You've got to practice that when the bar is on your back. So when it's on your back, it's too late Yep, that's good. Yeah, it's it's weird because if you practice the other thing Which is failing Then you set the motor pattern to fail right, which is what happens to a lot of people, right? So How often do we fail squats? How would you fail squat not supposed to? I probably fill a squat once every 18 months. Oh Well, I do more than that, but yeah, that's okay. Like once a year once every six months Whatever it was just like that. Just like it's pretty rare You know, like I probably fail a deadlift more often more Mentally and it doesn't break the ground if the deadlift comes off the ground I usually finish it. I probably miss two deadlifts a year that come off the ground that I don't finish I missed one Not that long ago. Where was that? Was that the the strenuous life thing? I think so, okay No, I pulled that let's see. I pulled that it was the time before that I don't remember we were in Tulsa. I pulled six 55 And got it to mid-shin and felt like I strained for five seconds and put it down And when I watched the video I strained for one second right it down That's the problem. That's why you have to have somebody counting right five four Three right they've got to go through that because you have no concept of time When you start to strain so it's not okay to miss You have to learn how to grind through the things right you gotta learn how to grind through the stuff now I miss more presses everybody's gonna miss more pressing anything else because press is so much harder to keep over the middle of your foot What's that one for you every three months? I mean there are times Yeah, I mean and plot not only that but I program, you know that I program press starts a lot And so a press start is essentially a program press miss. That's really what it is, right? So I program a press start which is say five percent to seven percent over your actual max After you're done with your press Main press work you take it out of the rack It's really heavy and you try to press it and you and of course it grinds at your forehead level And you grind and grind and grind and it comes back down You know fails and you rack it and what's weird is usually like the third week People actually press it and hit a pr they accidentally hit like a five percent pr Yep, and so I'll miss that sometimes because it's easier to you know to kind of misgroove a press a bench I now misgrooving something different, right?  Although it's one of those deals where I rarely misgroove a squat to the point that I I fail one.  It's not your body. Your body will go further So make your body grind as long as it possibly can push through that membrane, right and push If it misses it's because your body actually missed not because your brain allowed it to miss not because you gave up on it So that five seconds of grind becomes an enormous It is something that it actually it's probably If we can point to a singular thing That is the thing that happens during this refining process that makes us better like that's the thing Right, right when you learn how to grind on a deadlift for five six seven seconds Something changes in you, right when you blow your first blood vessel in your eye Right when you literally s*** your pants for the first time and look like I understand Those of you guys are listening to this thing You're like, I've never blown a blood for this long time. I've never showed my pants I don't want to show my pants don't want to blow Like yeah me neither and I totally get it, right and it still happens insanely rare It's not like this happens like every week.  Yeah, right? Everybody sharts Yeah, if you haven't if you haven't had some incontinence from straining On a heavy deadlift or a heavy squat you probably haven't actually strained enough, right? Especially if you've had kids Especially if you've given birth vaginally to kids like you're you're gonna know when I had kids That's when it really started right of course, right? Yeah, I mean there's even if you don't blow blood vessels in your eyes any time I do a parallel to me I blow little blood vessels in my eyelids I have little dots of red little red dots in my eyelids because of the strain and so 500 pounds doesn't do it for me. It takes like 550 or over I've described this a couple times before I take the weight out of the rack and I walk back And the second I start my descent Usually there's music playing is that a meet, you know So it's like I've got loud metal music as I start to descend The music drops an octave Right like it's you can hear the beat and it's It does that Yeah And then my eyesight the interest so the first thing that goes is I start to descend in a squat Is my hearing and the next thing that goes is my eyesight So I can see fine at the top as I start to descend it all turns red And in the bottom it goes black and I can see nothing so in the bottom It's almost like you're at the bottom of the ocean where there's like insane pressure The sound is really weird You know And and you can see nothing and then as you come up out of the hole in the bottom of the squat The octave starts the key starts to raise in the music and the sight starts to come back and at the top I can see again and I put it back in and it's usually still I can see red by the time I rack it back and get the red Yeah, I get red.   I don't care. Yeah, it doesn't care Yeah, I don't barney. I don't care like I can't hear anything. Yeah, that's why we yell all the time You know, you're yelling at your client and everybody around is like, oh god, this guy's terrible They can't hear you I get in trouble more than anybody at the meets because I'm yelling at every client I'm the coach like I'm trying to talk to my lifter and you can't talk to them. You have to scream No, you gotta scream and they won't let me be on the platform So I'm 20 feet away. So I'm screaming at them trying to get it and I understand But like I really don't care what everybody else thinks I want a lifter to complete the lift And so, you know, they've got to be able to hear my voice My voice has to be loud So this five second grind thing is a big deal being able to learn how to grind Is the most refining thing you can do in the process of the end of lp and going into your intermediate training So y'all be honest with yourselves be brutally honest, you know, did you give it everything? Think about what was your experience like as you failed?  Sure. But but if you're just like, gosh, you know, I don't think I can do anymore Well, then you probably didn't grind right? What was your experience when I actually was able to sit down and get some distance from The lift and they say what was my experience? I realized Like psychologically I felt like there was nothing to push against. Yep Well, then that gave me some information, you know, I can do something with that and by the way, I'm like a middle intermediate By the time I start to have those experiences. I didn't have those in my 11th week of lp Right, right. It's like, you know set five of whatever Reynolds gave me, you know, right? But um, yeah, it's brutally honest. I was gonna say it's important to be brutally honest. I'm vulnerable Right. So if it's okay like we all still sometimes give up early We just have to recognize that it's not not okay to give up early, right? So if you give up early be honest with yourself and say, you know what? I watched the video I felt like I strained for five seconds. I strained for a second and a half That wasn't enough and next time I have to know If I don't have somebody counting down for me It might feel like you have to strain for 10 or 15 seconds to actually be five seconds There's a time warp when it's happening. That's right. You can't get it. So he is Everybody's gonna make this mistake. Everybody's gonna have times where they don't pull hard enough or long enough or whatever Give up early on whatever rep that in and of itself is not a huge problem As long as you recognize it when you do it It's that you know to work on the thing like, oh, you know what? I felt like I strained that long I didn't brutal honesty brutal honesty Hey, barbologic listeners. This is 2020 matt Early on in the barbologic podcast. We released an episode entitled embracing the grind and that was episode 27 So it was very early And while we felt that this was a message that lifters needed to hear We actually received some backlash people thought that we were saying, hey, you need to grind your lifter into powder and so We actually released an answer to that episode in episode 43 originally that we called a clarification Which was a clarification to the Embracing the grind episode just to clarify and expand From that earlier podcast So what you've been listening to is the original embracing the grind episode and what we're going to transition into now is The episode on a clarification where we go into and explain a little bit deeper Why we don't grind ourselves into powder, but why it's really really important To still learn how to grind and really do hard things. So enjoy To clarify some of the points that we've tried to make about intermediate programming That kind of social media controversy really isn't rooted I think in misunderstanding of our position and we wanted to clear that up because well, we want to be good communicators So Let's do that man Yeah, I mean, I think first off is an understanding of who we Coach so an important note is who do I coach and who you coach and who we coach and also the following as a whole is heavily weighted With novices and early intermediates and middle age and older people. Yeah, I think that's a crucial I mean that that may be the crucial I don't know point about the way we like to train people Is that we don't was really train a lot of normal people? And frankly a lot of not terribly athletic people And a lot of people that are older than you'd think they'd be. Yeah. Yeah, our average age is 38 That's average. I mean, we've got we do have clients who are 17 and 18 and 21 and whatever in 70 and 71 and 72 But the average age of the client that is 38 Also, let me be really clear after running strong gym by the way you just reminded me that I sold strong gym two years ago today Yeah, and I congratulations. I didn't even think you know last year. I thought about it a lot But I ran strong gym and strong gym was a gym for lifters And I did the best I could To market that gym to the general population But ultimately it was a gym for serious people I even continued to surprise me as it grew the percentage of people that were that would consider themselves competitive Of the thousand people at strong gym that went to strong 250 of them were competitive two fifty three hundred were competitive lifters That's an enormous population percentage of population of the people and so Here's a monoliths there. Oh, yeah, yeah At all kinds of you know all the monoliths and strongman stones and we had well I mean we we had competitive power lifters and competitive strongmen competitive bodybuilders and competitive crossfitters I mean like actual competitive crossfitters a bunch of 700 pound deadlift me Yeah, we had a 21 700 pound deadlifters at strong gym And I want to be super super clear because this is a clarification episode I don't want to coach those people Now i'm not saying that I don't ever want to coach any of those people. That's not what i'm saying What i'm saying is that first off how many Late intermediate and advanced lifters are there in the whole world 5 000 I mean, I don't know not that many right how many lifters are classified less than that right not beginners novices Whatever most eight billion right Yeah, it's a better business plan for me. It's a better business plan. I want to get normal people strong Yeah, and beyond business plan It's just really gratifying to take someone with a 95 pound squat to 290. Absolutely, you know or 375 That's that's great work to do. Absolutely I have turned lots of the guys at strong gym that deadlifted 700 pounds would tell you that I was super integral in that That's not that I was the guy that's totally, you know, it wasn't all on me Right But I know how to coach people and get them strong and I've got some super high-end athletes that I coach But ultimately what i'm trying to do from a big picture perspective Is i'm trying to get people who aren't strong and make them strong I'm not trying to get people who are already strong and make them like world-class strong Right, so that's not what i'm talking about Yeah, so when we when we make when we discuss programming or Well, really anything here. We're really talking about all of those Little over 7 billion people who aren't advanced or maybe aren't even intermediate. Sure. So I mean, I think that's a crucial distinction, you know, half of the people Are below average You know, it actually About 80 percent I mean, we don't really know how to graph out the athletic ability of the entire population But roughly 80 percent of people are going to be in the standard deviation around average and below. Yep And that's something that we just can't get around You know that about 80 percent of the people that we end up coaching are going to be of average or less athletic ability And and so it's not just athletic ability. It's also, you know, gosh, you know their age You know, so this curve that would be for everybody in the population at their age And then the older they are the farther left they end up on the total curve of athletic ability Yeah, of course So, you know, they start with that's like that's where we come from testosterone and neuromuscular efficiency and things like that And so yeah, so that it's important to understand that the people that we're primarily coaching are novices Even absolute beginners pre novice, but we get a lot of people out online coaching who are Not even novices yet. Right. Yeah, they're like, I've never Touched a barbell. I don't know. Yeah, so that's interesting. So like a pre novice We've never talked about this. I would say that that's somebody man. So when you said that I thought Oh, yeah, those are the people that can't squat to depth Like they're so detrained they're 66. They're a lady with five children And they're so detrained we can't get them to depth and they have to squat to the box for, you know 95 or they're just have never performed the lift ever Like even it doesn't even have to be like detrained old can't squat to depth It may be somebody who can who just never has yet And as soon as they're their first couple workouts in in online coaching It certainly takes a little bit longer to get them performing the lifts within say 95 95 percent of correct And so we can do that as a matter of fact almost the first thing we do in a beginner signs up Is we do a skype call with them and we try to set them up with an in-person coaching session We find someone for them to see in person first and we start going from there So that's primarily who we coach and I just want to be clear about it. That's who I love That's who my heart is for at this point. I love watching 50 year old guys get their quality of life back Because of the way the way They train because of the way we've coached them and so I think it's super cool to watch people deadlift 800 pounds Oh, man, that's what when they do. Yeah, it's awesome. It's awesome It's just such a small percentage of the population And also to just be honest from a business perspective and I just want to be super transparent That population also doesn't have any money But it's true.  Yes, but I'm not interested in being juggernaut. So, you know If we say gosh, we're training a lot of folks that aren't athletic then that drives everything, you know And that they are novices and I'll just go ahead and try to clarify this one. Sure We don't think every set should be an rpet and 10 max effort set for the rest of your life No, this person who's a novice and really doesn't know how to do the hard hard work So here's what I see in a new trainee very often The deadlift gets to 275 or 295 something like that for a dude And he sets up shins are one inch from the bar Humps over grabs the bar shins the bar sets his back goes make takes a big breath And he pulls he sets it down. Yep. He goes And then puts it down.  Yep We have to teach that guy that you don't got to be patient with that You know, and then take some time and it's not going to pull your back into like gumby, you know And so that's what that grind is about. We would never tell We would never tell anybody every last rep needs to be rp 10. No, no, no, no But we use rpes in combination with weight sets and rep prescription or percentage setting right Sure, depending on how advanced they are and say look you're going to do, you know, 85 for a three sets of four and it should be about an 80 rp eight. Yeah, it should be rp eight Which means that as a communication tool if you get in there and you're 85% is not rp eight Right, you start getting there you do your first couple sets and it's like an rp six We got to go up on the weight a little bit or if it's an rp nine and a half or 10 We've got to come down a little bit. It's not we're supposed to be So there are certainly times when we program we want whether we actually call it an rp 9.5 or 10 or whether we don't use the rp at all and we just say it's going to be heavy and Right, so it's the like I want my clients to grind at a competition I want them to know what it's like Before they have to pull their third deadlift at a competition To grind now. I don't want them grinding Six days out from the competition, right? But they have to have learned how to do that And so every advanced lifter that I've ever seen Has learned how to do this you watch them they learn how to as a matter of fact man as I come back from my own training Like I can remember Just about every 700 pound deadlift and over I've ever pulled required some amount of grind like some serious grind Right And every time I you know get hurt or travel and take vacations and and miss some training and come back And I kind of do my own version of lp. There is always some days in there where I give up too early Yeah, yeah, so I haven't retaught myself out of grind yet.  Yeah, we are not talking about that We're talking about the guy right in his ninth 11th 12th week of lp And he's going to pull the deadlift set that you and I know is an rpe 7 Yep, we know that's what it is and he grabs the bar. He's already doing switch grip You know, he's already kind of reverse grip right and he goes and sets it down. Yep We're not even trying to get into the max of effort We're trying to how can that guy that it's okay to do it How can that guy ever get to the point where we can say hey man You should sign up for your first competition and even if his deadlift at the competition is 315 How can you ever trust that he's going to be able to go out and deadlift when he's capable of deadlifting If every time he gets to an rp 7 or 8 he puts the bar down and doesn't do it But so the thing is you have to understand is people going through these novice progressions Every single day on deadlift once you're six weeks into the program is the heaviest thing you've ever picked up ever in your whole life Yeah, and they're not used to it And so your brain has got this factor that goes oh shits too heavy put it down And so when I say learn how to grind or give me five seconds to grind What i'm talking about is I can't let you Pull on it for a half second set it back down. It's going to be hard and by the way because we're dealing with 80 percent of our people being averaged or below the rate of force development is low Their neural efficiency is low like they wouldn't have high vertical jumps Which means it's going to take longer For them to apply a hundred percent of force of their potential force to the barbell right like good athletes They're explosive they go from zero to a hundred percent fast right and average and below go from zero to a hundred percent slow I pressed four sets of four last night at 180. Yeah that last set Every rep probably took eight seconds. Yeah. Oh, I forced it to four. That's not like low volume, right? But all my reps are slow is what i'm saying. Yeah, sure. Yeah, because that's the grind Because you're way on the left end of the athlete. So, well, I am. Yeah. No, yeah, you know And i'm not the only one but that's the grind thing You know, we're not telling everybody. Hey, man, you go out there You do full intensity one grinder rep every no no no no no no Our friends who are novices we want to teach them how to exert So that later on they can reach new heights and find out new things about themselves And then, you know, our idea when we proposed this podcast is that we would go through this stuff in a stepwise fashion In a logical way and you know, we've gotten some of these episodes out of order You know because of really production problems most of the time But sometimes we thought oh gosh, we need to go back and do the topic But we're trying to mostly get them in order and so the concepts We're trying to present them in the order that the concepts would come to the new lifter. Yep, right So early on we're like, hey, why strength? Well, that's the first thing you got to think of and then we did an episode about equipment and shoes and stuff like that The linear progression, right? Yeah. So thus far We're still real early. We're real early. We're not talking about middle intermediates We're not talking about late earlys. We're certainly not talking about people who are advanced lifters So anything that we've said right now and you say, hey, you know, what about Littlebridge, okay What what about it? Maybe we can get him on the show someday. But we're not talking about it. Does he know how to grind? Yeah, yeah, of course, he knows how to grind, right? So we're talking about teaching people How to grind we're talking about my mother. Yeah, we literally talk about your mom We're not talking about Eric little bridge needs to learn how to grind his dead lifts every time he pulls we're talking about I know that guy knows how to do this. I know that guy knows what rp10 or rp9 and a half is And you know who else knows how to do it? A 25 year old guy that played high school football at a 6a school in the south That's right. He knows how to do it too. Probably. Yeah, sure. It's not that guy wrestlers Like people who've already done like really mentally hard stuff. They've been forced to do that So yeah, so the you know a guy that played division two lacrosse probably knows how to really these guys are Above average athletic ability and as a result they've been put in athletic situations Where they've learned how to do this former military guys, sure maybe firemen I mean, there are people that know how to do this, but there's a huge cohort of people, you know That the word this knowledge worker economy that don't yeah, and so that's what it's about but enough of that that grind Okay, let's talk volume So we already said that we're talking to these people We're trying to make our points in the order that the new lifter would encounter these concepts or encounter these challenges So we just did a deal about a programming philosophy in the title of it for early intermediates And which means immediately post LP right you shoot craps on your squat two sessions in a row at the end LP Now you're an intermediate. Sure. You answered the three questions. You're eating your rest in blah, blah, blah You're an early intermediate That's who we're talking about right and so for that guy, we don't pile on the volume yet. No, that's what we do It's not the only way to skin that cat strong by doing volume as a matter of fact Hell you do get stronger doing it. That's right. If we didn't communicate this well talking about certainly our fault It's our fault. So I would be clear all three Of the major variables intensity frequency and volume can be used to drive the strength adaptation. Yep. No doubt, right They can't be done forever all by themselves They're not the singular thing that will drive it forever in the beginning As we walk through a systematic progression in this podcast Volume stays exactly the same for all of LP right three sets of five It is not a volume dependent program right frequency says exactly the same through all of LP right You're gonna squat three times a week You're gonna pull three times a week whether those are deadlifts or you might start all deadlifts And you're gonna do some form of pressing press or bench three times a week That's the way it works. The frequency is the same the only thing that is the variable that moves and LP is intensity It keeps going up until it can't right now. Here's the question. Go ahead. Well, so You know, I had a guy ask me some questions this civil conversation by the way over DMs social media He said well, isn't LP Isn't it volume driven and I said no because we don't we don't manipulate the volume The only thing we manipulate is the intensity. He says no It's not the intensity because it's not a percentage of their one rep max and I'm like, okay Intensity in this case is a proxy for the weight. So it's the weight. The weight is the only thing we change And he says well, yeah, it's the volume Sorry, the tonnage in fact, and I'm like, okay, I'll I'll give you that tonnage is great Let's but but we're doing three times five. Yeah volume is just the number right the weight That's right. And so the weight is what's driving so in week one of LP How many worksets in week one of squat? Do you do? Yeah, nine worksets you do nine worksets three sets of five on Monday three sets of five on Wednesday Three sets of five on Friday, right in week 10 if you're still in LP. How many worksets of squats do you do? Probably gonna do nine you do nine, right? So the volume hasn't changed now Has the intensity changed to x and since the intensity has changed and the volume has not has the tonnage changed Absolutely, of course because tonnage is a product of volume Times intensity and since the intensity has gone up the volume stayed the same the tonnage has gone up And you can argue that the thing that is actually driving the strength adaptation is the tonnage. That's totally fine guys. It's probably true It's it's Definitely true. That's the thing right now. Here's the thing Is there a time when tonnage can no longer be driven up? And I would argue yes because at some point like a time for the novice There is a time at the end of LP When I can't keep driving weekly tonnage up, right? I can't right okay I can If I drop my percentages down to 75 I do a million sets of it, right 75 78 81 Right, I can't and I might actually continue to be able to get stronger that way But here's the other way I know to get stronger if in LP I can add intensity Add weight Every single session Until I can't Then can I go to training Where I add intensity once a week? Yes That's what texas method old man texas method heavy light medium That's what those things are Then can I get to a point where I can add intensity once every two weeks? Yes I can still do I can do a four-day split texas method split Spread it out over two weeks and still make progress once every two weeks. Then Can I increase intensity once a month? Yes, I can increase intensity once a month via five three one Version or whatever any other four like there's lots of places to yeah, right those and they're all Acceptable to find right and then can I get to a point where I increase intensity? Once every two months or three months the answer is yes. Will this last forever? No Reminder who are we talking to? Early intermediates early intermediate, right? So at some point You have to start manipulating the other variables But the point that I'm making is is that it is far more enjoyable to the lifter And far more productive for the coach and the business owner who doesn't want to get fired Add intensity as long as you can and hold off on volume as long as you can Before you bring in the volume or frequency increase in programming because once you start to increase volume when that becomes the variable that must be increased And yes, I totally agree at some point with advanced programming or even late intermediate programming Volume is going to have to be the driver. And by the way, it's still probably tonnage, right? Volume is going to help you get hypertrophy extra, you know more contractile tissue and more contractile tissue Which is good. Certainly absolutely more muscle great. There's nothing wrong with that But once that becomes the thing I can't just keep going up and wait anymore and it has to be volume Then it's volume And the problem with that is is it becomes less and less enjoyable And it takes longer and longer to do and remember that who I'm dealing with primarily Both personally and at my business are normal people who are not interested in Competing and powerlifting long term. It's certainly not as their primary goal in life. And so A three hour workout or a two and a half hour workout or even a two hour workout Where they're doing six sets of five on squats is not something they're interested in now At some point I'm probably going to have to have them do six sets of five As a matter of fact, you are late intermediate lifter early advanced lifter Certainly probably early advanced for a guy that's as far left on the athletic spectrum as you are And you just did a four week cycle of block training accumulation where how you do five sets of five Yep, and you're 42 43 years old 43 years old Right, you don't have great neural muscular efficiency And you're a little bit skinny and I need to put I need to put some well I mean, you know, so you're like lanky lanky's better work You're like, yeah, I need to put muscle in and so it was time But I wanted to wait as long as I could Because once we start driving up that volume, guess what you're going to have to do on the next accumulation cycle Not five sets of five more volume six sets of five or whatever more than 25 work reps, you know So for the long-term development of a trainee They're going to embrace volume They're going to have to like if you're going to do this for nine years Five years four years three years for depending on who you are you're going to be in the volume land That's fine. That is probably the variable that Gives us the most bang for our buck for the longest, but we just don't have to go to that That's right. That's exactly for the average dude Yeah, so the only disagreement we'd have with some other coaches is that we're in a position where We're going to bring in volume as late as we can and some other coaches are going to bring in volume earlier And neither one is wrong. It's okay like bringing a volume earlier than we bring in volume There's nothing wrong with that and you can still get strong I just want to hold off as long as I can because what I've found in my 20 years of coaching Is that people like to do intensity as long as they can make progress and intensity They're happy and I can show them like actual Quantifiable results that they're getting stronger because the weight on the bar continues to go up, which is the goal Yeah, at the point that it won't I've got to bring in volume There's a lot of people say oh, you don't like it. It's your preference. You don't enjoy it. So It's no good. So you don't enjoy it. So you say it's no good Not my preference. It still works perfectly fine But they're saying hey, you know, they said, you know, I got I got hot I got mad and then in an episode and they're like, oh, so you don't like it Right.  So that's why you don't want to give it to other people And you know, hey, I'll be honest If I can go and put five pounds on the bar at the end of the week on nine sets or Put five pounds on the bar with 20 sets. I'd really do the nine. Yeah, that is my preference. Yeah I'm sorry. That is yeah. And then there's another thing A person who starts training later in life, I would say 40 or older they start training at 40 or older They detrain At lower intensities. Mm-hmm. I've noticed this for myself I noticed this for myself and I can it's really a marked thing that you can see if you train somebody that's in their 70s If all I handle is stuff in the 80s 80 percent range, especially low 80s 80 85 Yeah, yeah, yeah 85 and under is probably more like it if I do two or three weeks You know 80 82 83 84 range. I mean even for multiple sets across Uh, I'm not able to hit that one rep pr again Or probably even southern within five percent of that. Yeah, even a 95 percent For a single is going to be a real a real grind. Yeah, I don't You're right. You're on to something with this people that start older than 40 Oh, dude, you started when you were 19 and now you're 45 and you're pulling 625. Yeah, no, that's not no No, no, no, no, that guy's a little different. Yes. Think about stress. You think about the stress recovery adaptation I got a guy that I'm coaching now that's in his 40s. The guy did this almost 700 He's doing work sets. He just pulled uh He's doing work sets of three at 585 on his deadlift like man That's a lot of like stress on your body like because it's just even though it's not a super high percentage of what he's doing You know, even like hot like sets of five and six at 545 and 535 And so it's lots of stress, right? So percentage is a very percentage is very individual dependent So I think you're on to something with this older lifter but I also think that it might be a product of testosterone and Neuro neuromuscular efficiency. And so as you are so I think I think females detrain under 85% Yeah, and so why we've had nicky on the show. We've talked about, you know, we moved females from Five sets of five Just sets of three. So instead of three sets of five pretty quick We're gonna move your phrasing there was was funky. Okay from sets of five down to sets of three Yeah, sorry So in females and linear progression will start at three sets of five like everybody else and then relatively quickly We'll move them to five sets of three Because we've noticed that they can handle five sets of three at a higher percentage of what would Essentially be their one rep max even though the idea of one rep max for novices, you know, whatever They change every single day and that women can handle it and be fine and that men It tends to drive men into the ground and five sets of three at a really high percentage say like 92% of what they could actually do would be difficult and for most women they can do that And it's just not that big of a deal. It's just good solid work and they're fine And there's something there with the fact that they don't have the normal muscular efficiency Which is probably due to the lack of testosterone Which is the same thing the old people have right if I do volume with an older Late intermediate advanced lifter and I'm not talking about a later in media advanced older lifter who can deadlift 600 I'm talking about a later in media advanced older lifter who can deadlift 400, right? So later in media advanced decently strong but not like super strong I've got to do volume for sets of three and sets of four and not sets of five six seven eight I can't take an older guy and have him do five sets of eight or four sets of eight or five sets of five He'd still do better at six sets of three And so the reason for that well, this is a question Is the reason for that is because you've got to have any sets of three and four and five So you can have the intensity high intensity higher because if we pick a rep scheme that he can do for 82% Do that for three or four weeks and the guy's going to lose the top end. That's exactly right. Yeah, that's that's my experience I don't know why And I haven't seen any literature that supports this but my experience tells me that the later the person starts Well, I mean this makes absolute sense the later somebody starts The lower their top end is going to be yeah, of course But then you know starting early Even if you're a 55 year old person the earlier you started the better off you are of course Flip of that the later you started You know worse and you can't do anything about that, right? So we we all it's you know I started when I was 17 and if people like man, I wish I started with 17 I was like, man, I wish I started when I was 14 No kid, right? Like it doesn't matter when you started you always wish you had started earlier, right? So like for years, especially in my 20s, I should have been but I was a kid I was like, man, I wish I had started before I was 17. I started so late at 17 You know, that's kind of what I thought but so let's make a good argument for volume Well, the good argument for volume is is that it's the best driver of hypertrophy Not hypertrophy as you call it But hypertrophy and so with muscle growth with Contractal tissue growth, right not Again, it's all theory sort of stuff But we know that bodybuilders are huge and aren't necessarily strong So they've figured out with higher reps lots of volume. They've been able to add a lot of Storage it's non-contractable. Storage is right. It's a lot of like it's like water. Yeah, it's volume, right? So it's water glycogen salt creating storage all sorts of things And so I'm talking about as contractile and obviously they get some contractile You can't just be a giant bodybuilder or not have increased contractile tissue Yeah, be happy as volume is going to increase contractile tissue more than anything else All right, that's all there is to it. And so at some point I can only be so efficient You can only be so level of neuromuscular efficiency based on my genetics I can only continue to increase intensity for so long I can only continue to add frequency of the lifts and the workouts so much to where I can't recover like We could argue the same thing go Well, you know, you squat three times a week as a novice and then you go to you know A heavy day or a volume day and a light day and a heavy day And then at some point maybe as you become advanced you could squat four times a week and then five times a week And whatever the word is then when you're gonna squat twice a day five days a week And the answer is actually yes Yes with the Bulgarians do this what some of the Olympic weight lifters do That also isn't real conducive for general for the you know, 55 year old executive that travels Three days a week and is training in his garage or at a CrossFit gym at five o'clock in the morning And so volume works incredibly well to build muscle And when muscle is built the ability to produce more force is greater And so therefore the ability to produce more force is greater therefore I could actually get stronger right however How much muscle can be built? We've argued this with 17 year old kids who want to be big and strong bodybuilders And they want to go in and do body part splits And they want to do hammer strength machines And then we do all this volume and they're If they can squat below parallel their best squat is 100 pounds 105 like how much hypertrophy Can work sets of squats at 95 pounds give somebody like not that much So we got to get them strong first And once we get them strong first we got good solid base of strength We start bringing this volume in and we let them build some hypertrophy. So it works just fine It's just the downside of that Volume game is that it makes the workout so much longer It requires so much more time And again for our executive that time is money because the guy's charging $500 an hour for his job He is probably never going to be to the point where he's okay for the three hour workout And by the way, we're also discussing a lot of like perfect theoreticals, right? That 55 year old guy or that 40 year old guy or anybody in there The chance that they actually ever become advanced is so Miniscule low That it's almost not worth arguing about right like could they or even later immediate, right?  This is another thing that happens And so while certainly there are times when our older populations make it to late intermediate and advanced lifting The vast vast majority of our people are going to end at like early intermediates They're gonna end as early and you know what if you become an early intermediate as a 42 year old guy Who's actually gone through LP you're strong enough You're strong enough for everything that life is going to throw at you And if you're strong enough for everything that life can throw at you, then we've done our job That's when you have to make the decision We've talked about this with brett mckay you then have to make the decision Do you want to keep getting stronger? If you want to keep getting stronger the training is going to take longer We've got to add in a bunch of volume You got to risk injury at some point because at some point doing a 600 pound Squat on 55 year old knees is Probably not we've swung the pendulum away from super healthy at that point, right?  For example get to late intermediate or advanced programming is because we're not putting them on enough volume or no I don't think so. I mean I understand that could be the question I mean look man if we want to use evidence With older people is you keep increasing that the intensity stays high And you hold back on volume as long as you can increase the volume now I did not always agree with that But after 20 years of coaching for me and coaching the vast majority people that I coach have been very general Population people not a lot of athletes I've come to the same conclusion. It just seems to work better than bringing in volume early So can you bring in volume early and will it work? Yes Do I like bringing in intensity continuing to drive intensity for as long as I can until it stops working? Yes, why because the client likes it better Because there's more satisfaction in it. It's quantifiable because I could always see the weight on the bar going up It doesn't take as long to train And all of those things that occur with your general population It seems to just make them happy customers and they can continue to be Stronger and stronger stronger until they can't yeah and when they can't we'll bring in the volume So here's one more thing that I've seen on the interwebs People say hey, why are you even peaking? an early intermediate You know or even a late intermediate, you know, they're like the peaking time Frankly the tracks from training because it does, you know, you work up You take a little deload to rest then you peak and you probably get a rest after the thing So if you want to go get a squat pr you probably lose Five or six squat sessions that could be productive training in order to get that peak and they're like hey Just get them stronger and don't do these peaks. Why are you doing those peaks? It's wasting their time It's bs. Anyway, sure. What do you think? Well, I'll just speak for myself.  I don't want to I'm not really excited About my three by five deadlift pr. Yeah, I mean I am proud of that. I like it, you know sure But you know, I really want to see that absolute number go up I like doing it as part of the game for me. Yeah, so it's and I'm projecting I assume my clients do too Yeah, and I mean my experience would be the same So the mental confidence that's gained and hitting prs via intensity prs rather than Volume or frequency and nobody ever comes up to me and it's like I'm so excited I bench pressed four times this week Right, even though some of my clients bench pressed four times in a week or tonnage I hit an all-time tonnage pr or I like seeing those though.  I've put in this in the rep max calculator forever And I'm finally over a 500 pound deadlift because I go. Well, you're not over 500 Not until you actually pull over 500 pounds. And so yeah, it's just mental confidence that I want somebody to know The joy that they receive and the value that they get from hitting prs Is worth it to me to lose a couple weeks of that sort of volume training Crying multiple sets across for a few weeks to give them that a few times a year. It's worth it And by the way, this is the same reason why you encourage our clients to Compete being in the meets even ones that aren't and by the way like, you know, well-known coaches like singles too Like there's a lot of guys that push for volume that still do singles and then they do volume So there's something that happens. I just think that there's something different When you get a heavy single on your back that's not physical It's mental I want to be able to take 600 pounds out of the squat rack And walk it out and all that that i'm learning about myself I want to learn about myself for that 600 pounds on my back in my garage or my basement the first time I don't want to learn that about myself on a platform in front of 200 people No, man I'm not interested in learning a lot of it And so when I step on a platform if I hit a pr on a platform and I have lots of times It's usually a small one or it's a surprise, right? Or it's a it's like a holy, you know, I did better than I thought And so for me I think that you learn things about yourself I think that there's a big difference between a 99 percent 100 percent 101 somewhere in there percent rep And a 94 percent rep Or 94 for a double or 93 for double or somewhere like that There's actually a big difference you put that weight that you've never felt before in your life on your back in your hands And there's something that occurs you learn a lot about yourself about do I have the Do I the balls to grind through this thing to struggle through it? And not even like an actual six second grind. I mean is it just like hey, this is sometimes a little bit scary And I want to build up the mental confidence in myself and in my lifters so that they know when it's time to be on the platform They've already done this stuff, right? Maybe they even haven't actually hit that weight But they've they've played with singles before we know what to expect we know what to expect out of a single They're prepared There's a different kind of toughness that we discover Maybe not maybe it's the same kind of toughness, but there's another way to discover that too Which will be in that seventh set of five at 84.  I like and I got four more sets. Yeah, I like it I've done that too Right. I've like, okay. I've gotten two sets Or I've done five sets and now I have two more like I did I did what I normally do now have to do more Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, so now it's good. So yeah, so hopefully we've clarified some stuff about intensity volume You know percentage we train at grinding things like that again, you know quick recap We don't want everybody to grind all the time. We just want you to know how to grind Learn how to do hard work. That's right. Learn how to work hard We don't believe that volume is bad. We believe that volume can certainly for long-term gains Volume is the thing that certainly can be driven forever. Yep volume can be driven forever The problem is is that once you start driving volume, that's the thing that's got to be driven forever And so I want to hold off on it as long as I can and drive intensity as long as I can Until I have to bring in volume. So I can already I can already anticipate a little hair split. Yeah So, you know, even when well almost anybody that's programming for volume, they're still doing Heavy singles and stuff in there. That's your heart of it, you know intensity Mixed with those, you know, 80 to 85 maybe 75 and there's still say it's just still in there So don't say that. Oh well, you know real system once you become advanced then it's only volume No, no, no do that and also everybody that preaches volume Also runs volume and intensity on an inverse relationship So there's times when they have extremely high volume and they may be running volume at 76 to 82 percent But by the time they're getting ready for the meat, it's not 76 82 percent anymore And it's not high volume anymore So, you know, most people that really like high volume training as they approach the meat The volume still comes down the intensity still goes up And so you're really looking at the periods of what we call like loading periods or fatigue periods or transportation periods or Any other intensification periods are all kind of the same Sort of thing and what we're doing is we're driving the necessary stress That's needed To push for the adaptation, right? So volume is the training variable that maybe works the longest Yeah, it is it is the training variable that works the longest. Yes, this is awesome And the quantifiable thing is the intensity right like intensity is the thing that quantifies whether it worked or not Right and so in the beginning intensity is the thing that We know that wednesday worked because friday were able to go up and we know that friday worked because monday We're able to go up and so on and so forth and you just can't do that forever So eventually when you're on a three month program the intensity has to go up on the last day So we don't want everybody grinding every rep at an rpe 10. Yeah We don't hate volume as a training programming modality. I hate training volume personally Don't like in my own training, but I use it all the time right because it works We know it works. Yep, and then We're trying to keep in mind that the person that we're talking to here through this microphone is probably Um, probably just getting started and has questions about what it's like Beyond where they are now. Yep, not where they will be in five years, but you know, what's the next step? So we're talking to an average person and this average person is probably a little older than most people would think So like you said the average client is 38 Well, they'd say well, that's your clients It's probably pretty close to what it is across the united states Yeah, you know if we could somehow find out who handled a barbell this week The average age is probably something like that 35 early 30s 32 33 35 so that's who we're talking to we're talking to somebody That um, you know, that's really frankly just getting started even if they've been doing this for 18 months That's just getting started. Yep, you know, I hope that this has clarified a few things It's probably just putting further fuel on the social media fire I don't know but for people that had legit questions and not just hatred or as I hope this helped clear it up We certainly don't mean to start any brush fires or throw anybody under the bus We're just trying to be helpful and if you don't find it helpful Man, I'm sorry about that. I really am. I mean, we're just trying to help people, you know Yeah, we're having a blast, man Yeah, you know, we're able to get this out to lots of people and Ultimately, man, I just want to help normal people get strong and I'm not super interested in coaching all the lifters at nationals and taking them to IPF worlds and us ap l worlds and whatever. It's a ton of fun Yeah, that's super fun. There's fun to watch. I still love it. I love watching. I'm a fan of the sport Sure And I've played those games and I've been there and competed as the lifter and I've coached as the coach I just I'm at a point in my life now that I just I derive more value and more satisfaction and more joy from coaching People who are beginners and novices and making them generally strong and not worrying too much about making somebody a national level Lifter. Yeah, so that's us. Yeah, getting a lady off the toilet. Yeah, that's pretty pretty good. Yeah, it's pretty good So, you know, that's some clarifications.  No, we collect them every three or four months. Yeah, but so this is barbell logic Thanks for listening. You can go and check out the youtube channel. You can check it out You can email us at barbell logic podcast at gmail.com. You can follow us on all that social media staff But tell a friend and help us all spread the word So thanks for listening. Talk to you soon


Good local time, everybody. My name is Justin Rackliffe, and we're gonna be doing this presentation around kind of avoiding your own jungle of the commercial software supply chain. It's a riff, essentially, on Upton Sinclair's book, The Jungle. We're not gonna be talking about meatpacking plants. That's not the discussion we're gonna be having. We're gonna apply the same kind of concepts and the metaphor to our own supply chain, the ones that we produce and the ones that we consume through commercial services. So a little bit about who I am. So I work for Fidelity Investments. I kind of handle all their open source stuff. I lead up their open source program office. I'm the kind of main point of contact for Linux Foundation and the to-do group, which is all the open source program office leads. Internally, it's really just being that the advocate for doing cool things in open source at Fidelity. And that could be, we wanna use it, we wanna patch it, we wanna contribute it. We want to work with a supplier who depends on it, which is pretty much all of them. So I tend to be fairly busy, but it's fun stuff. And just because this is a global event, I am in Cary, North Carolina, which is part of the Research Triangle Park. Just as a whole geolocation. So why does this matter to me? We all know that open source is in everything. We've all seen all the surveys, all the information, all the stuff is gathered. I did a little video. I didn't write this app to somebody else's, but it's going to kind of go through React Native. Just an NPM that many of us may have used, we may use internally, we may kind of watch. And yeah, I just want you to kind of see why. And I think of visual really just kind of helps. So I'm selecting out React Native. And what it's doing is it's walking through every single module that MPM is pulling out. So this is the kind of normal speed of the thing. I realized though that this was going a little slow. So I actually had to accelerate time. It's going to pop in right around now. And what's happening is again, every single link, every single module is being connected. And potentially creating another edge. And you can see, oh, so I just included one React Native. And all of a sudden my software supply chain looks like this. That's a little complicated. So that's it. So almost 600 packages were needed. They're linked a thousand times. And that's all the people who are responsible in contributing to making React Native a reality so that I can use it. Yikes, it's not necessarily bad. They're all doing really, really cool stuff. But it's pretty complicated. And that's both what we absorb when we write our own software. But also what also contributes to some areas of risk when we source somebody else's software. So the kind of the narrative is really figuring out what are people doing? Do they care about their build materials? Do they have concerns around this? Are all those modules really needed? And what does it mean to, quote unquote, operate locally, eat locally, and really understand what my supply chain means to me? So this is a quote from the jungle. Not gonna read it out loud. But again, this idea that we're getting a product. And it's a fine product. Probably was put in the can. May have a nice label on it. That's awesome. Now that if you kind of apply this beyond the concept of food, this could be an endpoint from a cloud service provider. This could be a commercial distribution. This could be a commercial of open source. It could be a commercial product that's both proprietary and open source. But if you don't know what's inside it, well, how do you know it's good for you? How do you know it's not been doctored? And again, this was a problem that the book was written to kind of resolve and just to wrestle with. And it caused a whole lot of changes when we look at food quality for the United States. And it's kind of a turning point when we look at what's the responsibility for the social good and keeping people healthy and what's the responsibility for the producer because they didn't have an infinite budget. People are only willing to spend so much. But it's important to kind of wrestle with these kind of questions. So kind of like I mentioned before, people use open source. No shocker. So again, this comes from the to-do group. I'll clarify, I need to refresh it to the 2020. But when we look at the ratios, and this is only so that people were willing to admit. For those who have already been taking the survey, they felt comfortable talking about it. Honestly, I feel like most products, commercial or commercial distributions of open source, they include open source. It's a big part of what we do today. And so those numbers, I actually probably think are a little bit low. And when we have to take this as kind of an end-to-end thing, well, if that amount of open source is sitting in our commercial products or is sitting at the other side of an endpoint for a software as a service product and we're giving them our data for them to protect, well, other people's supply chain matters as well. And life comes back to fast. There's always something new. Again, before we used to source things from some big commercial supplier, that could be any name brand that you know, just go Microsoft, whatever the case may be. It's not that those are bad, but the world is very different. And oftentimes those same suppliers are contributing to open source projects. And it's not that those closed source projects were without bugs or errors, but oftentimes we kind of trust it. The brand came with some credibility. Fidelity investments is very brand-centric. You come to us as a broker, as someone who will make a trade or manage your retirement. Those are really important things. Those are long-lasting things. And it's that trust that's there in the brand. With an open source project, it's harder to draw that bright line and there could be a number of reasons why that project could have problems. And again, companies can have problems. It happens all the time. But how do we make ourselves aware of those things? So what can be done? I think one of the basic things is basic education. Talk to your developers about it. Make it kind of part of their curriculum. Oftentimes they're required to take some basic security. Well, tie in some license, tie in some open source lifecycle. If we know that they're gonna be 60, 70, 80, 90% of their code base is gonna be open source. Well, let's make sure they understand what they're getting and how they're getting it. They don't need to be an expert. We have application security teams for a reason. We have open source program offices for a reason. This allows, again, some of those policy type questions, things that are really down in the weeds. What does a FARO GPL mean to me kind of things? Well, that's not the responsibility of every developer. Be really expensive. It would take a lot of their time. But there's some basic operations of dealing in an open source world that actually can be educated. They can be part of that portfolio so that as they're developing that application, they can go in it with eyes open. If they see a license and they know that this is for a mobile app, well, that's a distribution. I have to keep an eye out for the GPL. It doesn't mean you can't use it, but there might be other things that we as an organization need to do if we do. So let's try to figure that out. You can be an advocate for tools and practices that make sense for stuff that generates the level of ownership and accountability, giving developers options, telling a developer, hey, you can only choose this color or this front-end web dev framework, probably is not gonna end up well. It's gonna be a little bit of a demotivator and, well, they're probably gonna get a bit of shadow IT signal because this is a fast-moving environment. We're always being incented to take a look at alternatives and different technology. And there's some good to that and we wanna be able to foster that as organizations, but there's also some risk to it. So we have to be able to measure that.  That's not a scalable thing for a person to do. Tools can do it really, really well though. And we need to be the advocate to take that, put tools in the appropriate locations and then get that data to developers along with some education to help them kind of distill that and say, what does this mean to me? Not just gates, not just hard policies, but really understanding what those motivations are. Why does this matter in this case, but maybe not in this case? Inviting the developers to the conversation can be really, really important. And this is also part of engaging with commercial suppliers. So when you ask them for a bill of materials or what is their practice around open source governance, they don't have an answer. Well, it's not a bad thing. Some people have just not thought about it, but being curious can actually really help them. They may actually have something, but you may be talking with a salesperson or a legal person and they have to bring in a subject matter expert. Those are important conversations to have. And again, being that advocate for tools and practices, even in our commercial supply chains, very valuable because oftentimes, everybody's looking at the bottom line, whether it's products you're writing or products you're purchasing. So if customers are not asking for a capability or an artifact or something along those lines, you're probably not gonna get it. In this case, if more people ask for it, it'll become normalized, kind of like wearing masks, where we're figuring this thing out together. And then engaging in the sustainability integrity of our own supply chain. So caring about it. Investing your talent, investing your dollars. Not just asking the questions to our commercial suppliers, but potentially writing upstream patches, helping to, again, move those ecosystems forward. It's really, really interesting and fun stuff. So basically, we need to expect more. We need to look at it and say, hey, we can't just trust what it's on the shelf. Something that's bad. We can give it a little bit of trust, but it's still a little bit wild west there. There is no USDA of software. There's no one making sure this stuff is good. Even with all the flaws of the USDA checks and being able to time them and the overhead. It's not a perfect system, but it is a system. And it helps most of the time, us in the States, to eat food safely. We can rely on it. We don't have that for software, especially when we get beyond legal and copyright related stuff. Security best practices or maintenance best practices. There's a lot of best practices, not a lot of policies or regulations. So being able to say what is good is a lot more complex. So here's some specifics. I'm gonna kind of run through them. Kind of four points, but I think it make a big difference in avoiding essentially bad stuff making into our own supply chains, whether from things that we buy or things we pull in from GitHub or NPM. So knowing your bill of materials seems to be kind of an obvious one, but oftentimes teams overlook it. Maybe they just look at their direct dependency. Even if they have it, they may avoid doing transitive work. And again, maybe back in the day when you had five or 10 or 15 dependencies and they were kind of big, it's called Java. Maybe that was a feasible way of approaching this. But now we have these heavily interrelated ecosystems like Node and NPM that understanding your real bill of materials, not just the surface stuff, get complicated. Again, as we saw in React Native. Quality ingredients. So a little bit of the food theme again, but buying things that you can trust. And then how do you trust things? What are characteristics of the things that you do trust? Those can be hard questions. Is it just because you find it on a store shelf that you should apply some trust to it? Maybe, but there's some other options there. Organizational preferences, I think is one that small organizations can get by with. But as you get into bigger organizations, Fidelity has a wide breadth of developers. We have those who are still responsible for our mainframe. Those who are still writing COBOL. And then we have those who are responsible for our mobile apps. Both have equal responsibilities to security and compliance and all that kind of good stuff. Their needs are really different though, based around the ecosystems that they deal with and the velocity of change in those ecosystems. So being able to apply some context into understanding your supply chain can really make a difference to your developers. Because what works for a mobile developer probably won't work for a mainframe developer. And recognizing that, make sure the policies and practices reflect that. They're not overly biased in one direction. But just making sure that organizationally, we can figure it out and then mine that data. To help the next set of developers. And then again, investing upstream. So it's all for bill of materials. This is a little bit complicated. There's a couple of specifications out there. I put a couple of them on there. So you have SPDX. So that's the Linux Foundation's primary one. There's also Cyclone DX, a little lighter weight. I'm finding some organizations are adopting that as opposed to SPDX. Not gonna get into specification wars. The goal is that it's machine readable though. You don't want the back of the cocktail napkin kind of ingredients list. You want something that it should be somewhat reliable. And it's been created by an automated tool. And if you ever looked at either of those schemas you're not gonna write those by hand. So being able to adopt a bill of material schema that is machine readable but can still be converted to something human readable. It's super important. And it becomes what they're intended to be in exchange. I could have a supplier give me that and say, hey, yeah, these are all my ingredients. And I should be able to trust it a little bit. One thing to always remember though is these bills of materials are generated by sometimes open source, sometimes proprietary code bases. They're all built around heuristics. And it could be natural language processing or kind of fragment analysis and tokenization and all this kind of fun parsing stuff that somewhere in the back of my head from the days of writing software but they're in some ways proprietary. And everybody might come up with something a little bit different which is why you need that kind of normalize or neutral schema to hand it off to somebody else. There's a couple of plenty of open source options. I put a couple there. So pathology, Linux foundation project, next piece scan code, very popular project out there. Certain organizations will use something like the OOF dependency check and dependency track projects kind of core in the Java world but doing a lot more than that lately. And then there's also any number of commercial entities getting into this space. They all realize that static analysis for security and dynamic analysis for security when it was 100% proprietary code, maybe that made sense. But now with open source composition analysis is kind of a key part of your pipeline. Because what you do with those findings is a little bit different. They may become a CVE. It may be someone that is publicly registered with the government and possibly has an answer. It says, hey, just update. Those are important parts that we can take part of. We also have platform capabilities. So a couple GitHub and GitLab. Both have kind of accepted that dependency analysis should be a platform capability. You can use that dependency graph to feed any number of other types of systems. A security system, do you have any CVEs for this dependency? It could be a licensing system. Or if this is a distributable artifact, do you have GPL code in it? And does that create a concern? Or it could be a maintenance type of concern. Is this project being maintained? And being able to surface those kind of indicators can be very valuable to a developer. But they're all based around that core bill of material. So when we're thinking about the bill of materials, a lot of concerns you have to bring in. One is declared versus observed. And then we get into licensing in that way. So a lot of projects will say, hey, this is a license that I'm under. But then if you look at its dependencies, so that transitive dependency chain, well, really? If you're including GPL, but you're declaring that you're Apache, that doesn't work. So what can we do about that? Well, you may not be able to resolve that yourself. That may take some upstream work. But you have to be able to surface those things. And that's a great role of a tool. And then when we think about end of life, technology, life cycle management, how do we get this type of data available to our developers? Because if it isn't broke, oftentimes we don't fix it. And then if it does break, and well, you haven't fixed it for, we haven't maintained it for a decade, that could be a lot more complex as a fix. We like to get our oil changes done regularly, even if the engine doesn't seize. So we have to be able to kind of get ahead of that stuff and keep to a regular cadence. And a lot of that will all be built around a bill of materials. And again, this may sound like it only matters to the software that we're writing, but feel free to talk to your commercial suppliers. Some of them will put their third party notices or attribution notice or some form of disclosure on their website to say, hey, these are the open source work that we depend on, possibly even the version that they depend on. So you can use those, but ask, can you provide me a software bill of material? Because if they can, and they can do it on a pretty rapid pace, probably they have a good process and practice in place. They know what's inside their code base. They may have policies built off that bill of materials. So it becomes a strong indicator that they're aware of what's going into their products. If they look at you and kind of go, no clue. Well, it doesn't mean there's a problem. Again, you could be talking to the wrong person, but it is something that's not necessarily intuitive to them. And it may be a growth area. An area of risk that they weren't aware of before and you're helping make them more aware of the criticality because you're gonna be giving them some sort of data. That could be very minor, a query for maybe public data. We'll say a stock figure or something like that. Or it could be personally identifiable information, TII, so being in the regulated space, that matters a lot. So being able to surface that is really important. And helping organizations know you're not out there to nitpick their software development lifecycle. What you're there is to say, hey, I'm giving you potentially the keys to the kingdom, something that represents my brand. And I wanna make sure you'll care for it, that you'll protect it. And that you understand all the things that go into it. Cause oftentimes they're very comfortable with doing this for their subcontractors, maybe a geography type of check for any kind of procurement. We don't think of it for software, but it does matter. And you're also seeing a lot of work in the industry standard space. So open chain, again, another Linux foundation project. They're gonna be an ISO standard shortly, if not done by the time this air. And that's really important. It gives us all a place to look and say, okay, that's consistent. We can all kind of rotate towards that from our practices. And while it's really focused around the legal compliance, it provides us a framework for discussion. Cause again, ingredients are what's in the mix. Speaking of ingredients. So I'm gonna call it to a friend. Everybody likes Link. I know I like Link. Maybe I'm dating myself a little bit. But for a more recent game. Yeah, we all remember if you played Breath of the Wild, you couldn't just slam any ingredients together and get a good product. And unfortunately this didn't poison you. But yeah, it wasn't what you were looking for. You hopefully were looking for this one. And we all remember where you had to go in and get the ingredients for that. But in general, we have to care about where the ingredients come from. We see this a lot in the eating local. So you'll have now a restaurant saying, hey, we're a local based restaurant. That means they're just sourcing ingredients from the places around them. And why would you do that? And a lot of it comes down to the freshness. But it's again, that trust concern again. When you can go and see and you can visit a farm and you can look at the practices or you can look at the animals, you can look at the produce, you're gonna feel more confident that what you're getting is good. It isn't something that you're way separated from. So being able to apply those things to software is complicated. Because especially when we look at open source, one of its strengths is that it's borderless. That we have so many individual users, organizations, foundations, all contributing to create something common and awesome. So throwing the easy one up there on Kubernetes, we should feel proud there's 20 almost, 2,500 plus people that have contributed to this. And those are the only ones that are recorded on GitHub. All those behind the shadows are not listed. And that's awesome. We should all be very, very proud of that. So when we think of it in the context of an ingredient, is the community active? Well, obviously we have so many people playing on it. We have so many pull requests coming in to saying, hey, this is a fix or this is something new. And that engagement is very high. Well, there's a lot of issues. How many were closed though? What's that mean time to close? All of those you can look at and you can start kind of pulling out and saying, okay, well, this is a community that's vibrant that I can in some ways depend on in my supply chain. I can't name a specific developer and say, because of them, this project is good. It's not a brand name type of thing, but we can look at the characteristics of the community and decide that, hey, this looks awesome. Double projects that are kind of in this space. And again, they're related. So chaos, the health and, characters in health and open source and attributes of open source software. Sorry, I can believe what you're that. The sub foundation that we look at the health of communities. And this isn't just looking at, hey, I have an open source work and I need to maintain this work and I need to build a community around it. But it can also be around, hey, I'm gonna use this open source work. Take those same characteristics and the same attributes and apply them almost like a risk lens and say, is this a vibrant thing? Can I depend on this community? And auger is one of the projects that's partially maintained by the chaos foundation. To help kind of pull that data out. So it'll go out and it'll look at GitHub, it'll aggregate this data and help you make some decisions. This is also an emerging area in the commercial space where you have maintenance of open source works becoming far more critical because the first generation of open source passed a long time ago. So we may have adopted some Apache project from early 2000s and that's great because it saved us from buying a commercial product. But because that project is not broken, we may still be using it and it may be in the apache attic. Well, how can we surface that? How can we make that available to the developers and help nudge them potentially to an alternative? So again, this is the organizational preferences. I tend to kind of call this the Amazon shopping cart experience. A lot of people are very familiar with Amazon so it makes for a good metaphor. But it's a little bit of an abstract concept. What you're looking at is metadata.  We don't know what's good. And a lot of the stuff looks exactly the same.  And that spatula is awesome by itself but there's thousands of spatulas in Amazon. Well, which one's good? Which one's gonna meet my needs? And some of that becomes from what we see and we can see things like star ratings. We can see that there's people answering questions. We can see there's a badge that says Amazon's choice. And those are all indicators to us that, hey, this is probably a pretty good spatula. It probably will meet my needs. I don't know what the cost is but maybe this is the one that I should get. And some of this is organic but some of it is definitely not. Amazon has a lot of smart people and they're trying to steer you and that's okay. And we can do that along the lines with what comes up in our software builds and materials. We wanna help our organizations adopt similar products, generate a little bit of consistency because if, hey, we're gonna work upstream on a project, well, it'd be great to have more people work on fewer projects because we'll be able to materially influence them rather than spreading it out and not really being able to move the needle on any project. But we also need to be able to help people not buy what's directly on the menu. So you might be an Angular shop. And that's great. It's still an awesome project, very well maintained. But your developers may come to you and say, hey, I wanna try React or View or Svelte. Okay, well, we're an Angular shop. All of our knowledge, all of our experience may be there but we shouldn't necessarily be kind of single-minded. How do we allow our developers a little bit of freedom? Have them take some accountability because there's some risk. If you now have a defect in React and all of a sudden it goes back to an Angular developer that's probably not gonna work out well. But if we aren't aware of these things we'll probably miss emerging concepts. We'll not be able to stay up. We'll increase our technical debt. So you have to find this balance and exposing this type of data around who's using what, how effective was it, how supported do they feel and can they help support use? Can be really, really powerful. So a lot of times it's building a taxonomy, building topics and allowing for organic communities to grow. Centers of excellence can be let's say a formal way of creating this but oftentimes those are almost a lagging. They can't really catch those emerging concepts whereas a tagging taxonomy can't. If you are subscribed to front-end web dev and all of a sudden they start seeing topics on view well, okay, I should pay attention to this. And again, that goal is really to reduce the amount of variety and focus that allows us as businesses as well as from our suppliers to maximize those relationships. It's a basic economies of scale. Investing upstream. So this is one that I think a lot of organizations are still trying to figure out, mine included. This is maybe the most comfortable, at least a fidelity, budget dollars. We can allocate those things to foundations. We can do it on events, through and all things open. Just happened last week for me and here in Raleigh or ideally in Raleigh. We can sponsor events. We can work with partners like I put in Tidelift and get up sponsors which really start getting at hey, how do we help support a specific project or a specific domain of projects? All of those things take money. So this just helps you direct it. There's some benefits there because when we think about investment in some of these kind of core platforms, it generates talent. It gets our brand out there. Hopefully folks will be interested in coming and talking to us about a job. As well as it helps to stabilize potentially commercial distributions for cloud service provider endpoints that we source. That's important because we're all depending on those at some point. Time. So I think this was actually probably from the Kubernetes project as well. But we can just have our development associates spend their time fixing bugs, handling issues, just being generally engaged. They can do that in something like GitHub issues. They can do it in Stack Overflow. They can be focused on documentation. That's a challenge for every group out there. And it isn't just your read me. It could be a quick start. It could be an in-depth motivational thing. It could be an architectural decision point. Any of those will document artifacts become super valuable to the next generation as well as those who wanna learn from the project. So taking our resources and investing that time can really make a difference. And again, this bubbles up. It flows from these open source projects back into our commercial supply chain. So if we open a patch and fix a bug or a public CVE on an open source work, well, we're probably not the only ones using that open source work. We probably have suppliers that are using that open source work and they didn't have that time. So that bubbles up into their code base and helps to protect their code base which is protecting our data. So again, there's a lot of these cascading benefits that we can talk about and wrestle with. And then code. So again, most obvious one for source code is open those pull requests. Those could be bug fixes, it could be enhancements but working upstream rather than almost creating something new and sometimes it could be hard for organizations because they want that control and that brand awareness but having all the organizations work on fewer projects can be beneficial. Now again, it doesn't come without any risk. Always gonna be looking and making sure that project is the right one. It's going in a good direction. So neutral governance and all that other kind of fun stuff. Forks are a way to handle that but being able to create freedom in your development talent to work upstream on the actual source code can make a big difference. So here's some kind of next steps. The stuff sounds all great and everything like that but how does it fit? Where does it fit in my world? So when you're coming up with your product review documents or maybe you're working with your procurement team make sure open source supply chain is a question you ask and be willing to listen and to learn and to adapt how to answer and respond to that question. And also when you're creating products within reason be able to talk about what your supply chain is. If you wanna put a third party notices out there that's great. In some ways, radical transparency that's an effective light to shine light and say, okay, yeah, we don't want these bugs. But on request is good as well. You're not legally required in many circumstances especially as software as a service to providing this type of notice but community, it's a good thing. And it may help you and people may make you aware of a concern that you were maybe not seeing. Engaging communities of interest. So being involved in the things that matter to you. So if you're a big Kubernetes shop and honestly who doesn't have it on their radar right now making sure your talent is also attending in special interest groups or working groups or user groups. Maybe not leading them, day one, but at least listening. Getting exposed to alternative opinions. How are people solving a problem? Is this a good problem to have? Or potentially is it an anti-pattern? One of my favorites is always kind of multi-cluster management for Kubernetes. Everybody's got an opinion there. And you wanna be able to hear those. You're gonna land somewhere in that decision spectrum. So having a number of people be able to kind of talk about that problem. Potentially even writing code or writing documentation. Those who have tried to do it and maybe not have success, super valuable. Make your developer experience first class. This isn't just about tools. It's not just about GitHub or IDs or anything along those lines. But when developers are there and they're trying to do their day to day do they feel supported? Do they feel respected? Are they given information so that they can make decisions themselves? That they can take on risk and document that motivation? Or are they just putting in lines of code? So really thinking through that developer experience and trying to empower them, it's not anarchy but empower them to make good decisions. Build that accountability and that trust inside your organization. And when we get to questions I'm always up for suggestions on this stuff. I think it's an interesting topic for us all to be really wrestling with when we think about supply chains. So just talk about it. Those could be on medium posts. It could be wherever, LinkedIn, whatever your platform of choice is. But really thinking through all the ingredients that go into the software that we write and the software that we use. In trying to generate something that we can all trust. Now I'll leave you with a quote. So this was again, this is PBS's poison squad talking about the situation that spawned up in Sinclair's book. Well, we all look at things and we see this is awesome. We can't go to GitHub and not be in awe of what so many people have created in a common place. And it's not perfect, but seeing just such great stuff coming out of it in this generation. But we need to care. We still need to wonder what's inside because it isn't necessarily good for us. So feel free to ask those questions. Stay curious and you'll make it better for everyone. Thanks. Have a great day.