Show #2686
DIALOGUE edit
The Ultimate Home Gym
with Guest, Doug Brignole

Carl Lanore:
Doug Brignole has spent his career showing people how to efficiently activate muscle to get the most gains with the least risk of injury. Doug has been competing for 40 years and just retired in November of 2019, winning the Mr. Universe a second time of the age at 59. 

[00:05:01]
Muscle activation efficiency and the anatomical correctness - how muscle was designed to be used through evolution and then using that pathway to activate the muscle.

Doug Brignole: [00:05:01]
It is possible to lift let's say 40% of your one rep max and build muscle, but not until you get to the point of failure. So if you're doing 30 reps with a weight that's 40% of your one rep max, the first 20 are doing nothing for building your muscle. Muscle grows by recruitment and recruitment happens one of two ways. One: with total fatigue, total failure, the point where that muscle is barely able to twitch, and Two: with a heavier weight and low rep set. With the latter, the first rep is already recruiting. The second rep is recruiting. You don't have to take it to failure in order to get growth. Now that doesn't mean only do heavyweight low reps in order to get there. You have to sort of prime it. I call it seducing the muscle. You have to get it to the point where you can lift heavy and get the most out of the set and be stronger and reduce the risk of injury. I typically start off with 30, then I'll go 20, 15, 12, 10, 8, 6.  So I get a lot of volume in which is key.

[00:07:25]
If you want to build muscle, you have to spend a lot of time doing sets and enough rest time between sets in order to not compromise that next set. I'll be spending 45 minutes to an hour on one muscle group. If you’re doing lighter weight high reps to failure you won’t be able to get the volume required.

Carl Lanore: [00:08:31]
Fatigue does not equal efficient activation of the muscle. In fact, it may actually be the opposite. Doing super sets and all these extravagant things where afterwards you can't even lift your arms – You may not be getting growth from those things.

Doug Brignole: [00:09:04]
I've talked to a number of people who really do believe that if you don't do a set to failure, then it's a wasted set and that's absolutely false. There is plenty of science behind why.  You're better off doing a little less intensity, a little less total exhaustion in trade for more volume. So do 95% maximum effort set after set and your muscles will grow like crazy. It's just math.

[00:09:54]
The right way to activate a muscle.  

Doug Brignole: [00:10:21]
Look at compound movements, like a squat, a chin up, a parallel bar dip or a bent over barbell row. You know what your target muscle is. You want to work your back. That's very ambiguous we have to be more specific than that. So you say, okay, you’re working lats and upper inner back. I'll ask, do you know what muscles those actually are, what they're called and what they do?  Usually people don’t.

The first thing I'll tell you is that the lats have a different function then the upper inner back, the primary muscle being the middle trapezius. They have two different directions of anatomical motion. You cannot do them both well with one movement. That's number one. Number two is the muscle that is most loaded will not be determined by the movement you do. The muscle that is the most loaded will be determined by the direction of the resistance of whatever muscle is directly opposite.

The direction of the resistance, also called the line of force, will be the muscle that is most loaded, whether that's your intention or not. So when you're doing a bench or a barbell row the muscle that is most loaded is your lower back. But you're not doing it for the lower back right? It’s because the lower back has to hold not only the weight of the barbell you're rowing, but of your torso and the length that it's magnifying the weight by. So you could be getting twice as much load on the lower back then on your intended muscles.

Look at the movement of a bent over row. All muscles pull toward their origin so if you're talking about the middle trapezius or the lats, those originate on the spine. The movement has to move toward the spine, in, not back toward the back of the room. The muscle that is working most with that motion is the rear deltoids. That's the only muscle that pulls the elbow to the back of the room. The trapezius, the biggest muscle of the upper inner back doesn't even connect to your arms. That means that any arm portion of the work, benching or barbell rowing isn't being done by the upper inner back, it's being done by the scapula.

The lats pull down and in from a laterally high to a medially low. A bent over barbell row doesn't resemble either of those two movements, right? So the way to be the most efficient is to identify the best movement for each muscle group.

Some might say, well a compound movement works three muscles at one time. I’d say, well, none well. In a bent over barbell row you're loading your lower back isometrically, you're not working it dynamically with motion, so you're already getting a compromised benefit on the lower back on the erector spinae. You're not doing what the lats actually do. You're not doing what the trapezius actually does. The muscles are getting maybe 20% benefit and what going to walk away with 20% benefit. You're better off doing three exercises that give you 100% benefit for each. It takes it longer to do three sets than one but what do you prioritize time or progress?

[00:14:46]
The Home Gym

Doug Brignole: [00:15:32]
When I was working out at the commercial gyms, before the lockdown I was spending most of my time on the double adjustable cable machine. Not all my time, of course, because I had other options. I had a leg extension machine, leg curl machine, glute machine, calf machine etc.  When the lockdown happened, my training partner and I decided we were going to build a home gym in a space at his home.

We got a double adjustable pully machine, an adjustable decline bench, an upright seat, and made a high seat for leg extensions on the cable machines o when your leg goes down, your foot doesn't hit the ground. We actually created like a little bit of a back tilt to it and we're going to put a backrest on it. We are going to be designing home equipment because this is a fantastic solution to most people's problems, I think.

The only thing that we're missing and we're getting it in about four weeks, is a tough stuff, brand multi hip machine. That's the best way to work. The glutes. You can do fantastic full range of motion, glute extension with continuous tension using one leg at a time, which is great because it eliminates this thing called bilateral deficit, which is a weakening of both sides when you're doing both at the same time.

Carl Lanore: [00:18:06]
Bilateral deficit. I've always assumed that training bilaterally made the dominant arm or leg do more work, but you're saying they both get weaker.

Doug Brignole: [00:18:24]
Let me explain, this is a very tricky subject. Bilateral should be defined as independently loaded.It doesn’t refer to whether you are using one bar or 2 dumbbells or do reps simultaneously or alternately, rather doing for instance one arm first – the entire arm so only one arm is loaded. 

If they're both loaded at the same time, it triggers this thing called bilateral deficit, which is a weakening of both sides. They still don't know the actual mechanism but they do know it involves the central nervous system and because it involves the central nervous system, they're actually suggesting that there's a reduction in the innervation.  Conductivity to each side is lessoned when they're both working at the same time.

Carl Lanore: [00:21:10]
This makes perfect sense to me. If you think of the electrical system of the body and the electrical grid of the body gas, you got, you got so much amperage in it.

Doug Brignole: [00:21:20]
There's also a little bit having to do with mechanics. Let's say I'm going to do my right arm. I'm going to lean a little bit on that side. I'm going to lead a little bit on this side… I can’t lead on both sides simultaneous. The numbers I saw were as much as 14%, 14.2% weakening of each side when you're trying to do them simultaneously.

Doug Brignole: [00:25:34]
All we have is an adjustable decline bench, the double adjustable pully machine,  a rack of dumbbells from two to sixty pounds and the benches we use for cable crunches, leg extensions and things like that. We work the whole body, so much so that I'm not going back to the commercial gym even though they've opened. My quads are even as well-developed now, as they were, when I was in the gym doing leg days.

Carl Lanore: [00:26:53]
so you don't feel that you need a squat rack or a Smith machine. Those seem to be staples and home gyms.

Doug Brignole: [00:27:01]
We do cable squats, Brignoli squats and sissy squats. There are ways to do squats without a squat rack, or a barbell. We don't use a barbell for anything. We use dumbbells and we use cables.

Carl Lanore: [00:27:46]
So you can maintain a bodybuilders physique following this approach.

Like Doug said, you could shop around or even makeshift something that you can put on the wall plate loaded.

Doug Brignole: [00:28:49]
The machines that we use and sell are not marked up. This machine is so much a part of what we do, that it just makes sense for us to make it available. You are going to get the best price from us for the free motion machines, but they're still not cheap.

Carl Lanore: [00:29:25]
You’re saying they're not cheap, but the prospect of outfitting a home gym today isn't cheap.

Doug Brignole: [00:29:48]
You can do so much more with so much less space using what I just showed you.  If you have a squat rack, it takes a lot of room and you have to trust me on this. If you read my books you totally understand. A squat rack, a power rack will give you far less visible muscular development results then you'd get from what we set up in our garage gym

Doug Brignole: [00:30:44]
Every body part: abs, lower back, obliques, biceps, triceps, traps, middle traps, upper traps. Every body part can be fantastically worked with this home gym you see here. The only thing we're adding, as I said earlier, a multi-use hip flexor machine because that is by far the best way to work the glutes.

Carl Lanore: [00:34:17]
A comment from a listener:  Doug, when did you first discover biomechanics? How did you find out about biomechanics?

Doug Brignole: [00:34:42
It didn't happen all at once, but from the very first day I worked out, I was analyzing. I was 14 years old and I was doing upright rows and I thought, this doesn't feel right. I was doing the parallel bar dips and thought this doesn't feel right. I was already questioning why one thing felt right and another didn’t and what should it feel like. Little by little, I’d question more and dig a little deeper. I went to cadaver dissections and I studied and read the university books. I just became obsessed with body mechanics, how it works, why it works, what's better than what Y and discovered over the course of a number of years, that most of this stuff was unknown by the bodybuilding community.

You can find the research at university levels. Nobody talks about it yet these things have profound effects on what works better than what in a bodybuilding setting. I never thought that I was going to go public with this but every time I learned something, I improved my workout. Pretty soon my workouts started looking very unusual. I'd have friends coming up to me and asking “why are you doing it like this?” and “why aren't you doing it like that?” I would explain it to them and they would say, wow, that makes so much sense. You should write a book.

I just decided to make a list, which inadvertently became the table of contents. I've come up with 15 factors. I call them the Brignoli principles of biomechanics. They're either anatomical or physics related, or neurologically related. These 15 factors could be a checklist for every single exercise. There are certain factors that determine how good or not so good something is.

Here is one simple example from a physics perspective.

If you're going to load a muscle with 90 pounds of resistance, you're not going to pick a 90 pound dumbell to do it. The muscle is lifting an amount of weight that is related to how much you've selected, but largely influenced by the length of the limb that's moving it and the angle of that limb relative to the direction of the resistance. You end up getting a percentage, greater or lower, based on the physics, the mechanics of the exercise.

So you could load a muscle with 90 pounds of resistance by using a one hundred pound barbell with an efficiency ratio of 90% and you're getting 90% of the hundred.

Or you could load a muscle with a 300 pound weight and only get 30% on the muscle. It's still 90 pounds. The muscle doesn't know or care how much you're actually lifting and only cares how much it's getting, how much force is required. 

If you're going to use a 300 pound barbell instead of a hundred pound barbell because your ego requires it, because you think wrongly that 300 pounds is automatically going to load your muscle more, you're wrong and you're beating up your skeleton in the process.

A perfect example of this is the barbell squat. When you're doing a squat, your femur is the operating lever of the gluteus and the lower limb is the operating lever of the quadricep. So we're going to look at both of these angles and determined percentages.  A pendulum is in the neutral position when it's hanging vertically and support beams in buildings are vertical for the same reason because a vertical lever being parallel to gravity loads it's muscles or other things, zero it's neutral.

Once you move it away from that neutral position, it increases its percentage of load, being at 100% when it's horizontal, which is the perpendicular position of gravity. So a lever that is halfway between vertical and horizontal could be considered 50% active. When you're squatting, the lower leg doesn't even get to a 45 degree angle, it only goes forward about 30 degrees. Once you descend that lower leg forward 30 degrees, you're only getting about 30% of the weight that's on your back, on your quads.

Let's say you're using a hundred pound barbell, you know your quads can handle more weight so you add more weight to the barbell, but any more weight to the barbell will compress your spine more so that's a really foolish way to add load to the quadricep because you're still using an inefficient quadricep lever.

A better way would be like a sissy squat, let that lower leg get more horizontal. When you go down, your femur does get horizontal, that's a 100% level. However, the lower leg, since it's attached to the femur and since the load on the glute is coming from the foot to the lower leg, that lower angle has to be factored in.

So that is undercutting the lane of the femur, reducing effectivelyvwhat's called a moment arm in physics. You're getting a 50% long lever on the femur, even though it's fully active and you're only getting a 30% active lower leg lever.

So both the glutes and the quads mechanically are getting less than they could get if they had better mechanics.  And to make matters worse there's a thing called reciprocal innervation, which means that muscles that work in opposite directions can't fire simultaneously. When you're doing your biceps, your triceps are relaxing. Central motor system demands it and forces a relocation synapse to go to the triceps to not interfere with the biceps function. When you're loading the glutes during squats, the glutes is a hip extensor, that means the hip flexors are relaxing. Guess what? One quarter of the quadricep is a hip flexor, the rectus femoris. So you're shutting off 25% of your quadricep when you're squatting, because you are trying to simultaneously activate two different sets of muscles. One of which opposes the other right.

Therefore, you’d be better off doing leg extentions. This is the reason why it's so foolish to think that all compound exercises are better than all isolation. You’ll get more benefit to the quadriceps and more benefit to the glutes If you did them separately.

[00:43:51]
It's very clear exercises that are compromised do not not work. I never say squats don't build quads. But take someone like Ronnie Coleman. He'll do squats. He'll do like presses. He’ll do leg extensions. He'll do sissy squats and walking lunges, but he can’t tell you which one contributed more, which one contributed less.  So what you ended up getting is a good result, but with a lot more work than you needed to do.

Here’s the analogy I typically use:  I'm going to drive from here to that destination there, on the only road I think exists. It happens to be very bumpy, very muddy, rocky wet. I arrive at my destination and there you are waiting for me and you say you're here. That must prove that the road you took was a good road. No, there was another road over there. It was dry and flat and clear and  I could have gotten there just as well without the wear and tear without the abuse, without the the spinning of the tires.

Why would you choose to spend three times more effort and energy, wasted time and risk of injury, doing exercises that don't give you the most bang for the buck? Why not just do the ones that have the least abusive to the skeleton and give the muscle the most load.

Doug Brignole: [00:53:35]
20 Best Biomechanically best exercises for your entire body.

Doug Brignole: [01:10:14]
Deadlift is one of the worst exercises you can do because at the physics of it. What is the level that's getting most horizontal? It is in fact your torso. What is moving the torso? Well in part it's the glutes and partly it's the erector spinae. If you want to maximally work the glutes, then you jeopardize your spine because there's no way your erector spinae can hold as much weight as your glutes need. The result is a really risky exercise or an exercise that doesn't benefit as another exercise would that doesn't require any spinal involvement at all. It’s very compromised. I'm not saying that a person should never do deadlifts. In fact, I, I think that maybe doing a 100 pound lift occasionally bent knee deadlift is a very practical thing to do because you're not going to grow any muscle with that because you're not challenging anything to the capacity that you could with other better exercises, but it's a motion that you use on a somewhat regular basis o it wouldn't be a bad idea to be accustomed to doing it with some resistance, but I would never expect to get any kind of muscular development from a deadlift.

Doug Brignole: [01:12:18]
Most importantly is that people have to quit with the idea that the value of their workout can be assessed by how much weight they lifted. What they should be using instead is how much load did they get on each muscle with this little amount of weight.

If you maximize the physics, if you use the smartest physics, you can increase the percentage of magnification that the target muscle gets. So much that like on a 60 squat, for example, that you will have a hard time doing 20 reps with just body weight, because you've maximized the efficiency of the physics.

It's smartest to go for the efficiency, smart loading, not inefficient loading that lets you use more weight, but doesn't load the muscle any more, and challenges and stresses the skeleton even more.

Doug's Book:  The Physics of Resistance    shrnetwork.biz/physicsofresistance
Doug's Website and Home Gym Equipment for purchase:  shrnetwork.biz/HOMEGYM