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You're listening to Mondays with Matt. I'm Matt Reynolds, the founder and CEO of BarbaLogic and Turnkey Coach. Each week I share lessons from decades of lifting, coaching and business to help you get stronger, coach better and take action. Let's dive in. Happy Monday everybody, and happy Easter. Christ is risen. He's risen indeed. Since you can't say it back to me, hope you had a wonderful Easter with your family and friends this past weekend. We're going to dive into Mondays with Matt talking a little bit today about one of my favorite topics, which is barbells and why they're so awesome. So glad you're here to catch this Mondays with Matt. As always, you can ask your questions throughout the show. I'll talk for a few minutes and then we'll in dive, dive into your questions and answer those. So some of these you've heard before, but I just want to give a really succinct list of exactly why I love barbells so much. And I also want to be honest and we'll talk about this towards the end of the show. For somebody like me who's done barbells for 25 years, I'm enjoying some machines and dumbbells and things like that later on in my life. But I really want to talk to those of you who are in your first couple years of training why barbells are so effective. And so the advantages to barbells, we'll dive right in. I've got 13 points. I'll keep em pretty tight and pretty fast. Number one, you've heard me say this before. They are simple, hard and effective. Right? We know easy doesn't work. We have to do something hard. If easy worked, everybody would be strong, everybody would look great, everybody would, you know, that's, that's the thing. But we have to do hard things to get better. And complicated isn't necessary for most people. We want simplicity. There's nothing simpler and harder and more effective than barbells. And I'll dive into exactly like some, some more subcategories of why that is so. Another piece of this is that number two, barbells give you the most bang for your buck. And I mean that both systemically and financially. And so when we utilize barbells, barbells are one, they're, they're cheap. You can put them in your home. We'll talk about that here in a second. But also they're, you can do so much work with, with so little equipment and that work that's being done is systemic. When you train these compound movements, you're training the entire body. And so they give you the most bang for your buck. Both systemically, they're gonna give you the greatest return on the invest on your investment for your body, but also, I really believe, the greatest return on investment for your money and for your time as well. Number three, maximum load equates to maximum adaptation. Because we can go heavy on barbells, and in the beginning, that's what you wanna do. That doesn't mean you want to start as heavy as you can possibly start. On day one, you want to start pretty conservative, but you can do that linear progression, add a little bit of weight each time, you can continue pretty quick. Within a month or so, you can get pretty dang heavy, much heavier than you could ever be on a machine, unless you're loading up something that's, you know, like a leg press and you're doing 4 inches range of motion for most things. You can't even begin to sniff how heavy you can get with barbells. And this is for any age demographic, any sex, male, female, young, old, indifferent. It's heavy for them, it's heavy for you. And so that's why this works so well, so that maximum load gives you maximum adaptation. You've all seen the guys and the ladies that go to the commercial gyms, and they hop on the machines and they do the machines. And they may do them exactly right because the machines are in this fixed movement pattern. So they're doing them, it looks fine, but they do that day in, day out, and they never, never get better. Their body never changes this. They look the same a year later as they look today. And so we want maximum adaptation. And barbells give us that number four, compound movements have a systemic return, just as I was mentioning, it trains the most muscle mass. That's what we want, especially in the beginning. We want to train the most muscle mass for the least amount of lifts, right? So doing things like these, these exercises, these compound movements that train the most muscle mass over great range of motion using the most weight we can use with absolutely perfect form. What we can do is with just squats, presses and deadlifts, we can train the entire body. Now, is that all you should do? Probably not. There's a little bit more you should do. But as I've said before, 80 to 90% of your training should come from these barbell movements. And even for me today, even now, as I've accumulated more machines, as I've got adjustable, loadable dumbbells, things like that if I look at my time in a typical workout, which my workouts are always under an hour, they're probably closer to 45 minutes. Now certainly that 80 to 90% rule still holds. 80 to 90% of my time in the gym is spent doing the barbell movements. And then I can do some quick accessory movements at the end to kind of finish off certain muscles that I'm trying to bring up, add a little more hypertrophy, get a little more stress, muscular stress that doesn't add to the systemic stress. Now you'll hear some arguments from the bodybuilder crew that I've seen a big argument even this week on Twitter X about deadlifts are overrated. They're not overrated. If you're somebody that's already deadlifted £600 and you're a bodybuilder and you're just trying to build a big back, okay, maybe you don't have to deadlift so much anymore. Maybe you can do rdls and you can do the back attack and back extensions and these sorts of things. That's perfectly fine. But in the beginning I actually want the systemic fatigue. If you're 45 years old and you've trained for 20 years, you might not want as much systemic fatigue. For me, I do one to two working sets on the barbell lifts per workout. That's it. That's about all my nearly 50 year old body can take. But that is still enough fatigue for me to continue to drive adaptation and still watch my lifts go up, certainly those over 40 year old PRs. So I love that. So those compound movements have a systemic return. It trains the most muscle mass for the least amount of lifts. I don't have to do 10 exercises in a workout. I don't have to do 30 or 40 exercises over the course of a week. I can do three primary, four primary exercises, just a handful of secondary exercises and I'm done. So under 10 exercises total. And that gives me that return on investment, that simple, hard, effective roi. Right? Simple number five, simple minimum effective dose programming is incredibly effective and I would say is probably the most effective way to, to program for barbells, especially in those first several years of training or of coaching. If you're coaching lifters, it refines you as a lifter and refines you as a coach. And it's very simple to understand. I've told my clients before many times when you start a linear progression, a novice linear progression, understanding the program is very simple. That's why we don't sell Complicated programs we sell human relationship with coaches. That's the point. Someone who's actually breaking down your technique on a daily basis, who' there to be accountable for you to be accountable to, to give you that feedback, to build that human rapport, that stuff that AI and and spreadsheets cannot do. That's what we love about this. And that simple minimum effective dose programming is so easy that you can start this on your own even without a coach. It's okay, you can go in the gym, understand this basic minimum effective dose program where you just add a little bit of weight each time, do the same volume, the same sets and reps with a little more weight and get a little better every single day. And so I love that minimum effective dose programming. As you get more advanced, your training may become more complicated, your programming may become more complicated. But those first several years, it doesn't need to be number six. This is overlooked all the time. And as I get older I think it's more and more important. I understand how important it is for the long term. It's cost and accessibility advantages, right? It's home gym versus commercial gym. I want you all to be training at home. If there's any way possible to train at home. And unless you live in a 350 foot studio apartment, you can probably do this. You probably have some extra space in the apartment, an extra bedroom, a garage, a basement somewhere, even a storage unit, a storage facility that you can go and you can put an 8 by 8 platform in. That's all. And really all you need is about 4ft deep by 8ft wide. You can do everything you need. There's Coop from Garage Gym Reviews has had some great videos lately about these kind of fold up racks that go up against your wall. Even in a garage where you can pull in your car. They stick out about 6 inches when they're all folded up and then they come out and they're a few feet out into the garage. Pull the car out, work out, you're done. I love that if you think again about efficiency, about money, not just the cost of the gym membership, not just the cost of having to buy say lots of different accessory machines, but, but the time to be able to just walk into a room of your house, a garage, a basement and train. Not only that, but to do that and model it for your family, for your friends, for your neighbors, for everyone that you know. I love this. And so cost and accessibility is huge. It's much easier to stay compliant and consistent and motivated when it's right there. In your home, it's much more difficult to say, I gotta get dressed, you know, take a shower, get dressed, drive, commute to the gym, fight with people, deal with the meat market that's at the gym of like ridiculous people and all the crazy fitness stuff, you can just do it at your house. And so I love that. Number seven, objective, measurable progress, right? I love this. Barbells are incrementally loadable and infinitely titratable. Fun to say, incrementally loadable and infinitely titradable. You can keep going up. Someone who may start with a 45 pound bar, somebody who may start with a 15 pound aluminum bar or a 33 pound women's bar can titrate up two and a half pounds or a pound per workout. But likewise, someone that squats 405 for reps can go up 5 pounds or 10 pounds and go to 410. And so whether you are very early on in your journey where you're just lifting the empty barbell and there's nothing wrong with that at all, and adding a little tiny bit of weight at a time, whether you're somebody that's pretty big and yoked and jacked and you, you're using tons of weight, that's the great thing about a barbell. Barbells can always take more weight than you can lift, right? I can throw 8, 900 pounds on my barbell. I can't lift anything for 8 or 900 pounds. But likewise, I could train Ms. Sybil for many, many years with an empty bar, with a 33 pound bar and she could do it as well. So it is incrementally loadable and infinitely titratable. Number eight. Barbells give you scalability across lifespan. This is just a continuation of the last point. It works when you're 15, it works when you're 12, it works when you're 90. It will work for your entire life. I will still be training with barbells hopefully within weeks of my death, which is hopefully way out there, right. Maybe in my 80s and 90s and maybe I'll get lucky and make it to a hundred so I can do those things. Now, will it be as heavy as I do today? No. But do I lift as heavy today as I did when I was 28 or 30? No. But that's okay because I can train my body in a way that it's stressed to the point that it causes an adaptation. Right? That's what I want. And barbells can do that at any skill level, at any strength level. At any size level, any age. Time efficiency. We talked about this as well. It's not just the time efficiency of I can go train in my home. It's the time efficiency of I can do everything I need right here on this platform in this squat rack with this barbell. A squat rack, a barbell and a bench, that's all you need. A squat rack and weights, that's all you need. And I don't care how fancy your weights are. In fact, I don't care how fancy your squat rack is. In the beginning, we've got guys at our church that Coop showed them. There was a great deal, I think it was on Walmart and they got a squat rack for like $99. 149 you can give. Now, they're not great squat racks and they're probably not going to be awesome when you're trying to squat 500 pounds, but when you're squatting 1 35, 185, 225, they work just fine, right? And so of course those of us who get into this and you buy that first cheap rack or barbell, you're like this last me five years and then three years later you've got six barbells and a nicer rack. Like that's just part of the, that's part of the fun of the game, right? But ultimately it's this time efficiency of both. I can train in my home. Even if I have to go to a gym, I can still train in the same spot. I don't have to walk all over the gym. I don't have to utilize lots of different pieces of equipment. I can do everything I need right here on the platform. Skill, acquisition and motor control. That's number 10. This barbells teach you how to have skill, acquisition and motor control in a way that machines cannot. This is why you should start with barbells before moving to machines. This is why guys Forget who are 40 years old and been training for 20 years and say you don't just skip the barbells and go to the machines. Why you watch these people do machines and they're terrible at it. Even if the form looks okay. Why they don't get anything out of it. Why there is no return on investment and they forget the reason they get return on investment is because they've spent 20 years in the trenches of squatting and deadlifting and pressing so that they can do machine curls and machine presses and machine lat pulldowns and things like that in a much more effective way because they've Built all that motor unit, skill acquisition, that control that it takes, that I don't know what it is, that mind muscle connection that bodybuilders often talk about. There is something there to understand how to do the movement in a way that trains the muscle that you're trying to train. A beginner has no idea what that feels like. You don't have to even think about that on a squat. You do a squat, you're gonna train your quads, your glutes, your hamstrings, your adductors, your back. You go down, you come back up. Do we wanna stay focused on good technique? Do we wanna keep weight over our midfoot? We wanna stay balanced correctly, all of those things? Of course. Do we wanna not round our back up? Yes. But you don't have to think about, I don't know, this used to be a big thing in my early powerlifting days. I have gluteal amnesia. My glutes aren't firing. Yeah, they are. Because your hips went through flexion and extension. So they, they fired or you would fall over. So you don't have to think about what muscles you're training. It's training all the muscles when you do the compound movements, you absolutely have to think about the muscles you're training. When you do, say, a lat pull down, you can do all back, all biceps, get a blend of both. You can yank on it. You can, you can use that body English and, and pull back too hard, like that kind of stuff, right? But for somebody who's built all that skill acquisition and that motor control, they can then go to a lat pull down and, or even body weight exercises like a dip or a pull up or a pushup and get more out of it. And so that skill acquisition and motor control is huge, by the way. Skill acquisition, huge for a coach. Those of you who are coaching, learn, it's. What do you coach on a, on a machine curl? What do you coach on a leg extension. You know what? I coach on those things. Time, timing, hey, slow down, the eccentric stretch in the bottom, fire up. That's the whole coaching. Because it's on that fixed movement pattern. It's very easy to coach, lazy, to coach on some level those sort of movements to learn how to coach a squat, a deadlift, a bench press. A press, well, requires an enormous amount of skill acquisition. And then, guess what? You'll actually see some stuff on some of those smaller accessory movements that you wouldn't have seen. Now that you really understand the body. The body, excuse me. And how it moves number 11, three left. It builds voluntary hardship. We talk about this for years on the Barbelogic podcast with Scott Hambrick. It's not even when you do a really hard set of leg extensions or a really hard set of machine curls. It would be hard to argue that that builds voluntary hardship. And remember, the voluntary hardship is huge because we're choosing to do something hard, knowing that life is going to throw something at us in the future, because it always does. That's involuntarily hard. So I'm training for involuntary hardship with voluntary hardship. And barbells do that better than anything. Look, squats are hard. Deadlifts are hard. Nobody wants to get under really heavy squat. I had a heavy squat workout this morning, and I was like, I don't want to. I was doing the safety squat bar. I haven't done it in a while. Oh, it was just trying to round me. My middle back was hurting, like, not in a bad way, just like, it's hard to keep my chest up on this thing. It would have been much easier to go out and hit the leg extension, leg curl machine, right? But I knew that I had to choose voluntary hardship. I had to do something hard to make myself better. When I got done, even if it wasn't the weight I really wanted to do, I knew that I worked my butt off at it. My legs were jello. My body, I could tell, was systemically fatigued. It got what needed to be done, right? So builds voluntary hardship. In preparation for that involuntary hardship to come. Number 12. It transfers to real life and aging. Again, part of voluntary hardship, right? It is truly functional. These are normal human movement patterns. Squats and hip extensions, right? Like opening up the hips with a deadlift, picking something heavy off the ground presses. These things are things that we were created and meant to do, and now we're just doing it with heavy weight in our hands or on our back. And so that transfers to real life. So when it comes time to pick up the lawnmower and put it in the back of the truck or to pick up the 28 bags of groceries, because I'm not taking more than one trip on my. On my grocery walk, right? So those things transfer over when it comes time when you're 80 years old, to get off the toilet, to get into the car, to drive, to get out of a car, those sorts of things. That transfers from the barbell training in a way. Somebody who. Who never does barbell training and only does the leg extensions and leg curls and, you know, 4 inches of leg press. That person, surprisingly, still has a real hard time getting off the toilet when they're 80 years old or getting in and out of a small cooperation car. Right. A small sedan. So it transfers to real life and transfers across your entire lifespan into old age. It's truly one of the most functional things we can do. And finally, and I think this is often overlooked as well, is the simplicity of barbells, drives, motivation and compliance. What is the most important thing? Those of you who've listened to me for years, it's compliance. It's just showing up and doing the thing. It's not the program. It's compliance first, technique second, and the program way down here, you can have the worst program in the world. But if you go in and actually. And it's barbells, and you still go in and do it and you do it consistently, that's important. Well, how am I going to do it consistently? I want to do something that I enjoy. How am I going to do something I enjoy? Well, I want to. I don't want to spend two hours in the gym. Well, okay, so now I can do three or four lifts, not even in one workout. I can do two lifts in one workout. I do one lift in one workout, a big compound lift. I can add a little weight. I get excited because I couldn't do that weight last week, and I'm motivated to keep going. And so when I do that on a Monday, I can come back on a Wednesday, I can come back the next Friday and continue to do this and that. Motivation drives compliance. And the next thing you know, you've looked back and you've strung together six months straight of training. And so these are the reasons I love barbells. That's 13 advantages to barbells. I'm sure there are more, but I. I just love barbells. I love it because it's so efficient. And for those of you who heard me talk about my life, I love running an efficient life. I don't want excess complexity, things that take too long. How do I get the job done as quickly as possible? That's barbells in the gym, in your home gym, and why it gives you the greatest return on investment. So there you go. There is the advantages of barbells. Feel free to ask any questions. We had some come in, as we always do over the weekend. Uh, first question says, I don't have space to overhead press, but I can do the other main lifts. How should I adjust my training? It's a great question. Get this all the time have a handful of clients now who are in the same boat. They lift in like a basement with a low ceiling. I think there's very little drawback. There's some, but not a lot to doing a seated press instead of an overhead press. And so for most of my clients, actually for all of my clients, they will just do their presses seated with a barbell. I've got another guy who just cannot get a barbell back over his head because of old sports injuries to his shoulders. He's able to do a very high incline dumbbell press and that works fine. So I adjust it that way and that's we can still linear progress that those dumbbells are about the closest thing you can get to a barbell while still not being a barbell. And they're not quite as good. But you know how much less return on your investment is there by going from overhead or from standing overhead to seated overhead or from going to. That is probably 5%. And how much from a barbell to a dumbbell? I don't know, 10%, 15%. It's still a good movement to have. It still continues to keep the shoulders as open as we can and probably open them up even more over time. And so that's what I do. If you can't overhead press and the other stuff you should be able to do. Um, question two. I only have adjustable dumbbells and an adjustable bench, but no barbell or power rack. How should I adjust my training? Okay, so you can't train with barbells if that's the case and so your training's not going to be as effective. However, Matt, 28 year old Matt, 30 year old Matt probably would have said just you gotta go find some barbells. And I still think that's the best option. But in the meantime, again, we've got guys in their 50s and even in their 60s at my church who Coop and I have got them to start lifting and we often start them with some adjustable dumbbells and a bench because they can take those adjustable dumbbells, they can hold em on their shoulders, they can do squats slow and steady. Everything else is the same about the squat, mid foot bend over like, you know, hip drive, all of those things on the squat, full range of motion. That's what we're looking for. Below parallel. They can learn, you can learn how to do that same thing on the presses, dumbbell presses. You can do pushups, especially if you put your hands up on plates or you know, something that gets your hands elevated A little bit. You can do these things. Deadlifts, slow Romanian deadlift style. Deadlifting. With dumbbells, is it as good as barbells? Not at all. But if you've never lifted with barbells and you don't have a coach and you don't have much money and you've got dumbbells and a bench, it's, and it often is the gateway drug into barbells. And so I say go for it. Like just start doing something right. So if you have nothing and you start walking around the neighborhood, that's, that's better than doing nothing, than sitting around and watching tv. So that's a good place to start. Other than that, I wouldn't adjust your training very much. With the dumbbells, you're probably going to have to do higher reps. It's going to be hard to do dumbbells for sets of five. So you're probably going to do something in the sets of 10 or 15 or even 20 is fine. I mean all that is fine just as long as you continue to titrate the weight up or the reps up. And so with barbells, because they're incrementally loadable, one of the disadvantages of dumbbells is that they're not. Now you can get micro gains. Dumbbell fractionals, you can, you can get those, they work really well as well as fractionals for the barbell. And so you can, you can make the dumbbells go from five pound jumps to two and a half pound jumps, which makes it a little bit easier. But a two and a half pound jump on a dumbbell is still a five pound jump overall. So, so if I go from 25 to 27 and a half, I'm actually jumping five pounds or yeah, five pounds total. And that could be a lot for somebody who's trying to overhead press and they're going from a 20 pound dumbbell to a 22 and a half pound dumbbell, or having to go from a 20 pound dumbbell to A 25 pound dumbbell, that's a pretty big jump. Whereas it's much easier to just add a pound on a barbell and incrementally load just one of the. Again, another advantage. I travel a lot. Another question. I travel a lot. Do you typically do hotel workouts or find a good gym and train there? Understand there are trade offs with both options. What do each of these look like for you? What do you bring when you travel? It's a lot of questions. Well, I am leaving. I'm getting on a plane to go to Dallas here in just a few minutes. Since I'm off this and I have packed my bag, I can tell you exactly what I'm doing. The first thing I do is when I get ready to go somewhere like Dallas, a big metroplex. I found a hotel. I haven't been there yet. It's called the Cooper Hotel. I think it's got a nice big gym, it's got a spa, it's got barbells, it's got free weights, it's got all that stuff. So that's what I'm going to look for first or I'm going to look and see if there is a nice commercial gym. And as much as I can't, I would never want to train there all the time. Going to something like a lifetime fitness. I've said before, it's like going to a Taj Mahal gym for a few days on a travel on a trip and go train and work out and do the sauna and the hot tub and the cold plunge. I'm like, this is pretty, it's pretty sweet and a nice locker room, all that kind of stuff. So I'll do that sometimes when I train. But I also just as often, if not more, just train in the hotel gym. I mean you're staying at a Holiday Inn Express. There's usually a bench and 50 pound dumbbells. And the same thing that I just said in the previous answer to what do I do if all I have is adjustable, adjustable dumbbells and a bench. That's the way I train. I just train. You know, I grabbed the 50 pound dumbbells. How many times can I bench press 50 pound dumbbells? I a lot. But if I slow the movement way down, I go very slow, very controlled tempo. Lift on the dumbbell, bench press on the dumbbell, overhead press. They usually have a cable machine. I can do lat pull downs or I can do chin ups. I can do dumbbell curls. I can do rolling dumbbell tricep extensions. I do overhead cable tricep extensions. There's lots of stuff you can still do just in a typical hotel gym. Lower body. I can still do those, you know, goblet squat or like a front squat where you told the dumbbells up at your shoulders. I can do the, the Romanian deadlifts. I can do a kettlebell swing with either a kettlebell or even just holding a dumbbell and doing those. I can do sit ups with weight on my chest. Um, so there's still a lot of Stuff that I can do, I can do lunges, Bulgarian split squats, all those sorts of things. And so that works really well as well. Um, what do I bring when I travel? That last question. Part of that question is I've got a gym bag that's made to travel. I bring my shoes, I bring my knee sleeves. I've got neoprene shorts that I bring that keep my hips warm. Since I've got bad hips. I've got a travel belt that I really tight and kind of a tight ball. I bring that I bring a chalk ball in a Ziploc bag, wrist wraps, wrist straps. That's what I bring. And I can. I take like, the wrist straps and roll them up and put them in a shoe, a squat shoe. I take the wrist strap and put it in the rest of the shoe. So those are all in the shoes. I take the knee sleeves and the. And the shorts and roll them up. I take the belt and make it as tight as it can be. And it's a pretty tight little compact. You know, what would certainly fit in, like a shoe box. And so you can travel with pretty much everything that you need for travel. What is your favorite machine? Could even be an uncommon one. I think my. My favorite machine, I'm going to apply the same sort of criteria that I would to barbells and say, like, what allows me to get the most work done? And to me, that's an adjustable cable machine. Just as I was saying, the. That cable machine, you can do all sorts of lat pull downs, seated rows for the back. You can do both of those. You can do tricep extensions. You do overhead tricep extensions, like tricep push downs or overhead tricep extensions. Where it goes out over your head. You can do cable curls. I mean, there's all sorts that you can do face pulls. You can do all kinds of stuff with a cable machine. So that tends to be my favorite machine that I use most frequently. And I don't get too boutique on machines. And so one of the things I love, Coop loves the Power Voltra. They're very expensive, but it's that digital cable machine that you can just attach anywhere, attach to a rack, attach to a tree, and you've got a cable machine and you can do all sorts of stuff with it. So, uh, it works really, really well. Uh, okay, question here from Bubba. I love it. Great name. Must be from my neck of the woods, the Ozarks. Uh, I've been training for 14 months now. I went from starting strength to Texas. But my bench is regressing and I don't know why. My first question, Bubba, I wonder how old you are. So the problem with Texas method is it's very, it's high volume and high intensity. So it is heavy and it's five sets of five. And that's a lot of sets. And so the thing that I would do is I would back off the volume tremendously, stay heavy on the barbell and then to get the volume. And this is if you're anything over 30, let's say, and certainly if you're in your late 30s or 40s, and even if you've done it for a While and you're 25 and it's just starting to stall, the next thing I would do, that minimum effective dose is you've done the increase intensity. Now how do I increase volume without increasing systemic stress? And so the way I do that is then you take the, the, what you're doing on the bench press, I think you said. Right, bench press. And you do it for like two work sets and then go to dumbbell bench or dumbbell incline bench or something like that to get your volume in higher reps. 10, 15, 20 reps and build some hypertrophy there on after the main lift. It's a great way to get additional volume without additional or much additional systemic fatigue. Right, couple. Take the last couple minutes. Take the last couple questions here. Oh, 18, Bubba, you're 18. Yeah. So, okay, that changes that. The question. Here's the thing I would tell you to do if you're 18. Don't know how much you weigh. Eat 200 grams of protein a day, See what happens. Let's start there. Right. Swap to a three day. From a three day to a four day split, that's fine too. That, that will help make sure you're eating enough calories. At 18, it's awfully hard to eat too many calories. Aim for 1 pound of body weight gain per week, 2 pounds max, more than 2 pounds. You're eating too much and you're getting fat less than a pound. If you're only getting a quarter pound, a half pound, you're not eating enough. Start with the protein. Start with 200 grams. If you're already eating 200 grams, go to 2:50. Don't do that forever. Don't go up to. I was watching the Renaissance periodization video. Ronnie Coleman eating 600 grams of protein a day. That's probably a little overboard. All right, last question from Lisa. How do imbalances work when working with the Barbell, for example, one leg weaker than the other and the other leg compensates. Great question. This is a great. You don't have to worry about it, what will happen because you are. You are doing bilateral movements. Everyone has an arm, a leg that's stronger or weaker than the other, and it will lag for a while and then it won't. So eventually it will catch up because the one that lags gets more stress and therefore a greater adaptation response than the one that doesn't lag and is stronger. And that's okay. It's still getting an adaptive response. It will adapt for you, but not at the rate that the weaker one will. But that's good because the weaker one will catch up over time. And what you'll find is those balances will work themselves out. A similar question I used to get all the time was the very. Was very in Vogue 10, 15 years ago was the functional movement screen. When somebody came in to train for the first time, these coaches would put them through. They make them do what, walking, lunges and like an overhead squat with a broomstick and all this sort of stuff that nobody can do on their first day. I've never done that. I can just have you squat and teach you how to squat, have you squat, deadlift, bench press, press. And I can see where the muscle weaknesses, imbalances, skill, motor pattern issues that kind of like, you don't have the skill acquisition there yet. You can see all that. And over time, as you get those main lifts right, because you're working the entire body, all of those weak muscles will come up and match their stronger one from the other side. So that's a great question. It's something you don't have to worry about now. If you've done this for five or 10 years, you're still having those issues, then it's definitely time to get a coach. You probably don't have a nerve issue. Occasionally, though, people have, you know, some sort of sciatic nerve pain or radial or ulnar pinched nerve in an arm. You know, one arm is weaker because of a nerve issue. That's really rare. Um, but if you've been training for a long time and you still have that issue, that could certainly be something that you have to tackle. So there you go. There are advantages to barbells. Next week we're going to get into equipment that you need for the gym. It is a very short list and we'll talk a little bit about how we get the most bang for our buck out of the least amount of equipment. For literally actual bucks for actual dollars. And and how to set that up in your home gym, as well as how to just not be a nuisance at a commercial gym. So you just use just a handful of exercises so you're not that guy. Take it up. Four different machines at the same time. And so there is another Mondays with Matt. Hope you guys have a great week. Wish me luck. While I'm in Dallas, I got to speak at a business makers conference, business conference coming up this week. Excited to do it. See a lot of friends. I got three clients there that I get to train with and have dinner with. So I'm looking forward to it. Should be a great time. Hope everybody has a great week. Enjoy this weather, enjoy the spring. Get out there and get some training done. We'll see you guys next Monday.