Andy (00:00.098)
First time for everything, you know?

Ryan (00:01.767)
First time, yeah.

Andy (00:04.823)
All right.

Andy (00:10.4)
All right. Hey, we're doing a podcast. What? Crazy.

Ryan (00:16.163)
my

Andy (00:17.686)
I know it's been a long time. I don't know if I'm going to be able to do this right. so we're going to talk.

Ryan (00:26.789)
And hopefully people listen, yes. What are we talking about, brother? What are we talking about today?

Andy (00:33.358)
All right, so one of the weird things that we do, among many weird things that we do at GMB, one of the ones that I think really confuses people a lot is the way we provide a container for people to do their practice. And I'm saying that in really weird way because it's confusing. Most people, when they start,

doing any kind of exercise, they are used to getting a list of like, do three sets of 10 reps, do this for X, you know, X times, you know, do, I wanna get to where I can do 100 pushups. Like the number, the quantity is the goal. And we don't do that. Instead, we say, hey, here's a movement, practice this for five minutes.

Andy (01:29.856)
And for a lot of people, it seems to work okay, but then for like a portion of people that this is new to, they freak out.

Ryan (01:39.119)
they freak out. They sure do. Yeah.

Andy (01:41.61)
I can't do it for five minutes. How, this is impossible. No, let's calm down, let's breathe. And today we're going to explain to you why we are so unreasonable and why we are asking you to do this impossible thing and how you can actually do it. There's shockingly good reasons.

Ryan (02:05.607)
Yeah, it's almost as if we thought about this a little bit. exactly. um, yeah.

Andy (02:11.34)
Yeah. So, Ryan, why don't you just to start out like outline sort of how we organize the programs just really quickly and what it is we're talking about here.

Ryan (02:27.269)
Absolutely. So we actually have a framework that we follow. isn't just telling people to look at a particular movement, do that, that we actually have a protocol that we work through called the five P's that we do. We prepare the body with them, go into practice, a particular movement, moving into play, push, and then ponder. We can go deeper into that in another conversation. But what we're really looking at right now is simply using a framework in order to bring better awareness to what's going on in our body so that we can get better at skills.

Practice. Practice is where we're at. We're not about how many or how much can you do, but how well can you do the thing. The reason for this is let's take a step back outside of the world of exercise. How many of you listening right now count the number of steps you take a day?

That's actually not a good example because I do know that the 10,000 step thing is a big thing. Let's use a different example. How many times your phone counts you for you? Exactly. But that's another great example of just simply counting steps. But reframing that, how well did you take those steps? Maybe not something you think about. But the way that you move throughout life is more important than simply hitting a number. And if you're only

Andy (03:26.488)
mean, your phone counts for you.

Ryan (03:50.087)
going towards that number and thinking that you have to hit that number, well, there's a good chance that a lot of those reps are not actually quality reps. so Andy, like you said earlier, there's a lot of people say, I'm going to do 100 pushups a day. Well, first off, no, you're not. Okay. There's going to be one day where you're not going to do that. But the other thing too is how many of those a hundred reps, how many of those 100 reps are quality reps?

Chances are the majority of people after you get 20, 25, the form starts decreasing. Do you stop and take a break? Maybe, maybe not. But let's say that you do 20 quality repetitions of those pushups. Congratulations, you're practicing 80 crappy pushups. That's what your body is going to get used to doing. So what we're after here is one,

bringing awareness and having a framework to allow us to bring that awareness. But more importantly, focusing on the quality of movement through practicing movements rather than chasing repetitions. That's really what we're after when we're looking at timed sets.

Andy (05:04.269)
Right, and I think that this is really a big thing that where we came from a martial arts background, you and Jarlo and I, I remember even when I was, before I was even 10, I had been practicing at least a couple years, but not that long, and I had gotten to sort of like more advanced, more complex kicks and movements and things, and I just remember like,

Ryan (05:11.909)
Yes. Yes.

Ryan (05:26.631)
Thank you.

Thank

Andy (05:32.302)
I was really proud of my speed and that I was able to do a lot. I was very young, so I had great endurance, right? And so I was like, Sensei, look how many I did like 500 kicks. And it was like, were they good? Yeah. And he's like, because if you're doing 500 bad kicks, you're getting really good at bad kicks. And I remember that and I was like,

Ryan (05:52.475)
That's it, yeah, that's it.

Andy (05:56.662)
And so I was like, I don't know. he watched me and he was like, okay, well, now I want you to do like 10, but I want you to do them this way. You know, and it's really important because there's like, you look at sports and if you like, there was a Superbowl recently, right? You don't win by throwing the ball the most times you went by getting it over the goal line, right?

Ryan (06:07.099)
Right.

Ryan (06:26.503)
That's right.

Andy (06:26.728)
look at like any Olympic sport, like if you look at Olympic swimming, they don't count how many strokes you make. It's who gets to the goal fastest. They don't count steps and sprinting. There's a lot of things where the count is misleading. It's really when we started taking fitness to a mechanistic thing and separating it from sport and separating from activity.

Ryan (06:34.375)
Let's try it.

Ryan (06:38.448)
Exactly.

Andy (06:56.846)
that it became this thing of counting reps. And it's also really interesting when you look at even, I hate even saying it this way, but rep counting fitness, but you can look at people, find examples of people and training methods that have been popular at different times where people have gotten insanely strong doing five sets of five, three sets of 10.

Ryan (07:20.795)
Yeah.

Right. absolutely. Yes. Right.

Andy (07:26.254)
two sets of 25, one set of 50, 10 sets of two, any configuration you can come up with, you will find people that have gotten extremely strong doing it. And what this indicates is that it's not the numbers themselves that get the result, or not only the numbers themselves. And so this is why we have to look at something broader. And for us, a lot of times it is quality or effectiveness.

But the other thing is that reps are not the only measure, right? Even if you're talking about lifting a barbell, the load on the bar matters. The amount of rest period matters. The speed at which you lift and lower the bar matters. So just the rep count is really deceptive. I think that that's another thing in addition to practicing low quality. You have to understand that just doing

you know, five reps, if the load, if the density, if the tempo or whatever is not the same, it's not the same as another five reps that someone else might be doing.

Ryan (08:35.085)
Absolutely. And to go even further with that...

the range of motion that you're using, and you already mentioned this tempo. So you could have two people doing the same exact workout on paper. It's gonna look different because one quality of movement, range of movement, as well as energy levels, and we're not talking about just during that particular session, but up to that session.

where they are in the workout mentally. This is also something to take into consideration. And so if we're just looking at the number of repetitions, then it's not the whole story. so, you know, another thing to think about is I don't want to say that it's always this, but as long as we can understand what I mean by when I say this, it will make sense. that is focusing on quality of movement and intensity.

And the intensity in this case, of course, I'm not saying that it should be, you know, hardcore all the time, really pushing yourself to failure because there's that scale of intensity that we use, auto regulation, of course, and see where we are in that. so quality of movement and the intensity in this is a huge factor. And even in bodybuilding world, let's take Mike Mincer, for example. He was very famous for just doing one hard set.

low numbers in order to create extreme body, you know, changes, then having an enormous amount of time that they would, that he would rest a week in between. But the thing of it is, is that was has to be done at such a high intensity and the purpose was to build muscle period. But when we take it into the frame of what we're doing and looking at improving movement, practicing

Ryan (10:34.043)
Movements to help us to be able to do other stuff in our life better Then does it necessarily mean the majority of time that it needs to be or should it be a very high intensity type Movement when you're doing it it also of course depends on where you're going with that But but it will always come back down to the quality of movement where you're doing it so once again if you're simply chasing those reps and you get to rep number eight and one

you're not able to hold that intensity that you have. That's great. You can change the intensity. But if the quality of form decreases, then you're not doing yourself a service. It's a disservice to yourself in order to just try and continue to do those two crappy reps.

Andy (11:17.858)
definitely. So the first time that we talked about timed sets in training was when we released integral strength. And yeah, and it's interesting because that's not the first program in which we used it. But it was the first program in which it made people wonder what was going on. Because elements

Ryan (11:30.619)
I know strength, right?

Ryan (11:43.107)
Exactly.

Andy (11:45.664)
Elements made use of timed sets and nobody questioned it at all and here's why because elements makes use mostly of locomotion crawling floor based movement patterns and when you say Practice this movement for a minute three minutes five minutes people were like, yeah, I just do the bear walk for three minutes But then when you say do push-ups for three minutes, you're like what we like how many

Ryan (12:02.247)
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.

Ryan (12:09.681)
people lose their mind. Yeah, all of them. Yes. No, absolutely. And people Yeah, go ahead. Good.

Andy (12:15.34)
Yeah, so.

Well, because so was interesting. I remember when we were working on creating I.S. and we had done previous strength training programs before and in those we did use rep ranges and we had varying rep ranges that were based on the kind of standards that most strength training programs are based on. And some of those some of those heuristics and conventions have since been

shown in further research to not be false or anything, but to not necessarily apply all the time. Because I think that's something that's really important when we talk about evidence-based fitness and research-driven training and decision-making on this stuff, is that the evidence is always an indicator and the research is always a moving target. We're not finding a new truth that negates prior truths.

Ryan (12:58.053)
Got it.

Andy (13:18.894)
Putting that aside, we had done our earlier programs based on ideas of what was currently thought to be the right way to train and with sets and reps for different, for strength gain. Though we were also trying to include skill development at the same time and we had to make some interesting innovations for the time on the way we did that. But when we came to IS, we...

wanted to get away from that idea because this is a long explanation to say a lot of people had trouble hitting those rep ranges because the movements were too damn hard.

Ryan (13:56.389)
Yeah. Exactly. And that's it. That's very much it.

Andy (14:03.374)
And why were they hard? Because they were high skill.

Ryan (14:06.565)
And that's it. And that was what we're after. And so the other thing thinking and, man, there's so many different ways we can go with this, but just maybe quickly.

Ryan (14:19.567)
Also taking into consideration the load placed on the central nervous system in the things that we were performing and I'm specifically referring to rings, right, gymnastic rings. And using rep ranges that were possibly good for the iron doesn't necessarily carry over when it is looking at something with the rings. And so

That was also something that we found that a lot of people would just have trouble hitting those rep ranges. I myself over time, honestly, because I was training actually too much at the time with everything that was going on, I didn't have enough recovery. And so if I, the person who was doing this and creating the thing had trouble getting that recovery in, then you better believe that other people were probably having difficulty with that as well. But again, coming back to the fact that

we had a specific number and we I don't want to say shouldn't have because I think that program was still great. Rings one rings one fabulous. I still think it's great and the other programs we had with that. think it was just a matter of explaining the way we did based on the intensity level. And by the way, we didn't have a specific number. We would give a rep range, but

Andy (15:42.37)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (15:42.721)
Let's be honest, the majority of people out there are going to try and aim for the higher number. And this is another issue that we found is that we can try and lie to ourselves thinking that we're either stronger or better at a movement than we really are instead of focusing on exactly where we are in the movement right now. And the problem with counting reps is that we can lose track of that, not of the number.

but of where we are. And this is what leads into the discussion of, OK, what can we do with these timed sets that we have now?

Andy (16:23.726)
Yeah. Well, and that's the thing is even when we had rings one, P one, and these programs that were based around the rep ranges, even then we did include the idea that people should be also tracking the quality of those reps, right? But what happened is people would come to us and say, well, I've been doing, you know, the maximum four sets of 12 reps every time.

Ryan (16:40.892)
Exactly. Yeah.

Andy (16:53.418)
and then, and I'm not getting any stronger, and we would look at it and they'd be doing like 10 % reps with no range of motion, or their form was absolutely horrible, or they're rushing through things, and of course they're not going to be gaining strength, because they're trying to focus on hitting that top of the rep range, right? But the quality was so low, despite us telling them,

Ryan (16:57.926)
Yeah.

Ryan (17:03.141)
Yeah.

Ryan (17:22.47)
Mm-hmm.

Andy (17:22.51)
And this is a thing like when we make videos sometimes, like, oh yeah, like we don't really like Amrap training or some of these things based on numbers of people. Well, but you see, the thing is, it's with perfect reps. Look, we've trained thousands and thousands of people and I apologize to anyone listening to this that believes that their reps are always perfect. But what we see when we do this is that people will always, always, when they are tired, when they are

aiming to achieve a numerical goal, they will always, every single time, lie to themselves about the quality of the reps. You, person listening to this, I hate to be the one to inform you, lie to yourself about the quality of your reps when you are focused on a rep goal. I do it too.

Ryan (17:58.009)
Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Ryan (18:06.225)
but you're no.

Yeah. And that's right. Yes, we all do. That's the thing, because we want to hit that number. We got to hit that number, man. Yeah. Now, and that's what it is. That's exactly what it is. Yeah.

Andy (18:13.888)
We do.

Yeah. And so.

And so when we released IS, we made the decision that we were going to throw out the rep ranges because we had seen them cause this negative fixation and instead give people a duration during which they could do as much work as they were able to do well. And rest when needed, then continue to do a little more work. Rest, do a little more work.

Ryan (18:45.863)
Yeah.

Andy (18:49.312)
and fill that time up with quality work to the degree possible. And the goal then being instead of increasing the reps themselves, but to increase the density of quality practice, right? To do a little more work and a little less rest over time.

Ryan (19:03.675)
Exactly.

Ryan (19:08.647)
Absolutely. And so this actually comes back to something you hinted at the very beginning of our conversation is when we first introduced this to people and they were freaking because we were saying, in these five, in this five minutes or however long it was, well, I can't do that. How the hell am I supposed to do it? Well, we're not saying you do it, you know, and not stop, not give yourself.

Andy (19:30.86)
Right, and I'll be the first to say I cannot do continuous shrimp squats for five minutes. I would probably die.

Ryan (19:36.005)
Yeah, I don't. Yeah, mean. Yeah, but but this is a good opportunity to talk about how to scale things because it's not saying that you should. And so this is the other thing that that I absolutely loved about time sets is that during that set, you can make adjustments and

to give an example, because you mentioned the shrimp squat. Let's say that you start off in a shrimp squat. You're holding your foot. And for those of you who don't know what shrimp squat is, basically just think of standing on one leg and bring the other leg up and back and grab your foot and then squat down to the floor while you're holding your foot and then stand back up. That's a shrimp squat. So imagine that you can do that. You can do that for a couple of reps. But if we were to tell you to do that, even just for a minute. Probably couldn't.

But you can continue in the way to do that is you actually shift down to the previous variation of that particular movement. And I don't want to say progression. And the reason why is because what might be one progression for one person, another person might actually find that easy. So let's look at it as a variation. And so we can actually.

work through that where we're starting at the highest level that we possibly can. And by the end of that one minute, we could even just end up at a basic lunge. But the beauty of this is that you're still getting strong as you're doing it, as long as you're focusing on quality movement. And this is what a lot of people don't understand. One, that you can modify that movement. And by modification, don't mean completely changing it, but using a variation of that movement and working down through those ranges.

but doing that with the best range of movement that you have for that particular movement. the first set, another example of that, let's say that you can do shrimp squats for one minute is you're going to do three sets of those. But the first set is the shrimp squat. The second one is where you're doing a step back lunge and the final one is just a basic lunge. So this is what allows you to continue to be able to perform this at a very high level.

Ryan (22:00.815)
And I'm not talking difficulty level, but a high level of quality movement that's good for you. And you make these adjustments according to what you need. And again, like I said earlier, it allows you to continue to get not only stronger, but better at the movement and doing it in a way to me, especially that's extremely important. That's not going to set you up for stupid injuries that could have been avoided down the line.

because you have this ego in thinking that you need to hit a particular number of a single.

Andy (22:33.836)
Right. So, and technically this is what we're talking about here is a mechanical drop set. yeah, if you come from a lifting background or if you just don't know what the hell we're talking about, like let's say that you start with, and I'm not even gonna use plate ranges because it doesn't matter, but let's just say you start with 100 pounds or kilograms or whatever unit of measure you like.

Ryan (22:41.359)
Okay, no more drops. Exactly.

Andy (23:04.398)
100 somethings on the bar, right? 100 loops of hardcore chain on the bar, whatever, right? You start with 100 and you do six reps and then you're starting the fifth rep and you can't really complete it satisfactorily. So you don't just stop. What happens is you have a trainer or a partner or something and they take one plate off each side of the bar. So instead of 100, let's say you've got 80 now.

And wait, now you can actually do like three more reps. But then you're stuck again, they take one more plate off each other bar. So now you're down to 60, right? And you can do like two more reps. And you could theoretically keep doing this until you're like completely smoked yourself. But usually you don't really wanna do too much more than that. But the idea is you reduce the load and continue doing reps in the same set, and that's called a drop set, because you're dropping weight.

off the bar and continuing the set. So you're stimulating the muscle and the movement more without sacrificing range of motion, without sacrificing technique really, and you're giving yourself more stimulus to grow, to build strength without stopping. So this is something that, one of the things that people that love lifting always like, well you can't do that with bodyweight, actually. Well, if you have any imagination whatsoever, stock.

Ryan (24:24.679)
Yes you can!

Andy (24:28.726)
You can, because body weight exercises are actually much, much easier to vary in a lot of ways by changing the leverage or the whatever, right? So shrimp squats are an example that I think if you haven't practiced those, those are maybe hard to get. But let's just say something even very basic would just, like let's say pushups, because everyone knows how to do pushups, right? So you could start out

Ryan (24:53.287)
That's what I was going to say. Yeah.

Andy (24:57.518)
Maybe an example of mechanical drop sets with push-ups.

Ryan (25:01.713)
Yeah, absolutely. And I'm going to go like way up there. Just imagine you're doing a one arm push up. OK, like let's say that you're there. OK. And so you do one. One of them, you're like, this ain't happening. Put your hand on the floor. Now you do a standard push up. But but. What you're doing when you're doing this is slowing the tempo down, pausing at the bottom.

maybe exploding back up, pausing and using that. So then as you continue with that, you can't keep the speed as you're going slowly down, but you can continue to do that push up with good form. So you're doing that. Okay. That starts to tire you out. All right. You put your knees on the ground, but Ryan, those are, you know, whatever kind of push ups and blah, blah, No, no, no. They're still great. Okay. And you can still continue to work on them. Then

Likewise on your knees doing very slowly keeping the elbows in and Working from there. So there's any number and this is in that in that set So as we're Andy you were talking about earlier I remember back in high school when we used to do what we're called nickels and we put as many five pound plates on the bar as we couldn't take them down and that's like this is kind of what we're doing here we're working at that high range working all the way down to a point where We realize okay

We don't have anything left here. Our form is shot. We're done. But, but here's the thing. We're not asking you to do this for five minutes straight in integral strength. The highest or I should say the longest amount of time you will be performing one of these is one minute. You might be thinking that doesn't sound like a whole lot. Well, do exactly what I just said and you'll figure it out that, my goodness, time under tension.

as I'm performing this really adds up to some serious, my legs are on fire, my arms are on fire sort of burn. And I'm not saying you want the burn, but what I mean is that it is going to work you, is going to make you stronger. And the cool thing about it is you can adjust that and do it in a way that's going to allow you to continue to work on the form and not injure yourself by just possibly thinking you need to keep doing the same movement.

Ryan (27:27.537)
for certain amount of repetitions. This is exactly how I train, by the way, continue to train. I don't even set a clock. I don't even do that anymore. All I'm looking at is performing the movement with the highest quality I can and performing that movement until my form breaks down. And I have a really good understanding of my body and particular movements that I'm using. And so I know if I'm doing

let's say a loaded dip where I have a weight vest on with 20 pounds. know typically it's going to take me about this long to get there. I'm not even counting reps. I don't care. I just know that, okay, it's going to take me approximately this amount and I'm fine with that. And so I just don't even need to worry about it. All I can concern with is how many quality reps can I do today? And I do want to say something about that is that

The sheer fact that I'm not counting reps allows me to always have a good session because I'm not concerned about how many reps I did. I was only concerned about how well I did the particular reps that I did do. And to me, that allows me to be able to show up day after day and continue to do the thing that I, the strength training that I want to do and I need to do in a manner that's going to help me for the other things I need to do. So.

any number of ways that you can work out that way. But in the beginning, I do suggest if this is something new to you is to set a timer so you're not just up there or down there on the ground forever doing that.

Andy (29:06.37)
Yeah, and that's why we built that into the programs. So Ryan, you mentioned time under tension earlier and just for anyone listening to that and thinking, well, know, a minute doesn't sound like a lot of time. Well, so when we first made Integral Strength at that time, the convention for the range between

Ryan (29:09.383)
Mm-hmm.

Andy (29:35.566)
strength and muscle growth was really for time under tension was about 45 seconds to maybe max a minute per set. And more than a minute under tension per set was kind of considered counterproductive for strength development at the time. And again, some of that might've changed in terms of like what we consider the convention now, but.

Time under tension really 45 seconds of tension before before significant rest is actually very very good but that's for just muscle stimulation and As we talked about earlier, that's not the only thing we're going for especially when we talk about skill nervous system load You know balance agility all these things that we're trying to develop. So This is why we've coined our own phrase

Ryan (30:24.743)
Excuse me.

Andy (30:28.632)
that is the other side of the coin to time under tension that applies to practice. And this is time under attention. And every time we talk about this, some smart ass is like, it's time under tension. We know, we completely, we're aware of this.

Ryan (30:43.279)
We know. We're, we're, we're. But Ryan, you're playing, you're doing your planks and pushups wrong. Sorry, I had to throw that in there. Yeah, we, yeah, time under, I think.

Andy (30:51.022)
So here's the thing as native speakers we we know the meanings of these words and we Decided that time under attention is another thing that we wanted to focus on especially for practice And these are the things that we talked about with quality earlier today So we don't really need to get too much into it But time under attention is also our goal with using time sets for these things I do however, so we talked about shrimp squats push-ups

but also in elements we're doing this too. And could you give a good example of, and we talk about bear a lot, but let's say pick a different, like a monkey variation or something of how we similar mechanical drop set idea during a time set with locomotions.

Ryan (31:29.889)
Yeah, I was gonna, yeah.

Ryan (31:36.325)
Absolutely, I'm gonna use a Frogger. And so if this is new, if you're listening to this, I want you to imagine having your hands, your knees and your feet on the floor. And so you're in this tabletop position, if you will, face down. So your hands are on the floor, knees, feet. And from there, you're gonna float your knees and then you're going to jump your feet forward so that you're in a squat.

can start in a squat if you would like. So basically what you're doing is starting in a squat position, putting your hands on the floor, jumping the feet forward into another squat. Now, imagine doing that straight for a minute. Okay. You're going to get pretty good workout. Okay. So the big joke, whenever we're teaching seminars towards the end of the seminar, I ask everyone, okay, how many squats have you done over this, over the course of this weekend?

People start thinking of numbers. We don't even think about, we just think about you've done all of them. Okay. And the thing that we're getting at is it really doesn't matter. What matters is how your body is learning to one, adapt to that movement. know, specific adaption, the imposed demand. Your body is learning what's going on in that movement so you can become more efficient at performing that movement.

In other words, you're getting stronger, you're improving your range of motion and the body's getting smarter. But the thing is, when you're performing the Frogger and you continue to this for a minute, it's pretty exhausting. It's really exhausting. So a simple way that a lot of people for some reason think they need a completely different movement to do this, but simple way to adjust this, simply bringing your hips higher into the air so that you're not

in a deeper so you're not in as such a deep squat position. This is how we can start to adjust things. And the other cool thing about this is that it can be, let's say, every other frogger. So maybe your legs are starting to burn. You bring your hips higher. You realize that your legs aren't burning as much. So you can go back down again and perform that deep squat. The beauty of it also is that.

Ryan (33:54.265)
You're not doing it in a way where you're under load, where you can't necessarily bail out of it, if you will. And so, of course, there are other things in there looking at arm strength and whatnot. But if we were just to focus on the legs here, I think this is a great example of how this time under a tension really is great because you won't be thinking about anything else when you're doing the Frogger because it is pretty intense.

You're just going to be like, my goodness, I really feel this in whatever place in your body you feel it. And then you're going to have to make adjustments. Your body's going to have to learn how to adapt to that. And then over time, you are going to get super strong in that movement as well as improve your range of motion. So that's just one example in elements, elements, pardon me, where this time under attention and using time sets is fabulous because there's so many things that is going to be teaching our body.

Also mentally as well, I will say this is because you are in that movement, like I just said, and it's teaching yourself to become more aware of what's going on, but also to be honest, helping you to deal with stuff that's hard, which is good.

Andy (35:09.09)
Yep. And I mean, it sounds like a small thing, but I mean, look, we live in this world of, you know, Instagram and TikToks and they say that the human attention span is now less than that of a goldfish, you know? And there's a lot of value in learning to continually focus on just keeping going with your best attempt at a thing.

Ryan (35:25.126)
Yes.

Andy (35:38.51)
for a full 30 seconds, 60 seconds, three minutes when you really work up to it. But let's say that three minutes is hard, that's okay. You set the timer for three minutes, you do as long as you can, take a second, sort of reset, catch your breath, you know, get your focus back, and then you set up into the movement, get ready, and you go again. And you see how long you can sustain it this time. And you just keep doing that.

Ryan (35:40.593)
Yes. Yep. Yep.

Andy (36:06.156)
without counting, without worrying about it, until the timer tells you that your three minutes is done. It's not pressure, it's not a thing that you have to hit a certain amount of goal or anything. You just keep trying. You just keep doing what you can until time says, okay, next. And so you can gradually rebuild your ability to focus on things, to focus on yourself, on your own physical state in a way that doesn't

Ryan (36:21.788)
Yep.

Andy (36:34.67)
come with a lot of pressure and doesn't require even a lot of work aside from just keeping the focus on yourself. So that's another thing that's really useful. So one more thing that I want to cover because we've talked about a lot of things that are really useful that you can do that are benefits using these time sets, but especially people that are still like really hung up on numbers or come from a traditional strength training background,

Well, how do I know I'm making progress? Because in like barbell lifting, for example, you can talk about progressive overload. If you're used to running or endurance sports, you can talk about how far you're able to go in what time or whatever. There's a lot of, if you have a metric, it's so much easier to say, well, I got 20 % improvement. So how can we tell that we're making progress when we don't have these numerical targets? What are some of the things that you can look for?

Ryan (37:23.783)
Right.

Ryan (37:33.093)
Yeah, absolutely. This is something that is difficult for people to wrap their brain around. But honestly, what we're after is simply do you feel better in that position? And again, this is difficult because we don't have the.

the plates to say we're adding more plates on or we're doing more reps. But if our goal simply in exercise is to be better at what we're doing, then if you are better in that movement, then that means you are better. And I think a lot of people can miss out on that because it can be that simple. And I think a lot of us actually get, this is my personal opinion, get too hung up.

on the numbers and thinking that it has to be this numerical thing when really looking at how well you're moving, how you feel when you're doing that particular movement can be a good enough scale to help you to continue moving forward. That's literally all I think about now when I'm doing something, whether it be my martial arts, whether it be in GMB when I'm doing movements, it's okay.

When I'm doing this movement, am I getting better at moving my body? Does it feel more comfortable? Do I feel more confident in this movement?

Andy (39:05.676)
Right, and I think that this is something that's really key to what we do and the way we do it. And a lot of the people that are attracted to our training and stick with it for many years is that the idea is that the goal isn't just to optimize our metrics on our Apple Watch or close our rings.

The goal is to get better at something. And this is true for, we have professional athletes that use our programs. We have Olympic athletes that use our programs. And the thing that they're trying to do is not check off on a list. They're trying to win. They're trying to get better. And they're not doing this so that they can get the handstand merit badge or win the Frogger competition or whatever, right?

Ryan (39:35.643)
Yes, Olympic athletes.

Andy (39:58.936)
they're doing this so that they can perform in their sport. And even for the majority of our clients who are not professional or Olympic athletes, they're doing this so that they can be better at their martial art, better at their triathlon, better at what, windsurfing, golf, dance, standup paddleboards, hiking, all of the things that our clients do, gardening, right? All of this stuff, they're doing this so they can be

Ryan (40:15.952)
Steam the pedalboard, whatever, yeah.

Ryan (40:20.954)
I need you.

Yes.

Andy (40:27.202)
better that and move better in those things. And what happens is they all notice that they do, right? So what is the metric is, are you able to do the thing that you're doing this for better, right? And that's the hard thing. And we've done a podcast on this before and it's called something like, Don't Let Your Training Make You Worse at Your Sport.

Ryan (40:43.935)
Yes.

Andy (40:54.766)
So if this is something that resonates, like you should go find out and listen to that because this is what happens when you let the fixation on training well overshadow the reason you started training in the first place. And this happens to a lot of people, which is how we get the sport of fitness, for example, which again, not a dig on CrossFit, which I think is done a lot of good in the industry, but when you start making reps the goal, I do have an issue with that.

Ryan (41:13.222)
Right.

Andy (41:23.924)
and I will absolutely die on that hill and go to battle with anyone who believes that numbers are the real goal for a fitness perspective. If you just wanna win at that sport, cool, completely great, Neato. But that's not what we're doing this for. So Ryan, is there anything else you want to say about time sets, how we use them, why this is important?

Ryan (41:52.666)
Yeah, I would just

Andy (41:52.832)
Or like, hey, say something that people will misconstrue as shitting on CrossFit. I mean, we love doing that, so like, feel free.

Ryan (41:58.023)
you

I will say, I'll steer away from that for now, but I will say, if this is something that you're not quite familiar with, and I assume it kind of is if you're listening to our podcast, but even if you are very familiar with time sets, I would really encourage you to focus more on the quality of movement than one

Andy (42:05.964)
You

Ryan (42:30.736)
trying to do a more challenging version of that movement or seeing how many times you can do it within that time set. This is also

You could do this. It's great. But I don't think I've ever really counted how many times I do a particular movement when I'm doing time sets. It's. Yes, I do. know, I know people do so they can say, hey, I was able to perform this mini during this time set. But to me, that still is the exact same as just counting reps anyway. So what I am trying to say is this is that try and let go of that and just try this.

and at least try it for two weeks. You have got to do it at least two weeks to see if this is something that's really going to resonate with you. It's going to be very difficult if you come from a background of counting repetitions. But set that timer and I would just start off with a single minute. Don't expect like we talked about before to be able to do whatever movement that you've been able to do for X amount of reps up until now during that one minute.

And what I mean is you might not get as many of those reps as you thought you would be able to do. Let's say you usually get 12, maybe you get six in that one minute. I don't know. But the thing of it is, for me that shows that you could actually do a more challenging variation of that movement. And therefore you're to be getting stronger as long as the quality of movement is in there. So challenge yourself to look at something and go deep into these time sets to try it out. Focusing on a movement pattern.

that one, you're already comfortable with. You don't want to do something that you're just learning, that you've just tried out. But go ahead and do something that you still feel comfortable with. Do time set. Really bring the focus to what you're doing when you're doing that movement. I think you will notice within a couple of sessions how your movement quality will improve without a doubt.

Andy (44:37.882)
sure. All right, we covered a lot of ground, I believe, and insulted some people. Cool. Like, that's great. I mean,

Ryan (44:46.714)
Yeah, what we're here for.

Well, wait, are we?

Andy (44:53.486)
I don't know. But this is this is one of these things is it's a really core way, core component to how we do things. And it's something that confuses people. But I think that we've got pretty solid reasons for it. So I'm glad that we, you know, finally kind of explaining this in detail here. So that is all we've got today. And who knows, maybe in the next six months, we might record another podcast and we'll see what happens.

Ryan (45:19.928)
We might do another one maybe. If come this far, thanks for listening.