315. Can Pilates Make You Stronger? with Heath Lander and Raphael Bender

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Music.

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Welcome to Pilates Elephants. I'm Raphael Bender. I'm here with my friend Heath

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Lander. Hey, Heath. Hey, Raf.

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Can Pilates make you stronger? Yes or no?

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Absolutely, it can. Okay, good talk. See you later. See you later.

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So that's a little bit of a topical question going around. We want to unpack

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that today, dear listener.

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And, uh, turns out the answer is only if you do it right.

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So, um.

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Where do we start with this one? I think, well, when, when we, I think, I think,

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firstly, I think when we were both growing up in as polite baby Pilates instructors,

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we were taught that every exercise has a particular spring setting, you know,

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two, two red springs for short spine three to four for footwork you know two

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for hundreds whatever it was,

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yeah and you know some of

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those had a little bit of variation like if you know if you couldn't do like

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kneeling arms on one spring you could do it on half a spring you know but like

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heaven forbid you do it on three springs i mean that was just inconceivable

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you know um uh and so there was this basic concept that,

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you have a spring setting that is right for a person.

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So most people do kneeling arms on one spring, but some people will need to

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do on a half spring and that's totally fine if that's the right number for them.

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But there was no concept that you start on a half spring and then you get to one spring.

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It was like, well, what happens after you get to one spring?

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Do you just stay there forever? And the answer was, yeah, basically that's what you do.

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Stay on one spring forever. Yeah.

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And when I've thought long and hard on that,

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I think I've got, there's two things I think about with that and the things

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that, and talk about in workshops is, uh, one, maybe the rationale is that you're developing a practice.

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So like more like, like a, a sequence, like a yoga asana sequence, vinyasa or whatever.

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Well, like a Tai Chi form or a Kung Fu, you know, form or a Karate Kana, you know?

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Yeah, so once you've established the movement sequence, then you just forever

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more drill more deeply into the nuance of how you're doing the movement rather

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than where you're adding load. Yeah.

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So you're going deeper into the practice, into the work, capital W. Capital W. Yeah.

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And, I mean, you and I both started in martial arts. Yeah.

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Or maybe you started in yoga. Did you do yoga first in martial arts?

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We both started martial arts.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we both started martial arts. And martial arts,

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we both started in Chinese martial arts where you did a lot of forms.

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And a form is basically just, dear listener, it's like just a sequence of,

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you know, kung fu moves that you do, you know, and it's the same sequence that

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you do over and over, very lots and lots, thousands and thousands and thousands

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of repetitions of, you know, this flowing sequence.

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And the idea is to make it more and more flowing, more and more precise as you

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do it over the years and the decades until you become a master of it.

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And so that's kind of the way that I think, you know, Pilates is often taught,

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certainly not by everyone.

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And there is a real beauty and value in that type of practice,

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which is it becomes a moving meditation.

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And you, you know, get into a flow state and you do start to really tune into

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your body and tune into just the rhythm of the movement.

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And, you know, so there is a real beauty and value in that, but it doesn't make you stronger.

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Doesn't make you stronger. I think just quickly as a sidebar,

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I think one of the things that this, you know, the debates that we have in Pilates land,

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sometimes a little bit reductionist, like it's almost become sort of factionalized,

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like, you know, the reform is a wildly variable tool.

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So you can do a flowing self-practice, which is about exactly what you just described.

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And you can do movements under varying loads to make yourself stronger or you

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can also do things to work on your flexibility.

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But don't I have to just choose one camp?

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Well, that seems to be the kind of implied thing that we all have to be of a camp.

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But I personally think, yeah, I think it's a, the tool itself is such a kind

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of weird and nuanced thing that to say it's just one thing is odd.

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Well, I think what's so cool about it is it's not just one thing. I mean- Yeah, exactly.

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It's so versatile. That's its superpower, right? It's not the best tool for improving strength.

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It's not the best tool for improving flexibility. It's not, but it's a really

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good tool for both of those things and many other things besides.

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Right. And it also has the, I mean, you just mentioned two of the three big,

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well, the three dimensions of movement and the other is neuromotor control,

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you've got an unstable surface with a horizontal force vector.

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That's pretty cool for stability, whatever we call stability training.

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It's pretty freaking cool.

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Yeah. All right. So, dear listener, everything in life is a trade-off.

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There's no perfect solution.

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And every form of exercise, you know, whether it's using bands or body weight

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or barbells or machine weights or a Pilates reformer or a Cadillac or a stability

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chair or whatever, they all have their trade-offs.

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They're better at some things at the expense of being worse at other things.

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You know, so with, say, for example, bands, well, they're amazing.

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They're so flexible. Like you can fly and carry them in your hotel room and whatever.

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But it's like you can't just can't create enough resistance with them to develop

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serious strength you know and if you did there's a real chance of them snapping

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and hitting you in the eye,

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um and so you know they're good for some things and not

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good you know not as good for other things and and that come one comes at the

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expense of the other and then you've got something at the opposite end of the

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spectrum like you've got a massive like weight stack in the gym that weighs

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a ton and you couldn't possibly take in a semi-trailer let alone on an airplane

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and it's fucking amazing for developing strength,

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but like there's no requirement for really for control and it doesn't improve your flexibility much.

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So, and then, you know, so each of these pieces of equipment has kind of some kind of superpower,

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and the superpower of the Pilates reformer is it's good, very good,

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I would say at everything, but it's not the best at anything. Yeah. Well said.

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I mean, you can't really take it on a plane. Let's, let's face it.

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It kind of sucks in that regard.

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So one thing i actually there's there's so

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much around this topic i want to i'd love

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to talk about and in some cases pick your brain

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about i was running a workshop on the weekend and it was a group of really smart

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switched on curious instructors and we were talking about layers and clusters

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and as part of that we talk about you know that you can train for specific things

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So you can do strength training,

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you can do range of motion training, you can do stability skill training.

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I'm just going to quickly sidebar here and say layers is when you start easy

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and then you do a slightly harder version, slightly harder version of the same move.

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And clusters is a sequence of moves all in the same body position without changing

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the equipment settings that you can basically, you know, alternate muscle groups

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in this without kind of jumping around all over the reformer.

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Yeah. And-

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Yes, so we're talking about that and that if you're training for strength,

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there are particular conditions you want to create.

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And if you're training for skill, there are particular conditions you want to

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create. And same for ROM.

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And the idea in that particular conversation was that we're going to work on

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layers that are oriented towards load, towards strength.

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And as we had that conversation, we said, okay, how do we measure strength?

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So we measure strength through repetitions maximum.

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So that means how many reps you can do. And then we talk about how when you,

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if you actually want to get stronger, the reps need to, you need to be able

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to do less than X, let's say 20.

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Right. So sorry, I just want to, again, hold that thought. I want to just quickly

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unpack that for a second.

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So when we say like you measure strength by how many reps you can do.

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So what we don't mean is if you can do a hundred reps, you're stronger than if you can do 20 reps.

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That's not what we mean. What we mean is you make a load so heavy that you can only do six reps, right?

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And so that's how we measure strength. If you can do seven reps with that same

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load, then you got stronger, right?

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Or if you can lift a heavier load for six reps, then you got stronger.

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Yeah. And that the measurement convention is repetitions maximum.

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So if you can do six, but physically not seven, like you actually can't do it,

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then it's six RM at that weight is your current strength. Right.

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And the weight that you use if you want to build

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strength has to be heavy enough that you physically cannot

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do and then of course this is a continuum not a a binary

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so it's somewhere around the 20 rep max

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is where you know you're getting stronger which means you physically

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can't do 21 or you physically can't do 18 and then

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the other you know beauty about that that that

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evidence is that you don't have to

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do it to complete failure so but you

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do need to do it to a point where your form dissipates

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so you lose range of motion you look a

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bit sketchy you're you know you're not making it smooth and beautiful you're

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struggling to do those last few and so that that's the conversation where i

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was having and did you want to double click on something yeah i just took again

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to briefly unpack because there's a there's a concept we've covered in detail

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in previous episodes but just in case,

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dear listener, you haven't yet listened to all 313 of the previous episodes, shame on you.

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Strength and there's a continuum. Like it's not like a certain number of reps

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will build strength and if you go one rep over that, it won't build strength.

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If you want to maximize strength, you need to lift really heavy and that means

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you can only do a very few number of reps.

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Like if you're lifting like three reps and then you can't do a fourth,

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that's going of very close to maximize your strength.

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Whereas if you can lift 50 reps, right, you're,

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probably going to, over a long enough time horizon, increase your strength by

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1%, but it's going to be far, far slower, and you're going to get much more.

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Let me just zoom out again. At the maximizing strength end of the spectrum,

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you've got basically one rep max, so just lifting the amount you can only lift once.

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That's how elite strength athletes like Olympic weightlifters train.

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They do one rep when they train.

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And then at the other end, if we go zoom all the way down to the other end,

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we've got like ultra marathons where you do like 50,000 steps, you know, in a row.

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That's one set of 50,000 reps, right?

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And you will get literally zero, possibly negative muscle growth,

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you know, from doing that, right?

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Now that is cardio, right? So strength and cardio are not different things.

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They're just on a continuum.

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They're on a continuum. And there's a crossover point somewhere in the middle

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where it's like a bit of both.

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And the crossover point turns out

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it's somewhere more than 20 reps and somewhere less than about 35 reps.

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So if you're doing more than 35 reps, it's basically just cardio.

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And if you're doing less than 20 reps, probably it's mostly strengthening.

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And if you're doing somewhere in between 20 and 35, it's probably a bit of both.

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Nice. Well said. So that idea, and in the conversation we were having is when you're.

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Programming or calling to a group class, if you're calling loads,

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and this brings us to the topic of the fixed spring setting or not,

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if you're calling loads,

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right, where people can do,

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let's say more than 20 or even more than 30 as

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is so often the case and what we mean by that dear

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listener is if you've caught a spring tension for a group and

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they're still going at 25 reps and they look okay then they

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can probably do 50 right so that's the sort of listener it's not how

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many reps you do do it's how many you could do

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that determines whether you're going to get a stimulus or not based

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on the load yeah and when

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you so when you choose loads that are at that level that

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allow people lots of reps well that would be where you

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practice the nuances of a particular movement

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or you add load add stability challenges because people have got capacity to

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absorb challenge but if you want to build strength then the movement that you

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do needs to be loaded such that let's say hopefully everyone in the room can't

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do 20 if raf's in the room he's going to do 20,

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but then if I'm in the room, I'm going to do 12 because I'm not as strong as Ralph.

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And if my mum's in the room, she's going to do two because she's not as strong as me.

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Or if we're doing, I don't know, teaser snaps, you might do 20 and I might do four.

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You know, that'd be my maximum. Yeah, yeah.

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And what I was sort of, the conversation I had with this crew that I'm trying

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to get around to recapturing was...

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Firstly loading things so that we've got it heavy

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enough that you can't do the 20 and then

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it's obviously complicated by the fact that you're teaching a group and

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everyone's got different abilities and then someone sort

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of put to put forward the point that you know

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proper strength training is really only six rm

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or heavy i can't remember if that was a six rm and i what we

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then talked about was and you've already

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said it nestled in that sidebar is if

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we're going to be serious like properly serious about

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strength training the conditions that we need and this

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is sort of a question and to you and also just a

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sharing is where does the optimal strength training happen it happens on a stable

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surface with a predictable load like a barbell that you know is what it's going

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to do and you're very familiar with the movement so you're efficient and you

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can build efficiency and so that the conversation i have with them is like they're the they're the,

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preconditions for optimal strength training plus the load.

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So stability, predictability, and familiarity with the movement.

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I would say, yeah, so some degree of stability.

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Like, again, these things are not binary. They're a continuum.

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Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then, you know, this is the interesting thing about

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all of this, and there's so many threads in my head about this topic at the

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moment. So when we look at this on the reformer, it's a very unstable surface in a lot of movements.

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So like I say, a diagonal strap pull or wood chopper, as it's often called, right?

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So I'm going up on a high knee with… Right. Well, you've got multiple layers

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or dimensions of instability because the carriage is moving in one direction

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and that's unstable when you're on it.

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And so then you're changing position yourself. and so there's inertia from your

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body, plus the strap is unstable in all, you know, in all planes.

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So yeah, there's multiple layers of instability there. Whereas if you're on

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a, if you're doing a like bench press on a, you know, on a stable bench,

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the barbell's pretty unstable.

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Like the very heavy object that can go and move in any direction really wants

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to move down, but you know, it could go anyway.

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But you're on a stable surface, so the barbell's the only unstable thing.

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Whereas on a reformer, like your legs and your arms, potentially in a woodchopper

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or kneeling arms or whatever, are both attached to unstable surfaces.

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Yeah. And you're being essentially pulled in opposite directions.

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The springs are pulling your knees one way and the straps pulling your arms another way. Right.

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So you've got this highly unstable movement. And so then thinking of that as

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a strength training context is kind of flawed because the major problem you're solving is balance.

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So then it's the, but then the paradox of that is the more familiar you become

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with the movement, the more efficient you are at stabilizing,

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the more load you can tolerate.

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So if you wanted, so that movement like a wood chopper, so you're kneeling sideways

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on the carriage, you've got a strap in two hands and you're,

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you know, twisting towards the foot bar, you know.

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And so, you know, if you wanted to bias that towards more strength development,

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which would come at the expense of less motor control, right, development,

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you would sit on your heels so that you reduce the instability.

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And now that wouldn't eliminate the instability, but it reduces it significantly.

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And then you would add another full spring or more because, because of that

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increased instability, you can now move more load or you would just grasp the

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strap a bit closer down the rope towards the pulleys, which would achieve the same thing.

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Great. Exactly. So yeah.

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So then the question then is, because what have we said? Does Pilates make you

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stronger? We're talking about reformer.

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So then it's like, is the reformer good for strength? They say,

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well, then what? Fuck yeah. Right.

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And if we say we want to make people stronger with the reformer,

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then one argument here would be focus on movements that are as stable as possible, blah, blah, blah.

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So push-ups off the foot bar is about as stable as a horizontal push as you

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can create on the reformer versus kneeling punches where you've got the same

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problem as the diagonal strap pull.

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So if you're going to, at the point in your program when you want to make people

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stronger, you pick a movement that you can make stable for most people,

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you know, as stable as possible, roughly predictable, and they can be familiar

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with it. So for me, that's like a push-up off the foot bar.

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Right. And then when you go to the diagonal strap pulls, it's like,

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okay, as you said, this is a combination of everything. I'm going to start low

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and get used to the load, and then I'm going to play around with the knees and

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the hips and the arms, which is where reform is fun, right?

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Like they're funky moves that you can't do anywhere else.

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Right. And dear listener, like, you know, we're injecting some nuance into this

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here, and we're not saying that you must go hard on highly stable,

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highly loaded movements 100% of the time in all your reformer classes.

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That's not what we're saying. What we're saying is you can do it all.

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You can build strength by doing simple, stable, high load movements,

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and that only is going to take you 15 minutes out of your class to get everyone super strong.

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Then you can also spend 15 minutes doing like cool funky shit like twisty things

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with the low springs and balletic and all that shit and then you can spend 15

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minutes doing stretchy stuff as well.

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Or any other combination, but it doesn't, you can do it all.

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That's the beauty of this machine. It does it all.

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Right. And you can do all of that in a cluster rather than having blocks in your program, right?

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So you can do a cluster, which we're saying is multiple movements and muscle

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groups in one basic position where the equipment setting stays roughly the same.

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And you can change, you can actually change the equipment settings to use different

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muscle groups and to focus on different outputs like strength or stability.

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Right. Long stretch on half a spring abs, long stretch on three springs arms.

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Right. And in between you step off and do some flying splits.

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And because you can access the springs and the foot bar, those transitions are

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quick and simple, especially with a little bit of practice.

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So one of the questions I want to ask you, Raph,

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is there are things that happen physiologically and neuromuscularly or neurologically

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when you become stronger.

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You talked about that last week and you probably talked about it in depth in other podcasts.

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We talk about it a lot in the programs.

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So when I go and do, let's keep using the woodchopper as an example.

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When I go and do woodchoppers, this diagonal strap pull. Let's call it drawing

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the sword or swakati or some traditional Pilates name.

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Okay, but I'm going to say a two-handed version rather than the single-handed

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version because I want to maximize. I'm just, you know, giving you shit.

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Okay, right, right. So our two-handed swakati, which might be swakati's,

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we're diagonally strap pulling.

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Right now i get used to the movement over x number

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of classes or x number of practices and i

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work out that with my knees wider i've got a better base of support

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with my elbows bent i'm more athletic against the spring tension if i lean into

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the strap a little bit more i can offset the load all of those little efficiencies

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that i work out with practice and over time i discover wow cool i can do this

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on one and a half or two springs and i'm getting down below 15 reps right so it's okay,

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I've gotten below the 20 threshold for effective strengthening.

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I've become efficient enough with the stability challenges that I'm not feeling

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like I'm going to fall over.

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My question to you is, what's the cost to the physiological effects of strengthening of that?

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Did you know where I'm going with that? Is that making you stronger or is it

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making you a kind of better athlete in a particular construct?

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Well, it's a trade-off, right?

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So if you want to maximize your strength, you would just sit on your heels,

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on the reformer, put all of the springs on, grasp the strap as close as possible

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to the pulley, and just pull for all you're worth.

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And if you twist and lean and distort, it doesn't matter, just like freaking

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pull that thing, dude, right?

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Hard as you can. And if you can only do two and a half reps,

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perfect, perfect, right? And those reps should look ugly.

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So that's if you want to maximize strength.

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Whereas at the other end, if you want to maximize control, now,

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when you maximize strength, it's going to look ugly, right?

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So it's at the expense of what we would call, you know, control.

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Now, really, strength is, control is embedded in strength.

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So in order to express strength, you have to have control, but it's just not

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conscious control where you're consciously looking pretty while you do the movement,

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but your motor cortex is going to organize your body by the very act of leaning

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and grimacing and twisting and hiking your shoulder and whatever,

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that actually enables you to express more strength.

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So that is control. It's just not pretty control.

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But if you wanted to maximize pretty control, right, the finer,

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you know, doing it an artisanal way, then you would do a light spring,

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and you would move slowly and you would focus on developing the fluidity and,

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you know, lots of repetitions to build practice.

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Like if you're practicing a scale on a musical instrument, hundreds and hundreds

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of reps to, you know, really perfect it.

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And that would build almost no strength, right?

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And so at one end, we've got lots of strength and almost no control.

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And the other, we've got lots of control, almost no strength.

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And in the middle, you've got

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a bit of both, right? And so if you've got like a couple of springs on.

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You know, and you're kneeling and you've got two hands and you're not making

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it super ugly, but you're also, it doesn't look like, you know,

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Barajnikov dancing Swan Lake,

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you know, there's some element of control and some element of strength development there.

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Now, the maximum amount of strength you can develop in that position is going

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to be less than if you just sat on your heels and put all the springs on, right?

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But it's still going to be substantial, you know, so... If you can't do 20.

:: 25:02

If you can't do 20, yeah. yep and you

:: 25:05

go until your form dissipates notably right and

:: 25:08

so here's here's where we get to my first kind of

:: 25:11

answer to that question of like can pilates make

:: 25:15

you stronger it's like well depends where you fucking start from you know and

:: 25:20

depends how you do pilates and so if you do pilates the way that we're talking

:: 25:25

about it where you try and create situations at certain points in the session

:: 25:30

where the person can't do 20 reps,

:: 25:32

because it's just too much load for them to go beyond that, well,

:: 25:36

yeah, they will get stronger, right?

:: 25:38

But the limitation on the machine is because you've only got five springs on there.

:: 25:44

At some point, you've got all five springs on, right? And there is no more.

:: 25:50

You can't go stronger than that. I mean, you can grasp the strap a little bit

:: 25:52

higher, but it's eventually like you run out of strap, you run out of springs,

:: 25:55

you run out of carriage stopper positions, and that's as hard as you can go.

:: 25:59

Whereas on a barbell, there is essentially an infinite amount of extra weight you can add, right?

:: 26:05

So the barbell's got so many spots on the end of it, that's like the strongest

:: 26:09

human in the world doesn't run out of space on the barbell.

:: 26:12

So that's effectively uncapped right

:: 26:15

and that's the that's the superpower of barbells but guess what you

:: 26:18

can't stretch on a barbell you know like you can't

:: 26:21

do strike a tee on a barbell so so the

:: 26:24

beauty of the reformer is not that it's it's not a

:: 26:27

it's not like super specialized for strength and the the drawback of that is

:: 26:31

like will you develop elite world-class strength and conditioning levels of

:: 26:36

strength on a reformer no you will not no you will not but can you get like

:: 26:41

double as strong as the average human on planet Earth. Yes, you fucking can. Honor a former.

:: 26:46

And so it just depends, like, how strong do you want to get?

:: 26:50

And I think, just let me catch you there, too. I think one of the things,

:: 26:54

I've had this conversation a lot, when someone does have a handle on strength

:: 27:00

training, then their position becomes, well, the reformer's not great for strength

:: 27:03

training. So fair enough.

:: 27:05

Exactly as you just said, Raf, if we're talking about the pointy end of strength

:: 27:10

training, the super nerd factor of strength training, don't use a reformer.

:: 27:15

It just isn't the right tool.

:: 27:18

But who comes to group, you know, my brain is always oriented to the group reformer world.

:: 27:26

And so who comes to group reformer?

:: 27:28

35-year-old women who are slightly overweight and out of shape.

:: 27:32

Like now, dear listener, if that's not you, don't take offense, right?

:: 27:36

But like your average brand new client who walks in the door,

:: 27:39

you know, that's basically the profile, right?

:: 27:42

Yeah. and even if they're not female and even if

:: 27:45

they're not 35 and even if they're not slightly out of shape they're

:: 27:48

usually trying this out because they've heard it's kind of cool or it's a cool

:: 27:51

way to exercise because they don't like tennis or the gym and so they're not

:: 27:55

you know the number of people who come into a reformer class and say i don't

:: 27:59

care about anything but strength is exactly zero hi i'm i'm i'm a nationally

:: 28:05

competitive olympic weightlifter can you help me get stronger.

:: 28:08

Yeah, no, I can't. Not happening in a reformer class. You're helping people

:: 28:12

who quite possibly, and I mean this with all love for my fellow human,

:: 28:17

but the reality is what people generally think is strength training usually isn't.

:: 28:22

So the vast majority of your clients, even if they say they do strength at the

:: 28:26

gym, when you double click, they're doing 15 plus reps and they could have done

:: 28:29

more. So that's not strength training.

:: 28:31

Exactly. And we've got research on this and I've shared it in a previous episode,

:: 28:34

people typically at the gym, the average person, male and female,

:: 28:39

self-selects a load that is 50% of what's required to get stronger.

:: 28:45

So people are choosing a load that's their 20 RMs.

:: 28:49

But they're doing 10 reps. So they're warming up.

:: 28:53

Yeah. So the average person doesn't get stronger at the gym either because they're

:: 28:57

just self-selecting loads that's way too light.

:: 29:00

So it's the two things. Like we said, it's not just like, well,

:: 29:03

it depends where you're starting.

:: 29:05

It also depends how you'd use it, right? So you can get under a barbell and

:: 29:09

not get stronger if you do it wrong. You know, choose a load that's too light

:: 29:12

and you don't do enough reps.

:: 29:13

So it's the same on a reformer, But the limitation with a reformer is the top

:: 29:18

end of strength development is just not available on a reformer.

:: 29:24

But like you say, Heath, like 99.9% of your clients don't give a shit about

:: 29:30

that. And that's not their goal.

:: 29:32

And even, I would say, even the people who've come to my classes from CrossFit

:: 29:37

or Olympic weightlifting or powerlifting, they don't come to reformer to get

:: 29:41

stronger. That's what they go to powerlifting for.

:: 29:43

They come to stretch out and recover and, you know, get their mobility back

:: 29:48

and all of those good things. Yeah, exactly.

:: 29:51

All right, great. So what emerges from this for me is it's really,

:: 29:56

I think it's so important, and this is as a result of the deficit of what I

:: 30:02

learned in my Pilates training on the topic.

:: 30:04

Which I trained you. Yeah.

:: 30:09

For Pilates instructors. there's, well, yeah, we've come a long way together

:: 30:14

to learn about strength and what it is and how you actually do it.

:: 30:19

But then, and maybe this goes to that other topic we had, is that the more sophisticated,

:: 30:25

you know, the more in-depth your understanding.

:: 30:29

In a sense, the less you should share it with people, the less obvious your knowledge should be.

:: 30:34

I feel very confident these days that if you step in front of me on a reformer

:: 30:39

class, I'm going to get you to a strength training output.

:: 30:43

I'm going to get you to those conditions because I've practiced the layers that

:: 30:47

I teach and the clusters that I teach so many times that I can read you and

:: 30:51

I can watch your movement and I'm very confident I'm going to get you there multiple times.

:: 30:57

But I don't talk about it. There's no point telling you about it.

:: 31:01

There's no point saying, now we're doing a strength training phase, folks.

:: 31:04

I just want to get you moving. People don't care about that. They don't care.

:: 31:08

Look, people come to group exercise because they want to be told what to do,

:: 31:13

and they want to do it with other people.

:: 31:15

If they wanted to figure it out themselves, they'd be at the gym or at home

:: 31:19

figuring out themselves.

:: 31:20

Right. The figure it out yourself person doesn't come to group exercise.

:: 31:23

The person who comes to group exercise wants you to give them a session that gives them results.

:: 31:28

And even if they don't know that, the results are what bring them back.

:: 31:31

Right. Yeah. Dear listener, think about if you hired like a private chef, right?

:: 31:37

And to cook your meals for you and your family at home, right?

:: 31:42

You're probably not going to go to the private chef. Oh, show me how to make

:: 31:45

this dish. Show me how to make this dish. It's like, if you wanted to cook,

:: 31:48

you wouldn't have hired a fucking chef.

:: 31:50

You know, you would have gone to cooking classes or something, right?

:: 31:54

So the fact that you hired a chef says you don't fucking want to know how to cook.

:: 31:58

You want someone else to do it for you, right? And that's the chef's job is

:: 32:01

to, so you don't have to worry about it or think about it.

:: 32:04

The food just appears on the table, right? And that's the same with Pilates.

:: 32:08

The people who come to a group performer class, they don't want to think about it.

:: 32:12

They just want you to think about it for them and give them,

:: 32:14

okay, here's what I thought about and here's how to do it.

:: 32:16

Now move your arm, now move your leg, put on this spring, stand up,

:: 32:19

lie down. Good to see you next week.

:: 32:25

So, we take that group context and can we make people stronger?

:: 32:34

And at the pointy end of the conversation is 6RM, 3RM, can't do,

:: 32:40

you know, all of the things we've been talking about.

:: 32:43

And as we've said, there is a huge scope for making people stronger,

:: 32:47

which doesn't have to be as nerdy as that.

:: 32:49

Well, you can get someone to a 3RM. Like there are things I can do,

:: 32:52

like I'm pretty strong, but I can, there are things I can do on a reformer that

:: 32:56

I can't do three reps, like long stretch on zero springs, for example. Yeah. Right.

:: 33:01

And there are a few other things that I could name, you know,

:: 33:04

most of them on zero springs using body weight. Right.

:: 33:08

Where it's like, yeah, I probably couldn't even do one long stretch on zero springs.

:: 33:12

Right. So it's beyond my one RM. So I could definitely improve certain aspects

:: 33:16

of my strength on the reformer.

:: 33:17

But for most people if you just think of a balanced strength routine

:: 33:20

where you're strengthening your legs and your arms and your back and your abs and

:: 33:23

all of that good stuff it's like you're going to run out of springs

:: 33:26

fairly you know after at a certain point but you can absolutely get people a

:: 33:33

lot stronger and i think the limitation is you can get them you know and i don't

:: 33:38

you know i'm just making up numbers here but i would say you could get somebody

:: 33:40

to be like let's say have double the strength of the average person, right?

:: 33:45

The average just punter walking around the streets.

:: 33:49

But you can't get them to elite strength levels, you know, like a power lifter.

:: 33:57

And what we're saying is that broadly,

:: 34:03

actual strengthening is such a rare thing that using the reformer to get people

:: 34:12

looking sketchy at 15 to 20 reps in a movement that's roughly stable,

:: 34:17

you almost certainly just made that person strong.

:: 34:19

And if they're in your class, they're probably not doing systematic strength training elsewhere.

:: 34:25

Right. Fantastic. And even if they do go to the gym, like if they're the average

:: 34:29

person who chooses 20 RM load and does 10 reps, which is what most people do,

:: 34:34

that's what the research tells us,

:: 34:36

well, they probably will get stronger on a reformer in your class than they

:: 34:40

would in the gym sitting on the chess press machine for five minutes scrolling

:: 34:44

Instagram in between sets of 10 reps at their 20 rep max.

:: 34:50

So so so reformer taught well can be better for strengthening than gym workouts

:: 34:59

taught badly yeah right and then catching that just coming back to that uh woodchopper topic,

:: 35:08

if we say reformer taught well and by that we mean in the context of making

:: 35:14

people stronger can be more effective than the gym,

:: 35:19

the considerations are, is the person stable enough in the movement that they

:: 35:23

can put in, their focus is on the strength output, not the I don't want to fall

:: 35:28

over and hurt myself output.

:: 35:30

Right. And, or, I don't want to fall over and hurt myself, yes.

:: 35:34

And also, I'm focusing on making the movement pretty.

:: 35:37

Because there's an inverse relationship between how pretty you can make it look and how heavy it is.

:: 35:44

And so I just want to add in just one thing. I'm sorry to cut you off there.

:: 35:48

No, no, no. Go, go. So the other thing that happens, like if we were to,

:: 35:52

you know, we're talking about the wood chopper before and we're optimizing for

:: 35:54

load at one end by putting all the springs on, sitting on your heels and just,

:: 35:57

you know, yanking on that strap as hard as possible.

:: 36:00

And then at the other end, we're kind of kneeling up. We've got a light spring

:: 36:02

on. We're making it look balletic.

:: 36:04

We're keeping our shoulders down away from our ears and moving the,

:: 36:06

you know, ballet hands and all of the rest of it stuff.

:: 36:08

Right. So in the balletic version, you are going to,

:: 36:13

depending on how many reps you do and what spring you've got on, but for many people,

:: 36:17

you will feel a burn and get some kind of non-zero amount of strengthening in

:: 36:22

the deltoid, the upper shoulder of the arm that's away from the foot bar side arm, essentially,

:: 36:30

if you do enough reps.

:: 36:33

And so you may you know the other

:: 36:36

thing that happens is as you kind of increase the

:: 36:39

kind of control element of the movement and make it

:: 36:41

kind of more slow and light and balletic and

:: 36:44

focus on the nuances of which way your fingers are pointing and all that kind

:: 36:47

of stuff is you rather than like if you do a really heavy wood chopper sitting

:: 36:52

on your heels with all the springs on you're going to strengthen your obliques

:: 36:55

and your hips and your shoulders and your chest and your intercostals and all

:: 37:00

of these muscles are all contributing, probably your reductors and stuff as well.

:: 37:04

Whereas if you're doing the balletic version, you might get,

:: 37:06

you know, 90% of the strengthening you get will just be in your left deltoid.

:: 37:10

You know, so you're isolating the movement right down to like,

:: 37:13

you know, a tiny fraction of the muscle groups.

:: 37:15

And same, if you're doing like a side-lying leg springs on one spring,

:: 37:19

right, might be fantastic for the posterior fibers of your right gluteus medius, right?

:: 37:24

But the other 611 muscles in your body are doing basically fuck all,

:: 37:31

you know. So it's low value in terms of strengthening.

:: 37:34

So let me get you to unpack something for me and all the people that have asked

:: 37:39

me this question over the years, because I feel like it's something I could

:: 37:42

answer more comprehensively.

:: 37:47

In Pilates, there's a lot of, and I'm not sure where it comes from because it

:: 37:52

doesn't seem to be part of the original work, capital W, movements that are focusing on,

:: 38:01

all right, so if you, like me, for a long time, dear listener,

:: 38:05

think about movements as being for a muscle, right?

:: 38:08

Oh, so when we do this, it's for lower traps or it's for your pec minor or it's

:: 38:13

for your whatever. Well, Joseph's answer to that when people asked him in the

:: 38:18

studio, which muscle is this for, he used to get cranky and go, it's for the body.

:: 38:22

Yeah. Okay, great. Well, that might be the simple answer to my question.

:: 38:28

So when, you know, Raf's just given that example of the light spring,

:: 38:33

one hand in the strap makes steam come off your deltoid, but nothing else really feels anything.

:: 38:40

So maybe there's a non-zero strengthening effect for your deltoid.

:: 38:43

So if you're, like I saw for so long did, thinking that you're doing movements

:: 38:48

and you want people to feel a particular muscle so you know that that particular

:: 38:51

muscle is getting the effect, which you think is strengthening,

:: 38:54

whether it is or not, you don't know.

:: 38:57

So my question for you to unpack for us, Raph, is twofold. One,

:: 39:02

the things that we do for strength training are system-wide, right?

:: 39:07

So like squats, bench press, deadlifts, and in our case, let's say knee stretches

:: 39:13

on heavy springs, or there's multiple muscle groups working together as a system

:: 39:18

to create force against an external load.

:: 39:21

I would say there's a nuance to that.

:: 39:26

Yeah, that's what I want to unpack. All right. So you get, you are strong at a certain thing, right?

:: 39:32

Because strength is, the expression of strength is the ability to exert load

:: 39:35

against force, sorry, to exert force against an external object, right?

:: 39:38

Whether that's to move your own body weight or move the external object or whatever it is.

:: 39:42

And so there's a, there's a muscle contractile force component to that,

:: 39:47

and there's a skill component to that, right?

:: 39:48

So moving a barbell is not the same skill as.

:: 39:53

You know, moving a reformer carriage or doing a handstand, right?

:: 39:56

So doing an overhead press with a barbell is not the same skill as doing a handstand,

:: 39:59

even though it's the same muscle groups, right?

:: 40:02

So there's a muscle group component, and there's also a skill component to every test of strength.

:: 40:07

And so we could say, how long can you do a handstand for? And that might be one test of strength.

:: 40:11

And then how long can you hold this barbell overhead is a different test of strength.

:: 40:15

And they're not going to correlate a lot, right? Because if you've practiced

:: 40:18

holding a barbell overhead, that's going to make you better at doing that.

:: 40:21

You won't necessarily be able to hold a handstand for one second,

:: 40:25

and vice versa with practicing handstands. doesn't mean you can hold a barbell

:: 40:28

overhead, right? Even though you might have the same size shoulder muscles.

:: 40:31

So there's a skill component to everything.

:: 40:33

And so you can be strong at doing swakati.

:: 40:37

Right because that is there's a skill component and there's a muscle

:: 40:40

contraction component to it and you can be strong at

:: 40:43

doing barbell squat or a bench press right the the

:: 40:47

advantage and why i 100 agree

:: 40:50

with kind of the the the underpinning assumption between behind

:: 40:53

what you said is that like those big multi-limb compound movements like squats

:: 40:59

and bench presses and deadlifts and you know long stretches and lunges and things

:: 41:04

like that lunges push-ups push-ups all of those things are superior for developing

:: 41:09

strength is because you've got 612 or 620 or whatever.

:: 41:13

There's some, I think it's about 620, but there's a variable number because

:: 41:16

some people, there are some muscles that aren't present in every person, right?

:: 41:21

So some people have like 720 muscles in their body and some people have 610

:: 41:25

or whatever, but it's like, yeah, somewhere around that.

:: 41:28

You've got about 620 muscles in your body. If you targeted

:: 41:31

everyone individually and you did like 10 reps and

:: 41:34

then you did the other side for 10 reps and then you did three sets of

:: 41:37

that it'd take you like fucking 14 hours to do your whole body workout right

:: 41:40

so if we whereas if we just do like a

:: 41:44

lunge you've done freaking like 200 muscles literally

:: 41:47

right so you can just do all of

:: 41:50

the muscles in a much shorter time by doing bigger compound movements that

:: 41:53

involve multiple limbs right whereas if you're doing swakati great

:: 41:56

the right lateral the right lateral deltoids

:: 42:00

cooked now awesome now you've all you've got is your anterior and posterior

:: 42:03

deltoids on the right and then the left ones and then the other 615 muscles

:: 42:07

right and so it's like well how long is your pilates class you know that you're

:: 42:11

going to work with so there's nothing inherently less strengthening about doing

:: 42:18

an isolation movement like a swakati,

:: 42:21

compared to a lunge or push up or some other bigger compound movement but it's

:: 42:25

just like Like at the time mover level.

:: 42:28

Right. It's just way less efficient, way less efficient, time efficient.

:: 42:34

Yeah. So then-

:: 42:37

The next question that I often work through is, if you do that and you have,

:: 42:45

to quote, muscle imbalances, aren't you continuing to develop those muscle imbalances?

:: 42:52

So if you're, I don't know, if you're quad dominant, for Christ's sake,

:: 42:58

if you're quad dominant in knee extension- Well, I'm just going to stop you

:: 43:00

there because quad dominant is a total bullshit made up thing,

:: 43:03

which there's literally zero evidence for.

:: 43:06

I know, I know. It's just a made up thing. So, but this is the,

:: 43:08

I know, I know. But so this is the question.

:: 43:10

So for the, for the people who haven't got there, haven't understood this yet,

:: 43:15

or maybe they even understand the concept.

:: 43:17

I've often had the question, if I'm doing these big compound movements and focusing

:: 43:24

on force generation, am I not leaving some muscles behind? And so.

:: 43:29

No. Because you've said it's a, right. So unpack that. All right.

:: 43:32

So if, so dear listener, I've done a whole episode on this and presented like

:: 43:37

quite a significant amount of research in that episode.

:: 43:39

And I cannot for the life of me remember which episode it was,

:: 43:42

but I'm going to look it up.

:: 43:45

And the episode, drum roll, is 194, feeling a muscle working doesn't mean it's getting stronger.

:: 43:54

And then also 160, can we even feel muscles activating?

:: 43:58

So both of those, but I would say start with 160 if you want to get all the

:: 44:01

science on this topic of why feeling a muscle working and actually strengthening

:: 44:06

that muscle are just not the same thing.

:: 44:13

So that's not quite what I was asking. So in a compound, a big compound movement

:: 44:19

like a squat or a push up or a lunge or something like that,

:: 44:22

whether you can feel A, B or C muscle working has literally nothing to do with

:: 44:30

whether it is working and whether it's getting stronger, right?

:: 44:32

So just say you can't feel your glutes in a lunge. It's like,

:: 44:35

it doesn't fucking matter.

:: 44:36

They're going to get stronger, right? I guarantee. If you can do a lunge,

:: 44:39

it means your glutes are working. Like if your glute was paralyzed,

:: 44:41

you would not be able to do a lunge. So it's working, I promise you.

:: 44:46

So yes, a lunge is always going to strengthen your glutes and your quads and your adductors, yes.

:: 44:50

But if you're just doing just those big compound movements, there are certain

:: 44:56

muscles that you're going to miss out because those movements don't target things

:: 44:59

like hamstrings, for example, aren't going to get targeted in a lunge or a squat, right?

:: 45:04

And that's not because you can't feel it. It's not because you're working too

:: 45:07

hard. It's just because the biomechanics of that movement, it doesn't matter

:: 45:10

how light you make it, you're never going to fucking strengthen your hamstrings

:: 45:13

in a squat or a lunge because it's just not a good movement to strengthen that muscle in.

:: 45:17

If you want to strengthen your hamstrings, you have to do isolated knee flexion,

:: 45:21

or isolated hip extension, right?

:: 45:24

And yeah, so it's, but it's not about whether you can feel it or how much load there is.

:: 45:28

It's just about, it's just not biomechanically a good movement to challenge that muscle.

:: 45:35

And if you wanted to strengthen your lateral deltoid, the deltoid on the outside

:: 45:40

of your shoulder, well, is swakati a better movement than, say, push-ups?

:: 45:44

Yeah, it is, because push-ups doesn't really target the lateral deltoid, right?

:: 45:49

And you could do push-ups on the wall, right?

:: 45:52

The lightest possible push-ups, focusing 100% of your brain power on activating

:: 45:56

your lateral deltoid, it still wouldn't target your lateral deltoid,

:: 46:00

because it's just not a movement that loads the lateral deltoid, right?

:: 46:04

But and so swakati is a better movement for strengthening

:: 46:07

lateral deltoid than push-ups but not because push-ups is

:: 46:10

load it's just because like swakati is a better movement for

:: 46:13

strengthening lateral deltoid than lunges because lunges don't load the lateral

:: 46:17

deltoid you know it's like it's just not a that movement doesn't load that muscle

:: 46:21

right and and you've already answered it but i'm going to circle you back to

:: 46:27

it the the little movement so you know there's so much in Pilates choreography that,

:: 46:33

and in a lot of cases, it reflects gymnastics training where you do specific

:: 46:38

movements that do actually target a specific muscle.

:: 46:42

Right. Okay. So I'm just going to jump in there because you've totally inspired me with this thing.

:: 46:46

And I think that with that observation, so I just said there are certain movements.

:: 46:51

Just bi-mechanically load certain muscles, but not other muscles,

:: 46:54

right? And that's the case for any exercise.

:: 46:55

There's no one exercise that loads every single muscle in the body efficiently. but

:: 46:59

dear listener the distinction here is not between big muscles

:: 47:02

and small muscles it's not between

:: 47:06

big muscles and small muscles push-ups are like one-handed push-ups with your

:: 47:11

feet on the sofa highly highly loaded push-ups are fucking fantastic for loading

:: 47:17

the little muscles around your shoulder the rotator cuff there's like the number

:: 47:21

one exercise for loading in the rotator cuff.

:: 47:24

Heavy squats with a barbell with like your six rep max, so like,

:: 47:30

you know, one and a half times body weight probably, okay,

:: 47:33

are fantastic for your deep abdominal, you know, for your obliques and rectus

:: 47:38

abdominis, right, and your deep hip rotator.

:: 47:40

So the load isn't what determines whether the big muscles or little muscles are worth.

:: 47:45

It's just the biomechanics of does that movement actually load that muscle?

:: 47:49

And so squats are fantastic for your abs, They're shit for your hamstrings.

:: 47:54

Hamstrings are big muscle, right? Not a little muscle.

:: 47:58

Push-ups are fantastic for your rotator cuff, a little muscle. Terrible for your lats.

:: 48:03

Big muscle, right? So the distinction is not big versus little.

:: 48:06

It's just like where is that muscle situated and doesn't have a biomechanical

:: 48:10

moment to actually produce force in that movement, right?

:: 48:15

And in the case of lats in a push-up, no, it doesn't.

:: 48:19

Something i've wondered about with this is um

:: 48:22

all right so let's let's let's let's let's

:: 48:25

use a the hamstring as an example so

:: 48:29

as you've said in a compound movement uh the

:: 48:33

hamstrings are not changing length under load so it's not effective or as it's

:: 48:37

not as effective for strengthening the hamstrings as it could be right so if

:: 48:41

we want to strengthen the hamstrings effectively we want to move them through

:: 48:44

range of motion under appropriate load so we would need to fix one end of the

:: 48:47

the system so that the hip stays still or the knee stays still and you move at the other end. Right.

:: 48:52

So Jefferson curls or knee flexions. Or like a shoulder bridge on the reformer on a light spring.

:: 48:57

On a light spring, right? Which is effectively the same thing as a prone hamstring curl.

:: 49:04

Right. Or a front split on the reformer on a light spring.

:: 49:08

Fantastic. You're isolating the hip there.

:: 49:12

So the my question is if

:: 49:15

you're because i think this captures the question that

:: 49:18

i was trying to ask for the pilates world if

:: 49:23

i do appropriately loaded hamstring curls or jefferson curls and make my hamstring

:: 49:31

stronger will my overall output in a squat be higher no if i strength Does that make sense?

:: 49:39

Yeah, no. And that's the skill question, right? It's like- No, it won't.

:: 49:42

Yeah. Almost zero transfer. I would say, you know, I haven't seen a study like

:: 49:46

where they did hamstring curls and then did squats, but I would bet money that

:: 49:50

the transfer would be almost zero.

:: 49:51

Like you could spend six months in the gym doing 15 sets a week of hamstring

:: 49:55

curls to failure, you know, double the strength of your hamstrings.

:: 49:58

And at the end of it, your squat one RM would not have improved at all.

:: 50:02

If you didn't do other things as well, right? If you weren't squatting and whatever. Yeah. Yeah.

:: 50:07

And if you were doing the other things, it would be the other things that gave

:: 50:11

you the improvement in the squat. Whereas if you just squatted and didn't do

:: 50:13

a single hamstring exercise for the whole six months, you would get better at squatting.

:: 50:22

We're pretty far down the rabbit hole but can i ask you to think on something

:: 50:26

that i lived through and i've never been able to quite make sense of was it

:: 50:30

that acid experience you had in,

:: 50:33

we can talk about that another time on maybe a different podcast but uh no no

:: 50:37

this is um so on my 40th birthday so this is going back a while now i i'd been

:: 50:43

building up my deadlifts and my goal was to do lift 150 kilos on my,

:: 50:47

before my 40th birthday.

:: 50:49

And I got it. I got it on my 40th birthday. I lifted 150 and I needed to have a lie down, right?

:: 50:53

I was like, it was a one, it was a total one rep max. That was,

:: 50:57

that was all I was going to lift.

:: 50:59

And I literally did actually lie down afterwards on the ground next to my barbell

:: 51:02

because I couldn't really stand up.

:: 51:05

And I kind of thought, okay, well, I'm going to give myself a break from this

:: 51:08

for a while. I didn't even think that consciously. I just didn't want to do

:: 51:11

a deadlift again for a while.

:: 51:14

And there were other things in play that had already been

:: 51:16

emerging and so for the next few years all i did was gymnastic training

:: 51:20

i didn't do any barbell loaded work

:: 51:23

all i did was body weight work where if i used weights it was little

:: 51:26

kind of ancillary things but i

:: 51:28

was very systematic about it it's when i developed all the

:: 51:31

stuff around the diploma that we use for the good for everyone program

:: 51:34

and i was so super systematic i trained two to

:: 51:37

three times a week i'd vary my set output i'd

:: 51:40

bury my load input blah blah blah blah blah and got

:: 51:44

really strong and i was doing pistol squats and stuff that i'd never done before

:: 51:47

either and then i went to this event uh at

:: 51:50

a personal training studio that my girlfriend went to and they called it world

:: 51:54

deadlift day and it was just a little internal sort of thing it wasn't actually

:: 51:58

world deadlift and i went along i hadn't done a deadlift in the four years since

:: 52:02

my 40th birthday and so i assumed i'd do like 100 kilos.

:: 52:09

But i just was tracking along with the rest of the crew and i

:: 52:11

went to 130 140 150 and kept

:: 52:15

going and i got a one rm of 201 kilos and

:: 52:19

i was like i don't know where that came from like i haven't been training deadlifts

:: 52:22

i've got i've got never really i've got two two two things that i think explain

:: 52:26

that first one is uh so strength has a skill component but also just a muscle

:: 52:31

mass component right so two people equally skilled one with bigger muscles that

:: 52:34

person's going to be stronger, right?

:: 52:36

Or the same person, same amount of skill, four years go past,

:: 52:39

you've been training gymnastics, your muscles have got bigger,

:: 52:42

you're going to be stronger, right? Yeah.

:: 52:44

So bigger muscles are stronger muscles. So that's one thing.

:: 52:47

So that gymnastics training might not have developed your deadlifting skill

:: 52:50

at all, but it probably developed your glutes and your hamstrings and your back

:: 52:54

extensors and all of that stuff, right? And so just, yeah, more muscle mass, right?

:: 52:57

Is my guess. The second thing is the crowd.

:: 53:02

When you've got people watching, and we've got empirical research on this,

:: 53:06

people perform better when people are watching.

:: 53:09

Wow. Right? So I was trying to impress my girlfriend or whoever.

:: 53:13

Yeah, and all the other people there.

:: 53:14

And it's, you know, I mean, you could say that we're trying to impress the girlfriend,

:: 53:16

but it's also just like we get more stimulated, we get more,

:: 53:19

you know, fired up when there's other people around, right?

:: 53:23

We've got research saying, you know, when people get better results with personal

:: 53:27

trainers, not because personal trainers are better at programming,

:: 53:31

it's just because like they don't stop when it gets hard. The personal training makes you keep going.

:: 53:35

And so having that other person that just pushes you beyond what you thought you could do before.

:: 53:40

And so I would be a thousand percent certain that if you had continued deadlift

:: 53:45

training through that time, you would have hit like 250 on that day. Right.

:: 53:48

Right? Because of the skill component, et cetera. Right, right.

:: 53:52

But there was just, you've built muscle mass, awesome, and you already had the skill, right?

:: 53:57

And beyond a certain point, it's mostly the muscle mass. So like when powerlifters

:: 54:02

start out, they develop strength very quickly and out of proportion to the muscle.

:: 54:07

So how much muscle they get and how much strength they develop are not synchronized

:: 54:11

in the early, like you get really strong without putting on a lot of muscle.

:: 54:13

But then over years, to get stronger, like the only way to get stronger,

:: 54:18

if you've been powerlifting 10 years, muscle mass and strength correlate almost perfectly.

:: 54:24

Like how much you can lift and how much muscle mass you have correlate almost perfectly.

:: 54:29

So at the beginning, for the first X number of years, you're developing skill as well as muscle mass.

:: 54:35

But then at a certain point in the deadlift, your skill kind of maxes out, right?

:: 54:40

And there's not a lot more skill development available in that particular movement.

:: 54:45

But you can keep getting more and more and more and more muscle mass.

:: 54:48

So maybe you were relatively close to your maximum skill development,

:: 54:53

maybe not totally maxed out, but relatively close to it.

:: 54:57

And it's a relatively simple movement. So like four years later,

:: 55:01

it's like you hadn't forgotten that much about it. Still remember the fundamentals. Right?

:: 55:04

And you just developed more muscle mass and you had your girlfriend watching

:: 55:07

and maybe you were eating better or who knows, you'd slept better that,

:: 55:12

maybe had more coffees that day, I don't know.

:: 55:13

But there's lots of other variables that could explain it. Yeah, okay.

:: 55:18

Good talk. All right, well, let's wind that back to our- I'm sorry.

:: 55:23

I've got to wind it right all over there. Okay. Because here in Pilates Elephant's

:: 55:28

Land, it's dinner time, and I've got family coming over.

:: 55:34

Good talk. Thanks, mate.

:: 55:37

Music.