Matt Wenning's Take On Conjugate | JTSstrength.com

everybody Chad was the Smith here from during our training systems in Columbus Ohio with Matt winning at ludus Magnus Matt thanks for yeah an appropriately time yeah Columbus's Most Wanted and yeah burst in the door here maybe not so I'm sure a lot of you have seen my video from couple weeks ago or critique of Westside and in terms of critiquing the Westside barbell commonly understood Westside barbell training principles for the raw lifter and someone that you know I credit is maybe the most successful raw lifter from Westside and a lot of Westside proponents are always pointing to you know when I make my critiques like well what about Matt winning what about Matt winning so we got him he's right here and so come on I talk about Matt's background on the sport of parallel teen his development from multiply competitor to a raw competitor and how he has tweaked kanji ideas and and developed his own system and why he believes the butts so successful for him and his team as raw lifters so that one just started apparel 15 I started when I was 13 local YMCA I was very fortunate to grow up in a small town the reason I say fortunate is because just at a local YMCA we had a guy that was 190 pounds convinced press 500 raw so you know at a young age of bench-pressing as a 8th grader you can imagine what that feels like to a guy that you know I weighed 185 pounds in eighth grade so I was a big kid like you seen a guy that was in his early mid 30s it was the same weight in benching you know 500 pounds well the guy that taught him how to train was a 740 pound Delattre in the 70s so we had two guys there that were nationally ranked lifters that were you know in that area very good so I just like changes your perspective too on like P go to the gym and the strongest AC benches 275 anything that that's the strongest that's really strong yeah yeah Jenny livers I guess I guess initially starting out I was always the small fish in the big pond so my initial goal was to get as good as those guys were cuz got him Tim Smith and Jim Dawson were like legends in the area you know they were they were the top dogs for since the 70s and so I got really lucky that I was around those guys but there their ideals were very linear periodization very old-school I would consider a you know archaic compared to what we use now although functional and worked but I noticed that even talking with him now that their system allowed them to get to a certain strength level and I never noticed Timmy or Jim ever get any stronger after that way they got them to a certain point and then it flattens out I started to flatten out from that training methodology at about I'd say 20 years old and that's when I was at their own classic it wasn't as big as it is now it was you know if you weren't a professional power lifter or body builder or strongman de you didn't go to the Arnold now everybody everyone all right every remember when you could walk around in it was kind of cool you know and I would be really nice if you could walk around with that this was like 99 Louie and all the guys at Westside were walking out the door and my buddy Brad that was a training partner actually worked with my mom at the time he was a transfusion ax so if you were to get heart surgery you know I'm the machines that kept the blood moving in your body pretty smart kid he's like hey look that's Louie you need to go talk to him you know you need to get the out of Indiana and learn how to train smarter so I finally get the balls up right when he's about to walk out the door and go up to him like hey if my name is Matt you know I'm pretty good lift her from Indiana where he's like pretty lifter he goes how much do you lift so I tell him and I'm benching close to 500 pounds that you know a little under 20 years old he said that's pretty strong you oughta come over sometime so I think I waited a month or two and then went over to the gym that's when it was just a little old wall in a strip mall back when date eight and all those guys were still lifting at a at a higher level JM Blakeley was there at the time Volga pool was just getting good I remember he being at his big claim to fame at that time was he was able to employ under conventional or sumo either way and I think he'd already squatted a thousand at 220 so he was kind of the name face and then Albert was hitting all those big a little bit already a big benches you know 766 and 220 which at that time was amazing because the shirt technology was very little so I watched him be able to bench you know 625 touch and go roll at 230 pounds of body weight with with no shirt so he did 766 and a shirt but 625 raw yeah that I personally watched and it was one of those things I think that I remember and grinding into my head is George always telling me that if you want to be good and equipment especially at that time you still had to be crazy stronger nothing on so I always wanted to be the guy here we go now bündchen 760 sure - maybe 365 or 405 I mean I mean I've seen worse than that definitely not 625 no definitely not see some else I'm robbing turnover yeah that's what I try to tell people when I did a 40 in a shirt you know I did 615 touch-and-go so that always stuck with me that you know George would tell me or show me how strong he was and then I would tell myself that if I can't walk into a normal gym with no equipment on that I don't deserve to call myself a power lifter and I think that's where at that time especially because you know we grew up well maybe I'm a little older than you grew up in the era where equipment was king but the guys that were in the equipment at that time I would say from 2001 and to up to 2000 8 or 9 still insanely strong without at least most of them well hey look at a guy like Jim Blakely and yeah but the 7:30 bench but probably did 600 plus raw yeah I mean just looking at this vehicle different than yeah it's uh yeah most the other guy others but specially the multiply yeah George Albert still has the biggest pecs I've ever seen on a smaller guy so that's kind of where the philosophy started to make sure that everything stayed wrong so from 99 mm to like 2005 I was in school traveling getting my undergrad degree and then my master's degree bomb mechanic so on the weekends my boss at Ball State while I was a ga would allow me to leave it about 2:30 in the afternoon on Friday so I could squat with the Friday evening group that was the big time room at Westside at the time so when I could which was usually fairly often I would drive down to Columbus which is about a two hour and 40 minute drive to squat stay at one of the lifters houses or Louie's houses get up in the morning to bench with George and then drive home and that would be my weeks for I would say towards the end of my undergrad career in all of my graduate career so that's where the experience started then moved over there full-time after I graduated at the end of 2005 stayed there till about 2008 so I was there for two and a half or so years full-time and that's kind of where the system really really sunk in but I think there was a transition point in that time where the old-timers were leaving in the new timers were coming in so I got lucky that I was that I was actually seeing this system at its peak evolutionary point which I would say would have been about 2001 and two maybe three and four but then after that point the old guy started to retire the new guys started to come in and I think the system changed slightly and the gear got way more drastic huh so instead of in the old days we would do a geared lift every three weeks then every two weeks would be something very very heavy raw chains bands different kinds of bars whatever so that's kind of where my system from Westside started to when I left started to differ I started to feel that the bands of chains were no longer having as much transfer as they did I think at the initial point going back to the beginning as I trained free weights only for almost ten years that's all we had at the wahoo had a great base of what freeway felt like then I got introduced to bands and chains when I was already in my early 20s and already a fairly seasoned lifter so it accentuated all the other abilities for me to get better and give me a new environments to push harder that allowed me to max more often because you cannot you know if you're with free weights all the time you get the same wear and tear effect so the bands of change are changing the pressure gradients slightly allowing you to max every other week or every week if you if you can handle it when I left West Side is kind of when I hit my biggest geared lips and the big transition was recovery looks and flexing yeah we were me and Chuck bull pool and a few other guys were lifting a lexan and that's when I had broke the first world record total I had taken the kerberos world record but it was 26 60 to 90 at 26 65 which at that time was massive and multiplied it was 2008 well the next year I did 1100 and then pulled 800 and the same meet which was my first 800 deadlift and the big transition to what I was doing at Westside to compare to what I was doing at lexan was if I felt banged up I didn't go to a hundred percent I went to 85 88 and dialed it in the next thing I started to experiment with was is actual meat preparation technique so what I decided was is like 1012 weeks out I would take a free weight and I would put all my gear on and I would go down as far as that gear would let me how I would have it set up at the meet so let's say if I was going to try to squat 11:50 I would do a thousand four to 10 weeks out regardless if it broke parallel or not I was going to get comfortable in the equipment in the way up in between that time I would do anything weird Under the Sun maybe just brief some velvet a weird bar chains or bands for weeks after that I would do 1054 - and it would be deeper obviously because the weight was heavier pulled me down farther and then the next week I would do 1085 or 1094 one or two reps point being is I specifically teach it the exact preparation points in every three weeks and what I noticed is every time I went to the meet I felt like second nature I didn't feel disoriented from my actual competition well fast forward to 2012 I started getting more into the role lifting raw lifting starts to get more popular what was it the really prompted the desire to one of those ship yeah that I mean I think of quite a few things one I knew I could compete role my off seasons were 70% raw anyway so that that was that was one of those things that was always like a standing point to me like I was saying if you can't walk into a normal gym and just put a belt on and smoke everybody's ass don't consider yourself a real class and lifting I don't care if you're a gear guy raw guy you know you should be able to walk into an average gym and make everybody stop regardless of what you're you know me and you go in and squat over at lifetime it's going to be a fun it's gonna everybody's going to stop a wanna neither I did a good video it can be right would you get my point yeah but I think there was at that time there were a lot of gear guys that couldn't go in and out pinch somebody at Lifetime Fitness and that to me was a disgrace to the sport and it disgrace to myself the next thing was is raw lifting was starting to get more and more notoriety and popularity so for me it was like look I'm still in my prime I'm only in my early mid 30s I maybe have another 10 years if I'm really really smart and being at my peak what's what's more impressive to me now maybe to other people at the time it would be you know you could ask a hundred different questions and get a hundred different answers but to me I wanted to be solidified or at least try to be solidified as one of the the greatest lifters of all time and you and I both know if you can't be compared to the old-timers you you're not ever going to be the greatest of all time I mean in my opinion the strongest guy I ever saw in my life was Gary Frank but Gary Frank will always have an asterisk next to him because nobody knows how strong he is really without anything on but you and I both know if you took that gear off it would have been the gear was certainly a different thing and yeah whenever you're at six for 340 maybe right out of four 740il combine yeah fifth leg at 9:40 deadlift and it has uh put 60 p.m. and need the other leg yeah and heels to say I haven't at 2727 ring finger huh I mean the guy was a monster but my point being is is I always wanted to at least be compared to guys like Kazmaier mean compared to guys like Don Reinhold I think the guys that me and you hold up at viral John Cole John cook those guys to me I had to take it off to show that I could compete if you put me back at 1980 I was able to roll with those guys know so far in the bench from the squat I would say I would be in the category oh yeah but long story short to me in my own personal endeavors you know I grew up thinking Bill Kazmaier and all these guys with a because I grew up being trained by the old-timers I grew up by guys that were naturally strong with no equipment on and so those were my idols and guys that I wanted to chase and I started to look more and more at the rules becoming more and more lacks one of the other big transition points was about 2010-11 I had went to my last one of my last program meets as a full full gear lifter and the amount of squats and benches that I saw that were passed which program was a that's that's what really I started penalty I would say we've probably been in Louise last program in Cincinnati like 2010 or nine okay I was the it was the it was the meat that you know somebody had gotten in trouble for putting a you know a knee wrap in their bench trap yes those types of things so I did I had SPF program Ironman program March 2011 Knoxville yeah in a Days Inn yeah ballroom in that fantasy and I'm the tooth eleven power station program and since Ally yeah those are very interesting exerting their interesting experiences the problem is is 2007 eight up into almost nine those meets had multiple judges that were not in the same Federation they didn't turn full SPF till 2010 and 11 judging was ultra strict you know Chuck myself Chuck fought at the time we'd all we were all very good technicians and super clean we took away all the money that pissed people off I think because that wasn't for me that was other people's meets but I started to see the in the next years or two that the guys weren't getting stronger that the numbers were going up because the judgment was getting was judgment was getting losers who just got a half-inch higher every right of course it's what goes up yeah so to me you know you know as well as I do to be able to cut an eight fifty plus squat in a belt only it's not going to happen though it's going to smash you down now whether you can stand up for it or not is another another factor in it of itself but for me it was just more pure the judging was more consistent and I felt like if I wanted to compete against the all-time greats that I had to be in there in their arena so that's kind of why I switched just to give myself Lydian plus when I work with the military and the fire and police departments that I'm known for nobody gives a what I do to suit or mature you know can I walk into their gym and make them look weak just just grabbing stuff and doing it and that to me is the ultimate form of strength and what power things should be now do I like watching gear lifting when it with the judging strict and do I think it's cool yeah I think it's cool think it's the ultimate showcase of Technology and technique but I don't think that it's a true showcase of strength anymore and that's kind of sad I mean I think the only guy that I would say right now is the best gear lifter if you want to talk just like finish can I say can only do things and all aspects that are just absolutely amazing but you know I've seen other guys that convinced nine hundred to 405 500 and that to me is just not with them so I just never wanted to be regardless if that's your thing or not I never wanted to be associated with that I wanted people to go hey that guy's super strong for real legit and that's that's just kind of my philosophy on the whole thing so that's kind of where the transition started so then as as you got more and more interesting so you saw adaptations to what you were doing the train you were doing the gear yeah what would some of those changes look like so the first thing like we talked about earlier just me and you was was putting in strategic points of actual lifts that were done at the meat whether it be a different rep range it was the exact weight and you know exact meat conditions so if I'm wearing a single it at the meet I got a singlet on if I'm weren't doing a straight bar I got a straight bar if it's straight away at you straight way that's where I think conjugates system got a bad rap for a lot of people is that they varied it so much they didn't have a strategic plan now the question is why would I do that the reason is was disorientation the real weights so the key for everybody is finding the optimization of how much free weight do you need versus how much variability do you need so I'm a type of lifter because I think because of my background for first ten years of mine lifting career I mastered free weights I knew where to put it on my back I knew how it felt and I got up to an 8 20 26 or whatever squat in the IPF you know which with very little chains or bands or any kind of limit I'd be a single player yes yeah so then the equipment at that time was still not so hot good only but point being is is that my attachment to free weights was already high before I threw in variability first time in ten years long time these things but what I noticed was after 10 years of taking away a lot of the free weights I was becoming disoriented with how the free weights reacted to my body that you know the way inertia reacts to the straight bar so my point is is that I felt that I needed to have free weights every three weeks or so and I played with that for a while first it was four then it was three point being is is that everybody's going to have to have different amounts of specificity and different amounts of you know very on variation and that's where the trick is and I think that's where the fault is too because it's that's not an easy process to figure out that's like saying you know if you were say hey man I want you to do all my training it might take me a year and a half to figure out what you're about how your body ticks you might need more free weight than I do and I might need more variability to not burn out so I find that the more I stay away from free weights when I get to free weights they're much easier and I'm not nearly as fatigued if I stick to a free weight program too long I burn out really really fast so I'm like very very good at free weights but for a short period of time and other people like I see can grind free weights every week yeah I think that's a bit important to remember too that you've been to be in parallel ting for 20 more 24 years at this point yeah so in that 24 years you've probably done I don't know let's call it like a hundred thousand squats with yes with a straight bar and straight weight right yeah someone who's coming into the sport with two years experience three years experience yeah for them to try and change exercise every single we a different bar every single week yeah when they've done you know yeah tenth of or less of the straight weights yeah that you've done they're the ones are going to get more specificity because yeah they're not masters of movement yes I think the first thing that you try to sit down engage with anybody that you deal with his goal okay so I have a lot of clients here that train very very variable they do very different things all the time but they're in goal is to not be awesome at power with their their end goal is to get as strong as they can possibly be with the least amount of wear and tear if that's your goal then I think variability is crucial because of pressure gradients so if you're doing different bars and chains and bands and free weights and mixing them up all the time you're going to get stronger long term but the wear and tear on the need lower back in the ABS might maybe we don't know for sure but in my opinion I think so would be a lot less you'd be able to go a lot longer a lot farther for instance if you have a car if that car is brand new and all you do is burnouts on a left-hand turn you're going to have certain parts wear out in other parts never get touched if you drive the car the way in which it's intended to be driven that car is going to last 150,000 miles a little bit of highway driving a little bit of city driving a little bit of break in a little bit acceleration my point is is that it's variable so the body I think works in the same fashion if you have enough variability in your training it's going to allow you to train longer so if you're if your goal is to just be a strong person and have the minimal amount of wear and tear I think variability is key if you're trying to be the best pilot for you can but you have minimal experience you have to stick to free weights more often because you have not mastered that yet and I think there is that 10 year rule there once you hit 10 years like I'm sure you've hit 10 years for a while now your training can be much more variable because you have that hundred thousand squats under your belt with that freeway yeah like the squat bench that they're not overly complex movements rioting you know people who train more in the style that I train make the mistake of being overly specific and I think I may have made that mistake for a bit and just kind of getting a bit stale immensely more so than physically but they're deemed you know they're being overly specific well people on the other side a lot of pit bulls of people doing congi training as being overly hopefully a very little variable yeah when you're when once you're more advanced it's kind of like riding a bike yeah it's not going to take the you know 20 squat sessions or 12 weeks or something to remember how that yeah squat what's right yeah if you go let you know if you go live in another country where I say you just walk everywhere you come back you're not going to forget how to drive a car Yeah right but to peak at an optimal range you have to have enough of specificity and then enough of variability and that the hardest part with the training is its individual for everyone I think a lot of it is training experience like we're training history I had 10 years of freeway training so when I went variable it produced a great result because I had a solid base it would be very difficult if you want to be a world champion and not period a solid base before you start working your way up the ladder and I think that's where people get confused but if your goal is to not be the best power offer in the world you can vary it a little bit more and I played with it a bunch got some people that have had high variability in their training and do very very well other people do very poor I think a lot of it comes down to psychological burnout rate getting stale so for me like I said personally I have to have a lot of variability because I burn out very quickly for other people I can they can do the same thing over and over week after week and it doesn't bother them as much so you have to find out what kind of personality you have what your body is capable of withstanding all the time and then be able to decide okay what parameters cannot point in at this point and the problem is is that you never step in the same position twice so as you age your body is changing so the amount of variability may need to increase or it may need to decrease depending on where you're at at that time and that's I think the artists point of learning conjugate journey because it's very simple to lie that right out of linear periodization have a very specific but if you get burned out really fast or your techniques not really really good you can have a lot of issues so I think the main thing that stayed the same for the last 16 or so years that I've been really good is that all of my training has always evolved around where my weakest links are I know what I need at the time I need it and it makes me good and that's that's the big difference that I see people have pitbulls they get into a system and they think because they're doing the system that it's going to work for them and that may be true to a point but the problem is the system has to always evolve to what you need at that time and that's not easily seen though so I'm always watching my videos and saying when my upper back needs a little more my hamstrings aren't engaging correctly I'm always putting that into my training to try to find the next week link in the chain to fix and that's that's the hardest part with all of it is figuring out okay what do I need at this point in time because what got me good three years ago so my training to bench 606 was about 20% different than the bench 6:12 at 6 bucket pounds and the training is 30 percent 25 30 percent different I think that's something important for everyone to understand that people who are really elite lifters yeah they might have a system and it might have name now that they they wrote or whatever but very very few people if any are just taking a system out of an e-book or out of an article or or something verbatim that someone else gave them and just doing it with no adaptations like mat changes his system for himself for his clients yeah what I do is is different for for myself for Brandon Allen 44 Jake for all these different different people and you got to take ownership of what you're doing and you got to understand why you're doing it for you not just because this guy said is a seminar I read it in this article yeah yeah it work for you I think that's the key is figuring out what you need at that time if you read a lot of Vasily alekseyev's training he was the first Russian lifter that was allowed to break away from the Russian system the idea was oh good no no so point being is is that he adapted his training to his needs at that time and that's what made him a awesome lifter with a very long career of 80 some plus world records yeah he has a great quote something to the effect of everyone wants to do my program but you can't do my program because then it would be your program yeah exactly so like I said I think some what I do has some mirror image to what you do some of what you do probably have some mirror image of what I do and the key is is that everybody is going to have a different athletic background a different biomechanical background different you know muscle fiber typing different type of psychological where you have high dopamine serotonin levels naturally testosterone levels naturally or we attend or supplement it or going to you know inhibit or you know you progress how fast you can recover from things and then the big thing that I think we both agree on is having the highest level of general physical preparation you possibly can to be able to even do the training yeah and that's where everybody wants to skip they want to be strong but they don't realize that that pyramid base has to be massive so what I you know I post a lot on my extensive warmups when I bring in a new person that's even fairly strong they try to do my warmup and they're destroyed so the point being is that what I do to just even get ready to lift is 300 to 400 of things before I even bench that initially started because I always felt like when I lifted at you know at Westside we went straight in we did very little warm-ups and we went heavy well that didn't have a whole lot of transfer after being destroyed after squats so what I started to do was I would show up early and do a lot of extra work to feel that fatigue set in similar to after squatting so then I knew exactly where I was on the bench pre fatigue because you know as well as I do he goes squat nine hundred and tell me that your bench is going to feel the same as when you're on your bench day when you're fresh absolutely not so I always put myself at a deficit to bench press because I know I've done it after a squat so that's where the thought pattern of the warm-up started and involved since then five six years ago so I know that if you watched our our video with dr. Mike and I last less we yet what would you think what we read about what were we wrong about I think the thing you're right about is like what we talked about is you can only base the system that you're judging based on literature so if people go and look at my writings of what I've done in power magazine and we're wherever on the internet about speed training or max training what you're seeing is exactly what I do so based on literature you have laid out exactly what that system is so you know there's a lot of people that use my system or I write protocols for if you go read that article portions of their training are based on that article so I think with that being said you have to go off of exactly what you're saying you have to go off of what's available you're not at Louise your West Side gym every day so you can't write exactly what they do every day you have to base it off literature and they knew there are 99.9% of the people throwing website ranking so if you're basing it off the literature I think you're absolutely right I think where the big and I think you hit on it don't quote me but I think you hit on it is the reason that the system works for me is because I know what I need and that is the whole power of using a conjugate training it's the power and also the crutch if you don't know your needs at that time that conjugate system is nothing but a pitfall if you no if you have a good grasp of what your weaknesses are where you need the most work and you can learn how to apply it on to your system I honestly believe there's nothing better but there is a lot of education to be had before you can take that system and make it work 100 percent not that's the real trick to the system I think and them you probably hit on that any way on your talk so what how does Matt winning this training differ from Westside so I use with free weight I use a linear periodization model I start off with gauging with eighty percent say twelve weeks out every three weeks I hit a real free weight and build myself up very gradually to 92 percent before me two weeks out so my D loading system is the same I use a circuit back system is very similar but I think the real strategic trick is doing specificity every three weeks so 80% for five or roughly five 12 weeks out then 85 86 % nine weeks out then 87 88 % six weeks out and then 92 percent three weeks out and that allows them all those weird things I do in between to kind of tell my body hey this is what I want from you without overtraining it as well so I follow the wall of specificity I'm doing something very specific every three weeks but I also follow the law of accommodation which states that I'm doing things very different in between so the muscles are constantly guessing and the central nervous system is staying as fresh as possible while going as heavy as possible so where my system I think may have an advantage is I have more specificity involved but at a strategic points and that's just something I figured out over the years point around with so it's kind of my old system blended in with my new system so I think it's all the best of linear periodization and all the best of conjugate training blended in together and making it very different variable all up at all times with a specific goal in mind versus just training to train and you were talking about earlier you know kind of have an offseason and how you very different parts of the your yeah difference I was trained to go right yeah so I get down with my beats usually around I do one meet a year because of the the busyness of the gym and the talking so I can lay out about 20 weeks of no travel and just train the balls off with that being said right when I get done with a meet the first thing I do is clean my diet they get as much bloating off of my system as possible so the first time I went to see dr. Serrano which is a pretty famous doctor here in town works with a lot of pro bodybuilders and athletes and whatnot very smart man with blood work looks at me and goes holy you need to change a lot of things because you're not very healthy and I was only 33 at the time I thinking my trained heart you know I don't eat super dirty but my carbs were completely out of control I ate whatever I felt like eating because once I get up to about 250 I was a very hard gainer like it took everything under the moon to put on a pound or two so in college I had to eat a ton of food and pretty much whenever I wanted to either maintain or gain even slightly weight so it took a long time for me to fill out the 275 class it took me a long time to get up to a full 300 305 pounds but I did it by eating not so not so great so by the time I'm 33 I got some I got some cholesterol triglyceride problems that need to be straightened out but not audible but not great I start talking my carbohydrates I start feeling better I start realizing that if I want to last in this sport and I want to be the best I can be for as long as I can be I got to take at least half the year and work on just being as athletic and healthy as possible so my training is still just as hard but it's harder because I don't have as much energy to hit those big max numbers because I'm drier I'm less hydrated I'm less bloated which is awesome for strength but not so good for health so what I do is I try to get as clean as healthy as possible and then four or five months of the year I get as big and as strong as I can possibly be but I create windows of time in those years to make sure that I'm either working on health and athleticism and then pure strength versus just going strong strong strong all the time because it does a couple of advantages one one advantages gives my joints break if I'm not trying to put 900 on my back all the time like my back heals my knees feel okay so you know as you know I've only ever had a coin pull or tear I'm going to have you know a little bit of black and blue on my leg from the groin tear other than I've never been injured I'm 36 24 years competing so that to me is a good sign that you know what you're doing the next thing is is that it actually when I go back to getting stronger I noticed that when I only focus on my weaknesses so right now my emphasis is not the heavy weights it's the hard accessory we're fixing the weak points and whatever I decide those maybe this year is as you know you know once you get super strong it might take a year to get one or two percent better and one little thing because the muscles like wait a minute we're about as far as we want to go you know so it takes six or eight months so it allows me to focus on my weaknesses back off some of the bigger weights it doesn't mean I don't use a max every day I just don't go 100 miles an hour I do what my body wants to do that day and if it feels weak I don't push it if it feel strong I push it a little farther in the in season when I'm getting ready for me it's it doesn't have a choice whatever weight I decide that needs to be done that day I make myself do so I have training I get a mental break I get a physical break I work on a different part of my athletic abilities and then the other half of the year I work on getting super strong right they got saved my ass in my 30s because if I would have just stayed big and strong one I'd probably have more health problems to my joints would slowly be wearing down and I probably be towards the end of my career versus I feel better now than I did want to trained at Westside because I listen to my body so that that's kind of my philosophy on how to workout so if you had to give advice to a relative beginner lift or maybe two three years of training experience who really wants to do conjugate style training what would that advice be well the first thing is is go to somebody that knows technique you have to be perfect like you know if you watch me squat or bench press or deadlift my back does around my knees don't come in my chest stays up you know all the things that me and you hold in high regard to try to squat massive weights that is not the issue anymore and the reason is because it's been engrained in my head for you so the first thing is is ingrain the proper motor pattern that's going to give you lasting results and also keep it from getting hurt the next thing the more conjugate focused is go to somebody that makes you do things you don't like to do not the things you like to do I mean a lot of people I think like to use systems that Pat them on the back every week my system will not do that my system will find your weakness and kill it and initially that's going to make you weaker so reiterating back to when I first found Westside and the conjugate system and the books and the text when I initially trained to that system the first year and a half I got weaker so I want everybody to know that the first year and a half I got weaker now why did I get weaker I was used to exorbitant amounts of volumes bested specifically in the area in which I was training lots of squats for reps lots of dentals reps lots of pitches for reps that's all I knew so when I initially backed all that volume down initially I got weaker because I was doing less specificity but then over time it reborn and I got better so there was a transition point so we put bevel and been a lot do you feel like you lost to me muscle a little bit I mean I didn't feel like I lost any muscle I felt like I lost attachment to the specific weight mm-hmm like a 500 now felt insanely heavy because I hardly added my hands ever yeah that that more so than I thought I actually put more muscle on because I was working on my weaknesses but I felt like I was detached from what those weights felt like because every week you get a reinforcement okay this is 800 okay this is a 20 ok this is a 40 so I do that in my system now but it's separated just long enough three weeks away that you know my body is ready to do it again uncertainly as the as the way it's become heavier in your more advanced lifter you're not gonna build a handle you know week after week after week of just add 20 pounds at 20 pounds at 20 pounds because yeah the time to recover an adaptive we have heavy sessions is too long I think what you have to ask yourself the next question you have to ask yourself we're trying to figure out what you want to do is how long do you want your career if you want to be as good as you can but a short on time you need to work on specificity along be good at squatting and eleking and benching and very little else I think if you want a longer career I think that the way to get there has to be in a more paths it has to you have to have more ways to get to where you're going because the problem is is it shooting straight shot through the woods you're going to tear down a lot of trees and you're going to up a lot of you know in the body to get in a straight line where you want to be although that would be the quickest and fastest way to do it so I think you have to ask yourself is conjugate for you you have to ask yourself are you in it in long haul are you willing to work your weaknesses are you willing to do things you don't like to do all the time and are you okay with only touching free weights occasionally me I feel great at that because I had a good base in it others you might have to do free weights maybe one max day than one speed day maybe not every max day but every speed day you might need to have some sort of free weights involve or whatever and that's going to depend on training age so you're talking that younger group they're going to need to be using more of a percentage of free weights more often yeah I think that's something yeah that I've written about before and I've already called how I would Westside it's probably four or five years old now but when when people talk about avoiding accommodation or you know getting getting accustomed to movement I could hope you'll make a mistake in making such wide varying changes yes but they go from you know straight bar back squat one week to you know safety squat bar Reverse bands change from the floor the neck already and and the body doesn't yeah the body doesn't know what's what if I doesn't know the deadlift is it no stress and state I just work and yeah but to introduce new stimulus I think can be done for the raw litter in a fairly narrow yeah scope if they front squatted one week and backs wide the next week and paws about it the next week those are all variations just of a more specific yeah and that which was something else like I think you're hitting on is that over the last 10-15 years that I've played with conjugate training I got 25 exercises that I know where I'm at at all times so I know if I hit say a double orange band from the bottom on a bench if I hit for 35 to 450 I'm getting over 600 I know that why because I've done it for the last seven or eight years and I'll put that in my trainings to teach eclis to test where I am so my point is is I have testers and I have builders so I think that's another system that always I'm thinking am i building something today are my testing something today what I do is in my system especially in the offseason is every three or four weeks I have a tester thrown in and then the rest of them are play around and stuff but 20 I got 25 variations or so is squats 25 variation a patient's a deadlifts and 25 variations of bench of flow variations and I might throw in a new one that I see or maybe you know you put something up or I see my variations are very ya can only do something or you know it ever it doesn't matter if I see something new maybe can only do a weird accessory exercise or maybe you do a different accessory guys I put that in but my training I have a system of exercises that I know where I'm at almost all the time but it's variable enough that I can do it every week so that's the balance is I think I probably point with close to 80 or 200 different exercises and I picked 25 then I know work for me yeah I think that yeah for those II as watching us make sure he says get 25 exercises you know for each for each exercise but he actually understands a correlation and an indicator that that's having yes I think that becomes a difficult thing too someone's using so many different exercises that they're not tracking it yeah so well that maybe this exercise went up 10 pounds yeah that they have no idea that that's a correlation right and initially we won't yeah that's the problem is initially you won't but if you were to ask me hey Matt can you show me a manual what you've wrote down and trained six years ago what you hit on the on the double orange man I can tell you yeah so I took me 10 years to figure out which exercises work which ones I can discard which ones I could put in it though now I have it whipped I have all the variability of change but I have the specificity of knowing where I'm at at all times and that's only going to take years of experience so that's the big trick is why does the system work for me I'm calculated in what I do I don't do anything that's not needed I don't waste any energy that's not needed and I know which exercises are putting at what times to make sure that I peak where I need to be that's the trick but it's a long-term process if we went so I could write that you know you're as skilled at the lifter as I am it would still take me a year and a half to figure you out a year and a half and you're already good so that's why I mean my system is more of a long-term situation because if you're already decently tuned and your techniques already really goodness still going to take me a year and a half to figure out well double weren't bands just don't do a lot for you they tear up your elbows too bad we can use that one we got put this one in and then once I figure out those 25 or 30 exercises that we can play with now I just throw them in the you know throw them in the Powerball you pop one up take it there it is you know what I mean and make it as variable as possible with the specificity still built into the system we're Matt where can people learn more about you well my website winning strength comm spelled exactly like my name on one Instagram real Matt winning and then Facebook I have a community page where I post everything I post to my personal page because it's full now they're a fake men 20 and they're probably is I don't know I think Matt winning was a retaken so I had to do something quick so I just pop it in there but yeah there probably is a lot of faith Matt woody but we're gonna be on that thanks for ya I'm gonna talk with no problem brother

Channel: Juggernaut Training Systems

Views: 139,867

Rating: 4.9186506 out of 5

Keywords: westside barbell, matt wenning, conjugate training, juggernaut training systems

Id: BdOfNhF43oQ

Length: 44min 17sec (2657 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 22 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/Jaged4]

Matt is the right man to talk about conjugate for raw

[u/RugbyDork]

But the point is insert 5 minute ramble...

[u/Sshs152]

Just commenting so I can watch when I get off and have wifi. Cheers.