Jesse: Sub-optimal.
Sub-optimal. Sub-optimal.
It's just sub-optimal. Could it be any more sub-optimal? Absolutely the least optimal
thing I've ever seen in my entire life. Jeff: Actually, that's the most optimal
thing I've ever seen. [video] My name is Optimus Prime.
What's up, guys, Jeff Cavaliere, Athleanx.com. What is sub-optimal? Can someone please
explain it to me? Maybe it's only me and Optimus Prime that I actually feel this way.
Optimus Prime: It's you and me, Cavalier. Jeff: Or maybe you're a little tired of it too.
Because it seems that the newest buzzword in fitness right now is sub-optimal. You'll
see by the end of this video that we're going to want to replace that with something much,
much more important. Context. I feel like this word is one that's replaced last decades buzzword,
which was CNS Burnout. And maybe only three out of 10 people could tell you what CNS even
stood for. The issue is that social media and fitness specifically has caused this to become
a much bigger problem. Influencers everywhere are using this term and they don't even know what it
means. And quite honestly, it's the willingness to use the word in the first place that reveals
them as nothing more than an amateur instead of an authority. So why is this sub-optimal
phrase such a problem? Because it superimposes either the goals of the person who's saying it,
and that can be the influencer or the commenter, on you or more importantly, the lack of knowledge
by the influencer or a lack of full knowledge. There's a big difference between the two. You
either just don't have the knowledge and you say dumb things, or you don't have all of the
knowledge and you say things that may not be fully accurate. So, I have to just start with this one
here, because this is sort of encapsulating how crazy this can get. I actually put a video up a
while back defending the effectiveness essentially of the Biceps Waiter Curl as an exercise option
when it comes to building bigger biceps. One of the phrases that was actually used, and this is
what we call word salad when someone tries to sound smarter than they are, is the following:
That exercise is actually not effective because it creates and I have to read this because I
can't even memorize this, this is how dumb it is. Creates negative feedback of instability
at the shoulder and elbow joint, which is easy to mistake for increased tension on the biceps.
You're not really feeling that exercise when you're feeling it. All you're feeling
is negative feedback of instability, which is easy to confuse for a contraction in the biceps.
No, it's not. It's just dumb. So how do you call something sub-optimal
when that's your frame of reference? Because obviously that comes from a lack of understanding
and knowledge or credentials. I say you need to cut through that crap and look deeper. So,
if we were to take an exercise like a Barbell Row or Chest Supported Row, people might say
the chest supported row is sub-optimal. It's not what you should be doing. Everybody should
get out from the bench, get into free space and Barbell Row. I can tell you that if this person
who is performing the Chest Supported Row has a tweaked low back or a history of low back issues,
but they still wanted to develop their lats and build up their back or their upper back, they
might find that the Chest Supported Row is the ideal exercise for them that produces the exact
gains that they're looking for. Is the Barbell Row a great exercise? 100% it is. But for that person,
it may not be so It's not sub-optimal. It's sub-optimal in the eyes of the person overlaying
or superimposing their beliefs again about what is the better exercise. And if you're training
for strength and you want to move the most weight than the Barbell Row done, free standing may allow
you to do that. But what if the person that was on the bench in the first place wasn't training
for strength first and foremost? There is no sub-optimality about it. You could also take
an exercise like the Waiter Curl. And again, you can look at it and say, I don't like this
exercise as much as I like a Barbell Curl. And by the way, I don't like the exercise as much as I
like a Barbell Curl, but I really, really like the exercise because it hits all the high notes.
It accomplishes everything that the biceps need to accomplish. And the exercise,
specifically the long head of the biceps, to give you a really good option. And if you haven't
seen my video where I actually break this down point by point, I'm just throwing it out there,
not word salad, you throw it out there, you actually provide scientific context for why.
Context for why you could use the exercise, then you'd understand, and you might appreciate it.
But we can also talk about other things that people sometimes call sub-optimal. I'm sure you've
seen it before combination exercises. Any time you deviate from the individual exercise or perform a
variation of the individual exercise, whether or not you feel it more or it helps you more,
you're doing something sub-optimal in the eyes of the uneducated. The Problem is, what
if they don't know what you're training for? If you're doing an exercise like this Goblet Squat,
Reverse Lunge combination, the critics might say, this is not nearly as good as doing a Goblet Squat
alone. Or you should weight that a lot heavier and just do a regular Reverse Lunge. What if the
idea was not to do either one of those exercises individually, because maybe you're already doing
them. Maybe you're tying them together at the end of a workout looking for a conditioning benefit
or you're looking for metabolic benefit. There are other reasons why you could be doing
an exercise and you superimposing your beliefs about why that person should be doing the one
that you think they should be doing doesn't align with their goals. Therefore, there's
nothing sub-optimal about it. There are other instances here too, you can take an exercise like
the Dumbbell Front Raise that we know works the front delts. First and foremost, people might say,
never work the front delts, they get so much work, you don't need to do that at all. Well,
what if someone's front delts are underdeveloped in relation to their middle or rear delts? Look,
it happens. Muscle imbalances can sometimes rear their ugly heads in weird ways. If you
want to use this exercise, that's great. But for someone to see someone doing this exercise
and say that is not optimal, well, they would be misunderstanding the whole point of the exercise
because this is not a Front Delt Raise. This is a Plate Trap Raise. This focus is actually
on the whole other side of your body and your lower traps. Just because it looks similar in
how the motion starts, it is not the same exercise targeting the same muscles.
Therefore, if I was trying to train the lower traps, I would have a very optimal choice with
the Plate Trap Raise. So, context again is everything. You have to be willing to analyze
what's being shown to you with full context. If you're going to try to cherry pick elements of
that to fit your narrative to help you get the attention Mom didn't give you on social media,
that's not really the best way to go about it. You need to be willing to give full context because
that's where the real explanation lies. Now, I will give you a couple of professional examples of
where I ran into this. So back when I worked with the Mets, if we had a guy go down with what was
termed a hamstring strain in a game, within two days, we would have at least, and I'm not kidding,
100 letters in the Mets mailbox directed towards the Mets training staff on how and why that player
incurred that injury. His running gait, they could see it from a mile away. His running gait was off.
He's not strong enough. He needs to be bigger. He needs all of the theories of why someone had the
injury. Well, guess what happens? Oftentimes they don't have the full context almost every
time they don't have the full context. I can tell you there are times that the newspaper
itself termed something a hamstring strain just because it was a little easier to describe when
in reality it was a little bit more medial, we're talking about an adductor strain. So, everybody
that wrote in with their hamstring strain fixes aren't even talking about an accurate fix. It's
not even the hamstring that was affected. Or they'll talk about the running gait being
altered, not understanding that that person might have a toe inflammation from having a foul ball
hit off of their foot three days earlier and they're compromising the way they're running
now. Sure, they're compromised now. Was that the reason why they have the hamstring strain or in
this case, the adductor strain? No, it's just that they might have been running a little bit
awkwardly today. Could be a reason, but likely not because it's not a long-standing condition.
One of my favorite examples of this professional basketball, when this video of LeBron James
squatting was released, there were more critics online talking about how sub-optimal this was
and how horribly perform this exercise was. Even though he had a trainer standing there
with him at that time overseeing everything he was doing. They then critiqued the trainer and
said he was a horrible trainer. How would you know that? How would you even know what he's
doing? You don't even know what the entirety of his plan was. All you saw was one viral clip of
him squatting and you critiqued that. Well, what if the Quarter Squat was actually being
done intentionally? There's actually research that shows that the application of Quarter Squat into
a full training program has shown to increase vertical jump, court speed, and running speed
and their overall explosiveness. Not to mention increasing leg strength within that range. What
could be a very functional range for a basketball player who doesn't always squat all the way down,
ass to grass to go up for a rebound. How could you deem that sub-optimal when you
don't know the full situation? And again, as a trainer for professional athletes,
I kind of take a little bit of umbrage at this because I think it's just moronic when people
make those statements. I will tell you this as a strength coach, the most sub-optimal thing
that you could possibly do with LeBron James as the person standing in front of you is something
in the weight room that compromises his ability to step on the court. Because LeBron James ultimately
is not being paid to lift weights. He's being paid to perform and perform at the same high level he
has since he was a young kid. His strength and conditioning routine has allowed him to achieve
these career milestones in a career that he's not even yet done playing and has provided him
a pretty good life. I would say that I want to focus on him playing basketball and being the
best he can be. Sure, you want to get him strong, sure you want to keep them healthy and have him
do the right things in the weight room. But you have no ability to judge that from a single clip
of a squat that you don't like the looks of. So, this is one of the things I've tried my best
as a fitness professional here on this platform to avoid doing. Which brings me back to the Zac
Efron story. So, a long time ago I made a video about a chest workout that Zac Efron had done.
It was reported in Men's Fitness Magazine. Now I talked about the sequencing of the exercises,
the exercise choices, but I did so, as I always do, by first noting in that video how important
it is to understand the full story of why the things and the exercises that are being done
were chosen. [video clip] Don't ever assume that what's being done here or written here was meant
for everybody. Because this could have been written with very specific purposes based on
the information that the trainer knew about Zac prior to doing the workout and constructing the
workout and even the sequencing and everything else about it. That the trainer at his discretion
decided that these are the things we need to work on now, giving the trainer the benefit of the
doubt so that you could evaluate them without the bias that a lot of people will. And in that video,
I did exactly that and I pointed out the things that I thought could be a little bit different,
but also acknowledging that I might not understand full context of why the exercises were chosen.
The one part that I actually kind of stepped out and again, I regret, is I talked about
the absence of corrective exercises there. That there was a lot of internal rotation being done
through all the pushing exercise choices and not nearly enough things to counteract that,
to keep those shoulders healthy long-term, even though he's a young kid. Well, Patrick Murphy,
the trainer of Zac Efron, actually reached out to me personally, and he told me that it was actually
a little bit hurt professionally. And I actually felt really, really bad about it. The truth of the
matter was because the corrective exercises that he actually was doing weren't sexy enough, they
were chosen to be omitted from the article of what Zac was actually doing in his program. So, you're
not even getting an actual full story of what's being done. You're getting the sexy part of what's
being done because the magazine deemed that that stuff wouldn't really be attractive enough to the
audience. And they're probably right. But in this case, it was a discredit to the trainer who had
the program fully encompassing all the things that Zac probably had to do. So, I regret that. So,
I make it a habit of mine not to do that. Not to use that as the substance of my channel, because I
think we have a lot more substance to provide. We are the ones that can provide you with the
training and the knowledge and the understanding so you can take yourself to that next level.
Trainers do that on a daily basis. I feel like this is an anthem for professional trainers. For
guys that have gone through the hours of working with not just hand-picked clients, but clients of
all ages, people who have all abilities, right? And they've honed their skills to become better
trainers and understanders of context. And when you do that and you become a great trainer,
you influence people's lives, not just influence through social media. Making reviews of other
people's videos because they lack the content themselves to make an actual content filled video.
Not good enough for me. So, guys, remember, there's a big difference between sub-optimal,
which doesn't exist in optimization. We are trying to optimize what you're doing. There's many ways
to do that. Maybe your squat looks like a squat morning right now and optimizing your bar path
is going to help you to perform a better squat much different than sub-optimal. Understanding
the difference is going to help you to get to a much better place in your own training.
If you're looking for a little bit of help there, guys, I have a complete program over
at Athleanx.com. If you found this video helpful, make sure you leave your comments and thumbs up
below. Are you sick of hearing sub-optimal as well? Click Subscribe and turn on your
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