Whether you’ve never stepped foot in a weight room or you’ve been lifting for years without seeing significant results, figuring out how to get big, strong, and jacked can feel overwhelming. There are endless programs, conflicting opinions, and a lot of noise about what actually works.

Today on the show, Paul Horn offers a grounded, field-tested take on what really helps average guys get stronger and more muscular — without burning out. Paul is a strength coach and the author of Radically Simple Strength and Radically Simple Muscle. We discuss why you need to get strong before you get shredded, how and why Paul modified the classic Starting Strength program, the strength benchmarks men should be able to hit, when to shift from powerlifting to bodybuilding-style training, why you should train your lower body like a powerlifter and your upper body like a bodybuilder, the physique signal that shows you’re in shape, the body fat percentage every man should get down to at least once in his life, and more.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Podcast #154: Strength Training for Everyone
• AoM Podcast #302: My Workout Routine & The Benefits of a Strength Coach
• AoM Podcast #826: From Novice to Advanced — The Weightlifter’s Journey
• AoM Article: The Re-Rise of the Machines
• AoM Article: Getting Ripped vs. Getting Strong
• Paul’s video on how to stretch your shoulders for the low-bar back squat
• Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe
• AoM barbell training videos with Mark Rippetoe

Connect With Paul Horn

• Paul’s website

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Transcript Coming Soon

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Whether you’ve never stepped foot in a weight room, or you’ve been lifting for years without seeing significant results, figuring out how to get big, strong and jacked can feel overwhelming. There are endless programs, conflicting opinions, and a lot of noise about what actually works today on the show. Paul Horn offers a grounded field tested take on what really helps average guys get stronger and more muscular without burning out. Paul’s a strength coach and the author of radically Simple strength and radically Simple Muscle. We discuss why you need to get strong before you get shredded, how and why. Paul modified the classic Starting strength program. The strength benchmarks men should be able to hit when to shift from power lifting to bodybuilding style training. Why you should train your lower body like a powerlifter and your upper body like a bodybuilder, the physique signal that shows you’re in shape. The body fat percentage every man should get down to at least once in his life and more after the show’s over. Check out our show notes at aom.is/SimpleMuscle.

All right, Paul Horn, welcome to the show.

Paul Horn:

Yeah, thank you. I’m glad to be here.

Brett McKay:

So you are a barbell coach. We’ve met at a Starting Strength conference a long, long time ago. You’ve actually helped me with some, when I was doing the low bar squat, I was having some issues with shoulder tightness getting under the bar, and you were very kind to give me a tutorial on a stretch on how to make that happen.

Paul Horn:

For myself, that is my biggest contribution to the literature. I figured out a shoulder stretch and made a YouTube video, and to this day it’s my most popular YouTube video I’ve ever put up.

Brett McKay:

It’s important information. Well, let’s talk about your background a bit. You’ve been training for decades and you’ve been a coach for a long time too. How did you get started with barbell training? What were you doing before that? When did you decide I got to pick up the iron?

Paul Horn:

Yeah, well, I was wasting a lot of time in the gym. Most young guys are when they start lifting. The short version is I was a vegan in college and I’m six one. I weighed about 160 pounds and I was a camp counselor and some of the other coaches were older and kind of bros and thought, we’re going to take you to the gym and try and bulk you up a little bit. And I went and absolutely loved it. Got hooked on the training, but my muscles were seizing up. I was cramping a lot and my buddy in his bro frat boy wisdom was like, Hey man, I think maybe you need some protein.

And so it went from being a vegan to eating tuna fish and then chicken and then full carnivore now. And so that was great. Towards the end of college I had bulked up quite a bit and just again, doing bro workouts and things that you find on the old bodybuilding.com and T Nation and all the websites that we used to go to. And then I got hurt and I ended up having my first shoulder surgery from bench pressing. So I was out for three months for the first time since I had started lifting. And I thought I should try and figure out why that happened and maybe if there’s a right way to bench press because when you’re a college guy and you’re just screwing around in the gym, you just look at what the other bigger guys are doing and copy them and they don’t know what they’re doing.

So in that hiatus, I stumbled across this book called Starting Strength. And since I couldn’t lift, I just read about lifting and it was, as you know, the best book on how to do the basic barbell lifts and why you should do them that I’ve ever read. And it blew me away. I was like, I’ve never heard it explained this clearly. So I went back to my college gym after I recovered from surgery and I started doing the Starting Strength program. And this was a time when the gym had one squat rack and no one was ever in it and no one had seen a pair of weightlifting shoes, belts were Velcro and nylon. And I just started doing this thing where you squat three times a week, which was crazy. We’d squatted maybe if we squatted, it was like once a week and you did seven other leg exercises.

And so I started doing this simple starting strength program and all of my gym buddies were like, dude, what the hell are you doing? You’re squatting three days a week. And I was like, I don’t know, this crazy guy in Texas told me that I should do this. And within about three months I was probably one of the strongest guys in the gym, which wasn’t saying much at the time. But then people started asking, okay, what is this program? What are you doing? Started asking me questions about lifting shoes and technique, and then I got really into it and my girlfriend at the time as a gift sent me to the Starting Strengths seminar in Wichita Falls just to, I just wanted to meet Rippetoe and he was like my hero. I had been reading all of his books. And so I went to that and back at that, in those days, they just kind of pulled you aside and said, we think that you should take the test for coaching.

We’ve been watching you and we think you might be a good coach and do you want to take this coaching certification test? Which was a very difficult test, but I thought, yeah, sure, what the hell? And ended up passing, I was one of two guys from that group that passed and came back to LA and thought, well, that was cool. And they emailed me and said, your name’s going on a coaching registry. I was like, okay, whatever. And I went back to my, at that time I was working a marketing job for a tech company and then within about a month I started getting emails. The book started gaining more popularity. People were buying it on Amazon, seeing how dense and technical it was, and then going to the coaching registry. And I was the only starting strength coach in Los Angeles. And so I just would get these emails all day like, Hey, I see you’re a coach.

Can you help me out? Can you help me out? And I’m like, I mean, I’m not really a coach, but I know a little more than you do. And so it just became so frequent that I asked my wife then at the time, if I could convert the garage into a personal training studio a little put two racks in there. And I just started training people before and after work and it just kept growing. And within about a year of that, I quit my job and opened up Horn Strength and Conditioning, which was the first starting Strength affiliate gym on the West coast. And it just blew up from there. I ran that gym for about eight years and then the pandemic happened, and the rest of the story is me moving to Idaho and all that stuff, but that’s my little bio.

Brett McKay:

So yeah, you’re starting Strength Coach, and while you’re coaching, of course you continued to train. You did some competitions, some amateur stuff, I believe.

Paul Horn:

Yeah, I was what we would call a recreational power lifter.

Brett McKay:

Recreational power lifter. So you’re doing the main lifts and then you talk about in your books we’re going to talk about today, it’s radically simple muscle and radically simple strength. You reached a point with your training journey as people say, where you started shifting goals for a long time, and I had the same sort of thing. It was just chasing numbers. How much more can I squat? How much more can I deadlift? And then you reached a point it’s like, man, this isn’t doing it for me anymore. And you kind of became a bodybuilder. Tell us about that.

Paul Horn:

I mean, that is, in my experience, the evolution of most lifters. Most guys get into it, they want to get laid and they want to look good with their shirt off and they just want muscles. And then a lot of it had to do with changing trends. CrossFit came out around this time at the same time starting Strength came out and there was this push away from machines and bro splits to like, Hey man, how much can you deadlift? And it became a thing. Strength training became real popular. And so a lot of us got into it and realized that, oh, this is now I have a real goal. It’s like a tangible concrete number, and it keeps going up. If I keep training and maybe you do a power lifting competition and you’re like, who cares about how big my arms are? How much can you squat?

But then there’s this point where when you start strength training as a novice, it’s fun. Every time you go to the gym, you put more weight on the bar and the stronger you get, the harder it becomes to put more weight on the bar. And so you reach this point where you’re like, you know what? I am not really enjoying this. What it would take for me to put two and a half more pounds on my press, it might not be worth it. And who cares? It’s two and a half pounds. It’s not a motivating training goal anymore. On top of that, again, as you may have experienced, most of us who were pursuing the strength thing got fat and we got hurt.

So you get older and the weights are heavier, they’re beating the crap out of you, and it’s not fun. And you put on all this body weight, everyone’s telling you, you got to weigh 275, and you just don’t feel good. You don’t feel like you look good, you’re hurting and you’re like, what am I doing? And we all seem to have the same epiphany around that moment in your training journey, as you said, where you look at the machines and the Hammer strength bench presses and the lap pull downs and the cable and you’re like, those look pretty fun.

Maybe I should mix it up a little bit. And then you sort of move back into bodybuilding. And if you look at the history of the trend in fitness culture, that’s how it went. The nineties was all about the bodybuilding, and then the two thousands was CrossFit and strength training and starting strength. And then everybody started shifting back to a little bit more bodybuilding. And now if you go on fitness Twitter, it’s just threads of guys posting, no one’s doing a squat at all anymore. It’s all leg extensions and rows and isolation work. And so I like to, I think what I landed on with my books and what works for me now as an older lifter is a mix of hypertrophy, training, bodybuilding stuff, but you still, there’s a part of me deep, it’s an intrinsic thing of I still have to squat and deadlift. It’s not a real workout. You’re not on a real program unless at least once a week you’re getting under the bar and picking something heavy up off the ground. So I assume that your fitness journey was very similar to that.

Brett McKay:

Very similar. So back in the 2010s I got really into barbell training, Starting Strength, did recreational competitions like yourself and just chasing numbers. And it was great. It was fun. It gave me direction. I enjoyed it. But yeah, I reached this point. It was probably 2021, 2022 where I just started hurting. It was like tendon stuff. It was just like the tendons, it’s just really hard, the tendons. And then I was just looking haggard and I was fat. And my wife, I remember she looked at me, she’s like, what’s the point of this? You’re like, Sisyphus just pushing up that boulder. You just go down to the garage gym and just go up and down. That’s all you do.

Paul Horn:

You come in and you tell your wife like, honey, I pulled 505 today. And she’s like, okay, is that good? You’re fat.

Brett McKay:

Right? And I was just tired and beat up. And then also I just started not enjoying lifting. As you said, once you get really strong, there’s diminishing returns on your training. It just takes a lot more effort to just add five pounds to the bar.

Paul Horn:

Yeah, the commitment, it is just you have to say, is it worth it? Okay, my last squat PR was 465. I went on vacation, I got sick. I’m at 405 now. Do I want to do what it takes to get to 470? Is that going to be fun? And a lot of times it’s not. And that’s okay. We hammered people so hard back in the day on, the only thing that matters is the number on the bar. It doesn’t matter how fat you are, it doesn’t matter if you’re having fun. It just matters that you put five more pounds on that bar. And I can tell you what changed my mind was owning a gym and relying on paying clients to keep coming back and paying me. And you lose a lot of clients if you’re like, look, I don’t care about your goals because my goal for you is that you lift more weight. And they’re like, great, I’m going to go to someone else. So yeah, it’s a balance. And that’s okay.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So what I hope we can do this conversation is talk about your philosophy towards strength training and then muscle building. It seems like you’ve landed in a nice happy medium. That’s kind where I’ve landed as well with my training. And I think this conversation will be useful for people who maybe have been lifting for a long time doing the barbell lifts, but I really hope we can get these guys who haven’t started strength training or weightlifting at all and get them into it. Because what you talk about in your books, it’s all about your goal with your clients is getting a little bit stronger, getting a little bit more jacked, more muscle, and then leaning out. And that is possible with barbells, along with some hypertrophy stuff, some bodybuilding stuff with a few dumbbells and a few machine exercise. And I’m going to talk about that. Let’s talk about for the rank beginner, when someone comes to you and they’re like, I want to get strong. I want to start strength training, I’ve never really done it before. I might’ve messed around with some program that I saw. People don’t read muscle magazines anymore on Instagram. What are the common misconceptions guys have about strength and muscle building when they first start working with you?

Paul Horn:

Yeah, well, there’s a couple. One is that, I mean, I tell them all the time, you are not going to look like you take steroids unless you take steroids. I mean, I don’t care how good you are at this. There is a difference between the guys. The Instagram influencers, like you said, are back in our day, it was the guys on the covers of the magazines and the bodybuilders drugs work. And there’s a reason that those guys are on the cover of that magazine. So one of the misconceptions is like, oh, I just have to lift some weights and I’m just going to be 250 pounds at 4% body fat. It’s like, it’s not going to happen. So there is that layer of misconception, but I think the big one, the practical one that most guys have to accept and they’re going to learn it one way or the other, is that you can’t get big and strong and lean at the same time.

You have to do them in order. And if you’re not big and strong yet, you got to get big and strong first. You have to build a foundation so that when you go into a fat loss phase, you actually have something to show off. And so many times I’ll get a young guy who’s a buck 50 and he’s talking to me about wanting to cut and wanting to see his abs. And I was like, and it’s just like, dude, you’re going to look like you’re sick if you cut anything off of your frame right now, you don’t have any muscle mass, so you have to spend a period of time, I use the word bulking cautiously because you can definitely get too fat and you don’t have to do that, but you do have to get bigger in order to get stronger. And that comes with a little bit of body fat hopefully.

And if you do it, you can skew it. So most of every new pound you put on is muscle. And so you still look bigger, you don’t look fat because you’re kind of filling out your frame. And then after you’ve spent a year, two years maybe working on your form, learning how to lift, adding muscle mass, all that stuff, then you’ve sort of earned the right to cut. You’ve earned the right to say, okay, I’ve hit some benchmarks with barbell training and I’ve put in my time and now I feel like I’m getting a little chubby and I want to spend six months trying to take as much fat off as I can while preserving the muscle mass. And that understanding the order and the importance of the order is like that’s the number one thing that most guys who haven’t done it think they can do it all at the same time and it never works. So they either figure that out or they never make any progress. They just kind of don’t look really jacked and they don’t look really lean and they’re not very strong.

Brett McKay:

And I imagine too, I had to learn this. That stuff takes time. You can’t expect this stuff to happen in less than a year, do the putting on mass and then cutting. I mean, you can make significant gains if you’re first starting out with your strength and your muscle mass, but really the secret sauce to getting stronger, getting more jacked, it takes time. You’re not going to see instant results after you after your first couple sessions.

Paul Horn:

No, it does take time. You’re literally building tissue. It’s a biological process that it does take time. The cool part is it’s persistent. And as you add on those layers, and then with intelligent bulking and cutting strategies, the first run in both the bulking phase and the cutting phase is the longest because you want to get as much out of your novice phase as you can in terms of strength and size. And so if you’re a true novice, that can take six months a year just to run out the novice phase, maybe early intermediate phase. And then the first time you cut, especially if you’re 25, 30% body fat. And if you’re going to try and cut down to where you can see your abs, which is around 10%, you got a lot of fat to lose. So that first block, their cycle of bulking and cutting is the longest one.

But then once you get through that, the cycles get shorter because you don’t put on as much fat, so you don’t have as much fat to take off. And the cycles get more fun because, or your training overall gets more fun because you see a light at the end of the tunnel for each phase and okay, a couple more weeks of this and then I can do something different. But yeah, it’s getting people through that first phase. And I’ll tell you, in my gym, it was the end of the novice phase, usually around the six month mark where they’ve been focusing on just driving up the numbers on squats and deadlifts and presses. And at that point it starts to get hard. They start laying awake at night thinking about their next workout. It’s a grind every session. It scares the hell out of you. And if they can make it through that and keep coming and not quit and get to the intermediate phase, they’re lifters for life. But I’ve lost a lot of clients where they’re just like, I don’t dunno, man, this isn’t fun anymore. And it’s grindy and then that’s it. They go sign up for jujitsu or something and we never see ’em again.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Okay. So for someone who’s first starting out lifting, they want to get bigger, they want to get jacked, they want to get awesome, those death star deltoids.

Paul Horn:Is that a thing?

Brett McKay:

I think I’ve heard that somewhere. Death star deltoids. I think a lot of guys, that’s their goal. They’ll immediately go to sort of a bodybuilder hypertrophy program where they’re doing four day splits, six day splits where they’re working one body part a day. You take a different approach. It seems like your first priority, someone who’s first starting out is just to get generally strong in big first. So what is the best programming for that?

Paul Horn:

Yeah, I mean the idea here is we’re going to spend some time laying down a foundation. We’re going to build a foundation of just strength and size. You’re going to learn how to lift. You’re going to be doing these basic barbell lifts for your entire training career. They’re always a part of the program. You may add other stuff, but this is really what’s causing the most stress and doing the most work is squats, deadlifts, benches, presses, stuff like that. So we need to spend some time getting proficient at those lifts. You need to learn how to push yourself. You need to learn how to unrack a weight that scares you and try it anyway, and then learn that you can do things that scare you and all of that. So you need a lot of reps. You need a lot of practice time under the bar.

And so a basic linear progression where you’re just, you come in and you lift one day and then you try and beat it the next time. So it’s five pounds, it’s two and a half pounds, but the program is very boring and very repetitive. It’s just a couple lifts. And the only variable we’re manipulating is how much weight’s on the bar. So very, this is why software developers love programs like this. They get it. They can wrap their head around it. It’s like, oh, I came in. I could bench press 95 pounds. Now I can bench press 185. I guess it’s working

And we want to keep it simple. You don’t need all that stuff. You don’t need six different chest exercises and you don’t need to be in the gym six days a week. You just need a simple program where you’re getting better at the compound lifts and just driving the weight up. And so the Starting Strength Program is a fantastic beginner program, novice program. My version that I put in my book, A Radically Simple Strength, was just a modification of that program based on training real clients in the gym and needing to get them in out in an hour, keep them excited, keep them interested in training, not to beat up, not dreading their workouts. So I mean, do you want me to get into the details of my Novice program?

Brett McKay:

Yeah, let’s talk about the general programming. Let’s talk about Starting Strength first. It’s really easy to explain whenever someone comes to me like, Hey, Brett, I want to get strong and bigger and jacked. I’m like, you need to start with Starting Strength.

The reason I tell ’em that, because it’s literally, it’s the best weightlifting program for a beginner, and I’ll tell you why first, because it’s just so simple. There’s just four lifts you have to do. That’s it. It’s just deadlift, it’s squat, it’s bench press and shoulder press. You’re only going to train three times a week. Anyone can do that. And then the workouts are easy. It’s just like you’re going to squat at the beginning of your workout three times a week, and then one workout you’re going to do bench press and then the deadlift, and then the next workout you’re going to do press. And then the next work you do bench press and deadlift, and then it just kind of alternate. You alternate between the bench and the press and you’re getting a full body workout. You’re going to get really strong. And it’s just so simple. It’s fast, especially when you’re first starting out. You’re going to be in and out of the gym in 45 minutes even. I mean, I’ve got my kids doing Starting Strength. They’re like teenagers, for them the weight’s really light so they can get done in 30 minutes.

Paul Horn:

Oh yeah.

Brett McKay:

And for a person who’s first starting out, I think one thing that keeps people from being consistent is just workouts can be too complex. They’re doing too many lifts and it just takes forever because doing seven different exercises with three sets of 10 with Starting Strength, you’re doing three exercises in your workout and it’s three sets of five. So the simplicity of it, I think is one of its virtues. And then also with the linear progressions where you’re just adding weight to the bar, incredibly motivating. I remember when I first started my novice linear progression, I was excited every workout, I was like, man, I’m going to add more weight to the bar. This is exciting. So you get that dopamine rush and that dopamine rush gets you motivated, and it just helps build that consistency for training. I was not someone who trained consistently before I started starting Strength after that. I am a guy, I am a guy who trains. Even though my training has changed, I’m doing different stuff now. Starting Strength helped establish that foundation because motivating and it’s super simple, and I think that’s really important for a beginning lifter.

Paul Horn:

As you said, this is something that takes time. And so you need quick wins. If you’re not going to be satisfied or excited about your training until you can deadlift 4 0 5, you’re going to be miserable. But it is a long journey. And so you need those little victories, those small victories of like, Hey, you know what? Today I might not be where I want to be. I might not be at my ultimate goal, but I’m better than I was last time and I can see it. And so you’re right, you get those little daily workout victories of lifting five more pounds than you did last time are enough to keep you going. And then by the time, for me, the big shift, what got me hooked was you do it long enough and then you look in the mirror or you look at your training log and you go, damn, I just went into the gym for an hour three times a week and I picked up some heavy stuff and my physical body has changed. I mean, it gives people agency. You realize, look, I might not be where I want to be in life, but I’m not useless. I have a say in how I present myself to the world, and it’s very motivating. And if you can get the guy to that point where you have this realization that I can actually change my own reality just with work, just with effort, it’s a part of you. You’re in the brotherhood of Iron for Life. It’s very powerful.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so starting Strength, it’s three sets of five. You’re doing three workouts with these four different lifts, you’ve modified it. What is your version of sort of a novice program?

Paul Horn:

So my take on the novice program, the main difference with how Starting Strength approaches it and how I approach it just again from it was a more practical strategy for running clients through a commercial gym. And that was starting. Strength is like the novice phase is your most productive phase. You eek out every little bit of progress that you can for as long as you possibly can. No matter how hard and grueling and grindy it is, if you can press two and a half more pounds, you do it. I look at my novice phase as the way that we’re going to get you to the intermediate phase because if we can get you to the intermediate phase of training, that’s when we get more variety. That’s when things get more fun. Everything becomes less grueling. You space out your workouts, you maybe have upper and lower workouts.

So my novice phase was like, let’s just learn how to lift. Let’s get a lot of reps in a lot of practice. Let’s build a reasonable foundation of size and strength, and then let’s move on. So I do ascending sets of five instead of three sets of five. So this is an old Bill Star thing. Rather than do all your warmups, take a five minute break and then do three sets of five at the same weight with a five minute break in between each one, we just do the bar and then we do a set of five at 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%, a hundred percent done. So your warmups kind of count as sets

And it’s real fast. And is it as productive for as long as the Starting Strength novice program? Probably not because at some point those ramping sets tax you a little too much, and so you’re kind of tired for your heavyset, but it’s good enough to keep the workout really short and make a lot of really good progress and build that foundation. And it’ll take you, you’ll be able to run that for about three to six months before it kind of stops working and you have to make some modifications. But every guy I’ve switched over to that program after running the Starting Strength Program was like, God, this is so much faster. It’s just like, I like going to the gym just, and again, if that keeps you training that little modification, then great, you’re going to end up in the same place eventually down the road. So that’s really the big one is we start out squatting, benching, and deadlifting, but we’re just doing ascending sets of five.

Brett McKay:

Gotcha. That makes sense.

Paul Horn:

And then we move on in the second month of workouts, we start adding in some chin-ups and lap pull downs, so we’re not deadlifting every time. And then in the third phase of the novice program, which is like workout 25 till it stops working, I start adding in some curls and tricep extensions just because curls are awesome, guys want to curl. So by that point, I think you’ve earned the right to curl, to throw a couple sets of curls in at the end of the workout. And again, just to keep it, you give people a lot of what they need and a little of what they want and they’re happy. So that’s really the difference between my novice program and the starting strength. And again, Starting Strength is a fantastic program and it works really well. I’ve used it for decades.

Brett McKay:

And so again, the goal here is just getting bigger and stronger, putting on muscle mass, full body, the focus isn’t hypertrophy per se. There will be hypertrophy, your muscles will get bigger, but it’s not like that’s your main focus, just get bigger and stronger.

Paul Horn:

Learning again, and learning the technique, like five sets of five ascending is that you get a lot of reps in there, you get a lot of practice, and we need that early on. And then again, it’s also learning how to grind, learning how to push yourself, and you have to learn how to do that. And so you need a lot of time under the bar and exposure to those sets that scare you towards the end of that novice phase.

Brett McKay:

For a guy that first year when they’re just starting out, they’re doing that novice phase, they’re learning the lifts, getting bigger and stronger. What are some good goals a guy could get to? What should they be going after? Are there any specific numbers you found?

Paul Horn:

Yeah, yeah. I mean the first tier of goals in my book are what we call plate goals, a 45 pound plate. So you want to be able to press 135, bench 225, squat 315, and deadlift 405. So it’s one plate, two plate, three plates, four plates, and that’s for one rep. So that’s the first benchmark that any guy can hit.

Brett McKay:

And if you do that, you’re going to be stronger than a lot of people.

Paul Horn:

Oh yeah. I mean the bar is so low, and especially now with the influencer trend away from heavy lifting and back to the machines and stuff, there was a period in probably 2010 where if you went to a gym, those numbers weren’t that impressive. And to competitive lifters, they’re not impressive. But to the average gen pop gym goer, especially these days when all the machines are coming back, if you could squat 405, you’re in the 1% of people at that gym and they’re very reasonable goals. They’re not hard to do.

Brett McKay:

And I think what it also, it makes you generally strong for life, generally strong and healthy for life. If you get those numbers, you’re not going to be beat up, you’re not going to hurt, but you’ll be able to help move your buddy on the weekend. And it’s not hard because you’re stronger.

Paul Horn:

Yeah, it’s a solid respectable foundation of strength and it’s attainable to anyone. And the thing is that, as you know, the numbers don’t matter. I don’t care if you can squat 315. I care that you’re doing a program and you’re trying to get a little better every time and you’re pushing yourself, but you do have to have a target. Guys need to have a goal because if you’re just training and you don’t have a, there’s no lighthouse you’re sailing towards, it’s hard to stay motivated. So that’s the starting point. And then once they hit those, we can either move on to what in the book, I call ’em hundo goals. So two hundred, three hundred, four hundred, five hundred. Lately what I’ve been doing is just saying, let’s take those plate goals, one plate, two plates, three plates, and let’s just, instead of your goal being to do ’em for one rep, let’s try and do ’em for five reps. So you’re going to end up you deadlift 405 for five. That’s your sort of phase two target. And then from there, there’s more goals, but most people never even get there. And that’s okay when as we talked about, start asking about more bodybuilding stuff, right?

Brett McKay:

We’re going to get to that in a second before we do. We’ll stick on this mass phase, getting generally strong, getting bigger when you’re first starting out, nutrition plays an important role. And the thing I noticed with a lot of guys that start training is they’re doing the program, but they’re not eating to fuel the gains. And what’s interesting, people have a lot of misconceptions about diet. I think people have more misconceptions about nutrition when it comes to training. Then the programming itself, because there’s just so much stuff out there. But really simply, what does a good diet plan look like when you’re in this beginning phase?

Paul Horn:

Well, the high level concepts is protein is the biggest thing. And you’re right, the hardest thing to do is not the lifting, it’s the eating because you have to eat three or four times a day every day, even if you don’t want to, especially if you’re a skinny guy, you got to eat more food than you want to. And when you get into a cutting phase, you got to eat less food than you want to. Diet is the hardest part of this whole thing. But the number one mistake guys make is they don’t eat enough protein. And it’s just if you’re not, I used to tell my guys all the time, if you’re not eating enough protein, then you are wasting your time in the gym because the protein literally builds your muscle tissue. So you’re doing all the hard work, you’re busting your ass in the gym, and then your body’s trying to rebuild, repair and add more contractile tissue, and you’re not supplying it with the bricks it needs to build.

So undereating protein and then undereating calories, if we’re talking about the novice sort of bulking phase for an underweight male lifter, they don’t eat enough food and specifically they don’t even eat enough protein. So carbs and fat, I try and keep this as simple as possible, just hit your protein goal. And at this point in my coaching career, I just tell everybody, your goal is 200 grams of protein a day more is better. If you’re 200 pound guy, fine, 220. If you’re 185 pound guy, 200’s, great. So for most guys, just hit 200 grams a day and then with those meals will come carbs and fat. And then just check your weight. If you get on the scale every morning after you go to the bathroom naked and look at the number, and if we’re in the novice phase or we’re in a bulking phase, that number needs to be going up every week.

So total it up over the course of the week. And if you’re a pound heavier than you were last week, you’re doing great. If you’re not and you go two weeks in a row, you need more food, it’s a math problem. You’re not eating enough calories. So the mistake that they make is usually it’s gaining too much weight too fast. So when you first start training, if you’ve never lifted, I always tell people in the first two, three weeks, don’t worry about the weight on the scale. Because a lot of times when a guy starts picking up a barbell, he’ll gain like 5, 10 pounds within a matter of weeks after the first month. That should start to slow down. And you want to hit an average of about a pound a week. If you’re a little fluffy coming into it, maybe you’re going to maintain depending on how much body fat you have, but if your body fat’s a little high, maybe shoot for half a pound a week while you’re trying to build this foundation of strength. But if guys, if you’re six weeks into the program and you’re gaining three pounds a week, you’re just getting fat, unnecessarily fat, and you’re going to end up getting to the end of your novice phase and thinking, well, this strength training just makes me fat. It’s like, you don’t have to do that. It’s a very, very modest amount of weight gain that you need to build that muscle tissue. Only so much muscle tissue you can build in a month, unless you’re taking drugs and it’s like two pounds of actual lean tissue. So that comes with other stuff. So at most, you’re looking at four pounds a month. Anything beyond that besides a rank, novice, underweight, 17-year-old. It’s like if you’re gaining more than four pounds a month, you’re getting fat.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, the trick is you want to gain weight, but keep fat gain to a minimum. You’re going to gain fat as you put on mass. There’s no escaping that. But the goal is make sure it leans more towards muscle tissue and less towards body fat. And I think, I know back in the day, starting strength, got a lot of flack for the goad gallon milk a day and all these guys just getting really fat and eating sheet cake.

Paul Horn:

Dude, we were so fat, we were so fat.

Brett McKay:

You don’t need to do that. You don’t have to get fat to get big and strong. You can get slightly bigger week to week.

Paul Horn:

So my first, I looked around at, I remember being at the Starting Strength Coaches conference and looking around and we had some real strong guys there. I mean real good lifters. And Matt was one of ’em, Jordan was one of ’em. And I looked around and I thought, I’m trying to make a little niche for myself in this community, and I’m not going to be the strongest guy. In fact, someone had totaled up all the training logs on the starting strength forms and ranked all of us coaches. And I was like, my strength was dead center. I was totally like mediocre. And I thought, okay, I’m 252 pounds. I’m fat. I mean, I feel fat. I’m never going to be the strongest coach, so let me see if I can just lose, lemme see if I can get down to 10% body fat. I’ve never done it. Lemme see if I can see my abs. And so I did and it took, but I think I was the first coach in our community to do that. And I remember texting Grant Brogue, a fellow coach, and I had just hit 10% body fat, and I took a picture in the bathroom mirror and I sent it to him. I was like, I’m thinking about putting this on Instagram and it feels kind of lame. It’s a picture of me shirtless. And he just texted me back, he’s like, dude, post it. And I did. And within a matter of a year, all these other coaches and lifters started just shedding body fat. And that became starting strength. As we’ve said, it’s fantastic for lifting. It is a horrible book for nutrition unless your goal is to be a 275 pound fat lifter.

Brett McKay:

Power lifter. Yeah,

Paul Horn:

Because a gallon of milk a day works. I’ve done it and it works, man. It’ll put weight on you real quick. But most guys, my average client is like, he doesn’t want to be a power lifter. He doesn’t want to be a bodybuilder. Just like I said, he wants to be a little bit bigger, a little bit stronger, not fat and not hurt. And so that first time through of learning how to manipulate my diet to actually get down to 10% body fat was sort of what I thought I could contribute aside from the more abbreviated novice program and stuff to fill the hole in sort of the starting strength community of like, Hey, if you guys want to really talk about strategies for getting lean, maybe I have something to offer. Done it. And then I did it a couple more times and I’ve gotten a lot better at it.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Yeah. So if you’re first starting out, put on some mass and if you’re underweight, make it your goal to put on one to two pounds a week maybe. And then if you’re already coming into it heavy, there’s a lot of guys who they’re starting out but they’re overweight, they’ve got a lot of fat tissue. You just reduce your calories, so you’re losing about a pound during that strength phase. If you’re bigger, you can get away with some recomposition, so you can put on some muscle mass while losing body fat at the same time. So yeah, you can get put on muscle mass while reducing body fat as well, but it’s going to be a gradual thing. You don’t want be no severe cuts where you’re reducing calories way low. You just want to lose a pound to a 0.5 pounds a week.

Paul Horn:

In my book, I sort of break the novice lifter into three categories. The underweight guy, the sort of fluffy untrained guy, and then the overweight guy. So if you’re coming in and you’re just a rail, you have a high metabolism, you’re a skinny dude for the novice phase, for the first couple months of the program, your goal should be to gain 20 pounds. And then if you’re kind of in the middle, maybe it’s gained 10 pounds, slow it down, go half a pound a week instead of a pound a week. And then if you’re coming in carrying a lot of body fat, what I say is just maintain, don’t try and gain weight. And because you will be able to recompose, so the only time you can add muscle and loose fat at the same time, there’s three scenarios. You are a brand new lifter, you’re already carrying a lot of body fat or you’re taking drugs.

So outside of those three states, you’re doing one or the other, you’re building muscle or you’re losing body fat. But so yes, for the guys who are coming in who have a high body fat percentage, just eat enough to kind of maintain, if the scale goes down a little bit, that’s okay. If it stays the same, that’s okay because if your weight stays the same but you put a hundred pounds on your deadlift, you obviously gained muscle and lost fat. And that happens all the time. Every time I have my guys do body scans at the beginning, like body composition scans at the beginning of their training when we start and maybe at the six month mark and so many guys are able to just recompose and it’s amazing and then it goes away.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, you got to do something different. Alright, so we’ve been talking about just getting for first guy, starting out, you’re going to do the basic barbell lifts, squat, bench, deadlifts, shoulder press. You’re going to work out three times a week. You’ve got your version of what a linear progression looks like, sending sets of five on the lifts, and the goal is to add weight each workout. Let’s say you’ve been doing this for a while, and then you have to kind of modify your programs. You can keep driving weight at the bar. Let’s say a client reaches the point is like, you know what, Paul, I’m happy with how strong I am. I’m generally strong. I can deadlift 4 0 5, I can squat three 15. I’m not going to do any recreational power lifting meets. I want to start getting jacked. I want to get those death star deltoids. What does your programming look like for these guys? Because it sounds like you’re going to keep doing these barbell lists, but you’re going to add in some other stuff. What does that look like?

Paul Horn:

Yeah, so like I said, the intermediate program is where things get more fun. There’s more variety and it’s less grueling. You have hard workouts, but you’re not squatting heavy, benching heavy and lifting heavy in the same workout. So my go-to intermediate program in the book, it’s called the Intermediate B program, and it’s four workouts and I have my guys run ’em over a three day week. We’re staying consistent with the three day training schedule that they’re used to, but we move from full body to upper lower splits. Now on Monday you’re going to bench press and then you’ll do a light overhead press, and then you’ll do some arm work, tricep extensions. On Wednesday you’re going to squat and deadlift. So I have you squatting heavy and deadlifting light, and then some chin-ups or something. And then the Friday you’ll flip Monday’s workout. So you’re going to press heavy and bench light and then do some curls and bro stuff just for fun.

And then the following Monday, so the fourth workout would be deadlifting heavy and squatting light. So it’s upper, lower, upper, and then the next week is lower, upper, lower. So you have one hard week where you have two lower body workouts, and then you have one easy week where you have two upper body workouts and one lower body workout. And so we’re spreading out the frequency. You’re not hammering yourself all the time. And the beauty of that is it’s flexible. So with upper lower splits, you can train two days in a row. You don’t need a day off in between upper and lower, which is nice. It’s a lot more flexible that way. And then the other thing I start incorporating, and this is where I sort of branch off from starting strength, but it’s something that I am very passionate about, is introducing rep ranges.

So before when you were a novice lifter, it was like, no, you get five reps. Your goal is five reps. If you don’t get five reps, you failed. Okay? And that’s okay. We all fail. You’re going to fail, but you have that target and you need to push yourself really hard. If you want to add more weight next time you got to get that fifth rep. When we get into the intermediate phase, I like to pump the brakes a little bit on the intensity of the live and die by the fifth rep mentality because guys are burnt out by that. And it’s like you don’t want to hate your workout. You work all day, your boss is yelling at you, your kids are running around screaming, you go to the gym and then you get four reps instead of five, and you’re like, can I do anything?

Right? It’s demoralizing. And so the rep range, what we’ll say is, for example, you’re going to squat. So you’re going to go in and you’re going to warm up, and then you’re going to do one set of squats and the rep range is three to five reps. So you have a minimum and a max, your goal is five. But hey, look, today, if you only have three or four, that’s okay. You’re in the range, you still had a good workout. The next time you just try again. What you’ll find is we all have bad days. Doesn’t mean your training isn’t working, doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. Maybe you didn’t get enough sleep, whatever. But you walk out of the gym going, look, at least I got three, so that’s okay. And the mental shift of taking that pressure off, it’s like one of the things I get emailed about most when guys switch from the Texas method where it’s like five sets of five rigid to this flexibility, it’s a mental, it takes a lot of pressure off and it keeps them really enjoying their training more and pushing.

If I tell you like, Hey man, let’s see what you got. Maybe you only have three today. That’s okay. A lot of times guys will, when they know that that pressure’s off, they’ll push themselves harder for five. It’s a surprising psychological thing. So we work up, you do one set of three to five, and then we do a back off set. So instead of doing sets across, we’re going to do one heavy set and then we’re going to take some weight off about 15%. And then you do another set for if it’s the squat, it might be five reps or five to eight reps or something like that. But if it’s the upper body stuff, maybe you push for as many reps as you can, but that other shift of you have one hard set, okay, you’re going to warm up and you have one hard thing to do today, especially on those lower body days where it’s like the deadlift.

Okay, look dude, you got one set of three to five today, and then after that we’re going to pull a little weight off and then you squat light, everything gets easier. And so just giving guys that everybody can do one hard thing. I don’t care how tired you are, I don’t care. Can you just get it together to do this one hard set? And then you move on. And those two things, the rep ranges and the one hard set, and then a back set is what I’ve found kept my clients and my current clients training with me. They’re not constantly failing.

Brett McKay:

So you’re going to shift to a four day split. That means you’re going to train upper body one day, lower body, upper body and lower body, something you’ve set in radically simple muscle. If your goal hypertrophy is like we’re not just working on getting generally big and strong, we’re actually going to do some bodybuilder stuff. You talk about your philosophy is train your lower body like a powerlifter and train your upper body like a bodybuilder. What does that look like?

Paul Horn:

So we’re talking about a trainee who’s gotten to the point, like we said, where they’ve established that foundation of strength, so they’re moving heavy weight. So these workouts can be stressful and a lot of them are like, okay, I did the boring workouts, I built this foundation. I’m strong and I want to mix it up. I’m feeling beat up. I’ve accumulated some injuries. And so the radically simple muscle program, which was just supposed to be A PDF, but ended up turning into my second book, I have guys shift to, especially if their goal is now like aesthetics. I’ve got this mass that I’ve built, but now I want to kind of shape it. So training your upper body like a bodybuilder and your lower body like a power lifter. There’s a number of reasons for that. One of them is exercise variety. So bodybuilding typically uses lots of different exercises, isolation movements, and that’s primarily because your upper body muscles can be segmented into basically pushers and pulls.

You’ve got your lats and your pecs and they do opposite things. So if you do a bunch of seated cable rows that doesn’t build your chest, you have to do some type of pressing variation, and those presses don’t really build your back and the upper body demands that there’s a reason for it. If we contrast that to the lower body, you can think of hamstrings and quads as pushers or pulls and pushers, but they’re both covered by the squat and the deadlift. Both of those functions happen in both of those lifts. So let’s just squat and deadlift. I don’t want to do seven leg exercises when squats and deadlifts work everything all at the same time versus, like I said, I can’t just have you curl because it’s not going to train your triceps. So that’s one part of it. The other part of it is aesthetics. When you size a guy up and we all do it, you see a guy and he’s like, that guy’s jacked. You’re looking at his upper body, right? You’re looking at those landmarks, those desirable aesthetic features, cap shoulders, a vein in the bicep, things like that. Okay, that shaping that is a bodybuilding. If you just focus on overhead presses, I promise you, you will not have shoulders. Would you say death star?

Brett McKay:

Death star deltoids.

Paul Horn:

Yeah. I mean, my shoulders never looked worse than when I was just pressing 200 pounds over my head. It just didn’t fill out the deltoids the way that something like very light lateral raises do. So there’s a bunch of different examples of that with the upper body. You need to do some curls. Chin ups are great, but curls, tricep stuff, it makes those muscles pop. And that’s what we want when we talk about an aesthetic physique versus the lower body. Unless you’re walking around with your pants off, your lower body just needs to be big, right? You need to have big legs and a big butt. And you could do that with just squats and deadlifts. So again, that will just squat and deadlift for the lower body and we’ll spend some time doing bodybuilding stuff for the upper body. And then finally it comes down to high reps versus low reps.

Bodybuilders use high reps. Traditionally power lifters use low reps. Your upper body joints are much smaller and much more sensitive. They don’t have as much structural integrity as the lower body. If you think about your hip joint, it’s like a sturdy ball and socket, your G glenohumeral joint in the shoulder. It’s like a shallow cup. And I’ve had three shoulder surgery, so I can tell you that is a very unstable joint, just banging out, grinding out heavy triples with bench presses and stuff like that, your wrists are going to hurt. Your upper body joints are not as tolerant of heavy weights as your lower body where you have more sturdy joints and a lot more muscle mass helping move the weight. So when you get into that phase of like, do I really care? Am I a powerlifter or do I just want to look good and feel good? Then maybe you spend some time bumping up the rep range in the upper body, taking the stress off a little bit with loads that are less likely to sort of fall out of the groove and end up tweaking something. And then the lower body, I dunno about you, I do not want to do high rep deadlifts.

Brett McKay:

No, that’s not fun.

Paul Horn:

They’re miserable and you don’t have to, could just do a set of five, a set of three. So squatting sets of eight is just, I mean it’s brutal and I use it sometimes for cardio development, but ultimately I have a hard time counting past five for lower body stuff. So that’s the philosophy is we’ll do the bodybuilder stuff for the upper body. It works better for the requirements and the demands of that and the lower body, we just take care of by training like a powerlifter. And at that point in my training, one of the biggest shifts that I’ve made is squatting and deadlifting heavy every other week, which I thought would be counterproductive, but it’s actually been, I mean, my lips have never been better with only squatting heavier every 14 days, but you’ve got to get to the point where you can make that work and we can talk about that another time. Yeah,

Brett McKay:

I mean, it’s interesting. My programming has kind shifted to that train your lower body, like a powerlifter upper body, like a bodybuilder. So my current split that Matt Reynolds has me on, it’s Monday is a lower body day, and I start off with a heavy set of deadlifts, and then I do accessory work after that for the quads. So I’ve got a leg extension machine in my garage gym. So I do some leg, not high rep, it’s like 10 reps, but going on heavy, do some calf raises, and then my upper body day on Tuesday, I start off with heavy bench press, just typical bench press workout. And then after that I’m just doing bodybuilder stuff. So I’ll do some shoulder work. So I do shoulder dumbbell presses, maybe some lateral raises. So the assessor work is more shoulder heavy. And then I’ll throw in the curls, tricep extensions, lap pull down, and then Thursdays is my next lower body day. I’m squatting, I got my first lifts to the squat. Then after that I do assessor work for the hamstrings. So I’m doing a RDL, and then I’ll do some leg curls for the hamstrings. And then Friday it’s upper body start off with the press. So I’m doing barbell press and I’m not doing a lot of sets. I do one heavy set and then two back off sets that are as many reps as possible. And then my bodybuilder stuff, it’s more chest focused, so I’m doing an incline dumbbell bench press,

And then some cable flies or maybe some dumbbell flies, and then I’m doing a curl.

Paul Horn:

Great exercise.

Brett McKay:

Then a curl variation, and then another tricep exercise variation and then a row for the back, just get a different, and that’s it. And yeah, my lower body days are fast because really there’s not much there. The upper body days take a little bit longer because like you said, you can do a little bit more variety on the upper body.

Paul Horn:

I’ll have to send you my, so at the end of, I added a program after radically simple muscle came out because I did an experiment. I was at a point with my training that I was just, I mean, I’ve been doing this for a long time. As my buddy says, my training partner, he says, man, I hate training. I just hate not training more that feeling when you haven’t worked, but it’s like training just got after decades, just I just hate it. So I was like, how can I make this fun? Let me try something. And so I decided to see how little I could get away with. So I just picked a couple bang for your buck exercises. I think I did a bench press, a row, a squat, a deadlift, a pull up, overhead press, curl lateral. I just one exercise for each thing. And then I just started doing one set and I was like, I’m going to try and hit eight reps. If I hit eight, that’s it. I’m done for the day with that exercise.

Then my rule was if I don’t hit eight, two workouts in a row, then I’ll do a second set. I’ll do a back off set. I’ll go in thinking one set, and it worked for a couple weeks. It was like, I’m getting eight every time it’s going up. This is great. And then I’d stick for two weeks. And so I’d do a back off set, and then the week after that it would move and so cut the back off set. And so I’m just literally, the workouts are like 30 minutes. It’s one set, and man, I’m having a great time in the gym again.

Again, it’s that mental thing of like, look, I’m only doing one set, so I got to make it work. But that type of program, and I always tell guys who email me about the book, the reason that it works is because I’ve put in the time to figure, to learn how to grind, to learn how to really push yourself, and it just takes time to understand what you’re capable of, that you have a lot more in you than you think. But if you’re a novice lifter, you don’t know how to push. So one set isn’t going to work because that one set isn’t going to be very stressful. But if you get to the point that you’re at where I’ve seen your deadlifts and stuff like that, and you’re like, look, Brett, you have one set, that’s it. That will be a very stressful set for your body. And it was totally an experiment. I put up a YouTube video about my new training experiment, and I’m never going back. It’s so fun. And the programming is so simple. Programming people make programming so complicated. It’s like, look, here’s the weight. Did you get all the reps you were supposed to? Great go up. Next time you didn’t. Okay, well, you need to add a little bit more stress. Then do a second set. Did it go up next time? Good. That’s it.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, no. Okay. So once you get to that point where you’re working, hypertrophy, workouts can become a lot of fun and it can also become really fast. Sounds like you’re kind of doing some Mike Metzner heavy duty type stuff there with the one rep or one set workouts with the exercises. I’m curious, guys, if their goals now physique at this point in their training when you’re lifting for strength, the goals are pretty easy. It’s like, well, if I just get more weight. If you’re working on physique, what are some good physique goals or benchmarks to hit for the average dude.

Paul Horn:

Yeah, so there’s two in my book, I talk about getting your bicep vein, getting arm vein lean.

Everybody always talks about abs, but you’re walking around with a shirt on most of the time, but you see a dude at the coffee shop and he’s got a big snake running down his bicep. You know that guy’s in good shape. It’s cool. So I much prefer that metric, and that’s just reaching a certain level of body fat. So numbers wise, I always tell guys that your first goal when you cut is 10%. You want to get down to 10% body fat. You should get down to 10% body fat once in your life to figure out how to do it right, because hard, I mean, for some guys, they walk around at 8% body fat, whatever. I hate you, not me, it’s not you. Most of us are very happy. Our bodies are very happy to not be 10% body fat. So you cut down to 10% and that’s usually where you can see your abs and your lean, but you’re going to look kind of skinny with your clothes on. You look pretty ripped at the beach, but once you get down there, now when you bulk back up, you’re going to skew more towards muscle gain than fat gain because the nutrient partitioning changes once you get that lean. So your body, it’s much easier to put on muscle and not as much fat once you strip it off. So the first goal is 10%, and then once you get sick of restricting of being miserable and dieting for that long, because getting to 15% is not hard, but as you start getting close to 10, your brain starts messing with you. So that last 3% is can be brutal. Of course, now we have these miracle GLP drugs that just make this whole process super easy. But yeah, my goal is you get down to 10% body fat, you can see the veins in your arms. That’s a good measure and pay attention to when that comes, mind pops up around 13%.

So that’s kind of my gauge. Do DEXA scans. So you want to get good at understanding your visual cues of your level of leanness, and then you’re tired of that. You want to go back, start moving weight again, setting prs, bulking back up. So we’re going to bulk back up until we hit 15%. That’s sort of my cap. Of course, I’m saying that to you right now at like 18% because I have not been taking my own advice, but traditionally you want to just cycle between 10 and 15%. That’s my approach to this. 15. You still look good. You still look athletic. You could still see maybe your top abs and it’s a healthy athletic physique. You’ll look good with a shirt on. You’ll look like a big dude. And then every so often you got a vacation coming up or a high school reunion or something. Maybe you use that as motivation to try and cut back down to 10 or 12% or something like that. And then you just keep cycling as you want to. But hitting that first 10 is hitting those first barbell goals, those tier one goals.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, that’s exactly what I’ve done. I did a pretty big cut in 2023.

Paul Horn:

How lean? Did you get to 10?

Brett McKay:

I don’t think I got to 10. I probably got down to 11.

Paul Horn:

Okay. It’s fun, right? Yeah,

Brett McKay:

No, it was awful. It was terrible. And then after that, I’ve just been bouncing back between, I’ve been hanging around like 15 to 12 is where I’ve been hanging out at.

Paul Horn:

That’s great. That’s great.

Brett McKay:

It seems to work for me. And the physique part, you got to to keep training hard because you want to maintain muscle mass, but a lot of it’s just nutrition. It’s just learning how to learn to reduce calories and be okay with being hungry and things like that. But again, it’s a skill that you develop and once you develop it, it’s pretty easy.

Paul Horn:

Yeah. You learn how to deal with the cravings, that you don’t eliminate foods, you replace them if you have a, I mean, have a habit of having a cocktail at the end of the night. It’s like you don’t just try and sit on the couch and stare at the wall, get a sparkling water and put lime juice in it and make it, there’s little psychological hacks for that last part, but man, yeah, it, it’s no fun. Your training, a big misconception guys have is, well, if I’m cutting then I’m going to get weaker. That is not true. I find that most guys can hang on to their strength in the gym. I mean, at least maintain. I’ve had plenty of guys set PRS during a cut, but it’s usually once it gets below 15%, 14, 13, then all of a sudden your strength just falls off a cliff and you feel like you’re a hundred years old and then you just got to ride it out and do the best you can to finish the cut and then get back to eating like a normal human.

Brett McKay:

Well, Paul, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go learn more about the books and your work?

Paul Horn:

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. This was fun. I’m glad we got to reconnect. Everything is on horn strength.com. That’s my website, and you can find links to books and all my stuff there.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Paul Horn, thanks for time’s. Been a pleasure.

Paul Horn:

Yeah, same. Thanks for doing what you do, man. I appreciate it.

Brett McKay:

My guest today is Paul Horn. He’s the author of the book’s, radically Simple Strength and Radically Simple Muscle, both available on amazon.com. Check out it [email protected] and also check out our show notes at aom.is/SimpleMuscle. Find links to resources we candel deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com. Find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, sign up for a free newsletter. We have a daily option and a weekly option. They’re free. The best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AoM. Take one minute to give a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think was something out of it. As always, thanks for the continued support. Until next time this is Brett McKay. And remember, don’t just listen to the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.