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“Noob gains” are real. The term is often used to describe the big muscle and strength gains that new lifters experience, no matter what they do in the gym. Research has shown that they’re not just in your imagination: In one small study, scientists had eight untrained individuals—"noobs”—do the same workout as eight experienced weightlifters, for six months. The new lifters gained three times as much muscle and five times as much strength as the study participants who had multiple years of prior lifting experience.
There are certainly physical limitations and other circumstances at play, but to Eugene Teo, the slowdown in strength and muscle gains has a mental aspect, too. The Australian coach and founder of the Ganbaru Method says the lessons you learn during that “noob” period could be contributing to why it’s harder to gain now.
“When you first started lifting… you could show up and do the most horrendous, horrific exercises out there and you'll get a response,” he says. “And that then creates that false idea that this is what you need to do to get results.”
In his view, guys need to get with the program—well, with a program. He spoke to Men's Health about the importance of choosing a structured strength training program versus just trying to do more. He also outlines when and why he thinks you should train to failure, why the front- and rear-foot elevated split squats should be in every guy’s exercise repertoire, and offers up a quad- and hammy-smashing 20-minute leg day routine to try.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Is a program the missing piece that separates a lot of guys from their fitness or physique goals? Kind of just working out to work out instead of having a plan that they train to?
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that a lot of it comes from how we first started going to the gym. No matter if you were in your 20s, 30s, 40s, when you first started lifting, you're going to make those newbie gains, no matter what you do. You can just show up and do the most horrendous, horrific exercises out there and you'll get a response. Especially for us guys, where even as you approach your mid-40s and -50s, you're still going to have, usually, a better hormonal profile than women would. This is going to allow you just get more out of your training, no matter what you do.
Unfortunately, this gives us this skewed view of self-confidence that we're doing the right thing. I'm getting a response, so it must be the right thing that I'm doing, even though it might not be ideal or it might be a completely randomized exercise regime. And that then creates that false idea that this is what you need to do to get results. And it could be doing too much exercise, not enough exercise, the wrong type of exercise, or just a randomized approach that will have diminishing returns. But by that point in time, it's already maybe six months or 12 months into the whole routine, and you think, OK, this is what I need to be doing now.
But of course, there's diminishing returns where it gets harder. And then you think, "Okay, maybe I'm not doing enough, let's do more and more and more of it. That must be the answer." And that's where people get stuck into this cycle of doing more and more work, but getting less of a response or even getting a negative response—getting injured. And all of that, in my opinion, can be addressed by having a methodical plan.
You mentioned working too hard and things like that. What are some mistakes that you see guys make when they do choose a plan?
Most people, if they've been training for a little while, will be familiar with the idea of progressive overload, where you need to—in some way—overload your body. Now, a lot of people will take that and the meaning of it and think, OK, I'm get a little more weight. But it's not about lifting more weight all the time. It's about in some way progressively overloading the stimulus placed upon your body. And that's what's going to initiate some kind of adaptation or some kind of response from your body. It's all about working out what stimulus you want. And then, how do I increase that over time?
And that's the mistake. People are taking on a program without understanding what stimulus it's training. Some are going to be more strength- and power-based. Some are going to be pure muscle-building for aesthetics. Some are going to be more for conditioning. Some for more functional aspects or more movement and mobility.
Now, if you come in saying I want to be as strong as humanly possible, but then you choose a program that has more of a stimulus based around mobility or improving your fitness or improving your overall health or improving muscle mass, you're going to be getting less out of it. And then it doesn't matter what split you're following, what exercises you're doing, or what rep scheme.
So I think guys need to get a little bit better, a little bit more educated at understanding for themselves. What stimulus do you really want right now? And it could be that I want to get bigger. I want to get stronger, I want to feel better, and I want to move better. You can't do all five things at once. You need to focus on what's most important right now. Maybe I'm carrying a little bit extra body fat on my body right now, so I focus on that first. Maybe I can't move as well as I'd like to. I can't reach over the touch my toes comfortably without my back screaming at me, maybe I should do something that improves mobility first. And then that helps you sort of navigate the sea of programs.
Is there a problem of ego, too? Do you think some guys struggle because they're not able to put aside something that they usually measure themselves by, like moving big weight in the gym—even if it's not helping their goal?
Big time. I think it's part of the human condition. We're so driven by emotional bias, where you just want to do things that we've always done in the past or we we want instant gratification. It's very hard for us to conceptualize this idea of delaying doing what we enjoy doing right now. Like putting away the big, heavy weights right now in order to lift heavier, bigger weights in the future by doing some mobility or some more restorative work right now.
And because we have these deep-rooted biases in the newbie period—"I always made progress like this." Why can't I keep making the same progress? It's hard to compute.
Some people that I know have been doing the same workout with the big five lifts for 20, 30 years, and they see results and stick with it. But I talk to other guys who crave a bit of novelty in their workouts. If somebody wants to stay on a program, but they're a person who craves a little bit of novelty, how can they give themselves that little bit of ice cream to go with the spinach?
It comes down to structuring your program as your primary focus, and then having a secondary focus and tertiary or accessory focus. And the primary stuff is should be the main goal. That's the spinach or the broccoli. Focus on that. And then the rest of the workout is a bit more, I guess, free time for you to do other things.
I used to schedule myself a "broccoli day" where I would call it broccoli. That would be things I didn't enjoy training, like training arms. I don't like training shoulders, so I would put those things in on a separate day. Now, having a separate day for that kind of works when you're doing a bodybuilding plan—we have different body part days.
But if you're doing more of a strength or power or functional training kind of program, it may not lend itself to being able to have a separate day. Let's say it's mobility that you don't really want to do. You can't do all your mobility stuff just on the final day and think you're going to get better. So that's where it comes down to taking the primary focus of the workout and focusing on that. Then sprinkle in the five minutes, 10 minutes at the end of the session and do those other things. Now, if you're the kind of person who won't do it because you've got to go home, then I say do it at the start. Or if it's like mobility or something, do it between other exercises or between sets.
And that's one of my favorite ways to incorporate exercises would be to stagger it in between what you're already doing. Let's say you really love the heavy weights and you really can't stand doing abdominal work. In between every single set of your squats or in between exercises, shove the ab work in there. And that can be active rest periods to help keep the intensity of the workout up. Or it might be something where you take it as a methodical exercise on its own with its own rest periods. But squeezing it in that way is a simple way to get the bang for your buck out of your workout.
Speaking of doing things when they fit your goals, you recently wrote a post about how you sometimes train to failure, but don't at others. Why is training to failure important to you? And when is it not part of what you prescribe or what you do?
I use training to failure as a teaching tool and as a benchmark to bring awareness to where my limits really are, because that's something that is constantly changing.
There was some research on trained individuals that put them on a series of exercises and said, okay, tell us when you think you've hit your failure point. And these individuals were saying that they've got 10 reps, and they've hit failure. And they were off by between 10 to 20 repetitions in terms of their gauge, for their for their failure points.
If you could do double the amount of reps, but it was your mind or your perception of where the limit really was versus what your body was physically able to achieve that was holding you back? That's huge. Because when it comes down to creating change in the body, whether it's improving mobility, improved strength, recruiting muscle mass, it's all about inducing stress to your physique over time. Progressive overload is about progressively overloading stress. If you're not really taking a body to a point that's really stressful, which is close to that failure point, which is around between two to five reps away from complete failure—if you're not doing that, you're going to be still accruing work in the gym, but not getting much of a response. If I knew that I could squat 100 kg (225 pounds) for five reps, but I only ever trained using 50 kg for five reps, I actually won't get any results. I might get smaller over time. I'd get weaker over time, but I'm still accruing time spent in the gym. I'm still accruing wear and tear on my body. I'm still expending resources to do the 50 kilos. And that's a big mistake people are making is they're doing work, they're showing up consistently, they're training hard, but it's not at that threshold that creates the response.
So I incorporate training to failure regularly as a reminder. It tells me, this is where your limit really is. So it might be on the final set of every exercise that I might take it to complete failure. Or it might be once a week. It might be one week out of four weeks.
I try not to do it every single set, every single training session, because that's where it starts to beat up your recovery too much. So there's a little bit of guesswork there as to what the best approach is for the person to take. For a beginner, I might say to train the failure a lot more often than for a more advanced trainee. Because a beginner will still need to learn the skill of what failure really is, whereas the advanced person, their failure is true failure. And if [the advanced person did] it all the time, something will snap.
How often can or should someone be changing their plan and changing their goal? If you're one of the people who has five goals at the beginning, how long do you think people should be sticking to a specific program, and how often switching it up?
If there's no strict deadline, which is 99 percent of us who aren't elite level athletes where there is no deadline, I say stick with a program for as long as you enjoy it and make progress on it. And that could be maybe only a few weeks, if they stop enjoying it or they stop getting results. Some people do adapt faster than other people. But again, for other people, it could be months on years following pretty much the same routine. You can stay on the same theme of the workout for a very, very long time.
I really always bring it back to your individual response: Are you still enjoying things? Are you still making some kind of meaningful progress long term with it?
Everyone has different goals, different programs, different responses. But are there things you think everyone should do? What are a couple of exercises or a couple of movement patterns that you think every guy can and should be doing, no matter their program?
I don't want to say "you must deadlift" or "you must squat with a barbell." But it could be, "you must do some kind of knee bend, some kind of hip bend motion." So it could be a thrust. It could be a Romanian deadlift. It could be a single-leg split squat instead of a full barbell squat.
I focus on that lower half a lot more than anything else because I think that's what most people neglect—not just men, but also a lot of what our lifestyles in general don't really put us into. So if I had to choose one, actual usable movement for people, it would probably be a front-foot elevated split squat, or it would be a Bulgarian split squat, where the rear leg is elevated. It's a single leg motion. You're training both the hip joints and the knee joints. And depending how you do it, you'll be able to take both legs joints through a very large range of motion, which we really don't do that much. And and that will start to open things up for a lot of people. That's going to cover everything from leg strength, muscle mass stimulus, and also mobility because of the positions you're putting your body into.
In July, you wrote a post about different exercises stressing the muscle at different lengths and different contractions. Can you talk about that a bit, and how thinking about that impacts exercise selection? Is that important to help guys maybe address a spot where they might be weaker or might be stronger within a movement pattern?
That's a very exciting area because it's kind of overlooked for a lot of people. It can get a little bit nerdy, but it helps to explain some of these overarching principles that we care about for muscle building, strength, and also for mobility and joint health.
The simplest way to first understand what we're talking about is you can contract your muscle in different positions. So if we talk about the biceps and somebody said, "Hey, flex your biceps." Most people are going to put their arm up like this [in a classic bicep flex position, with the elbow up]. You bring the arm up into what's called its shortened position. Now what that really means, technically, is the actual muscle itself, all of its fibers are being squished up together as much as possible.
Now you can also flex your biceps with a completely straightened elbow. You know that you don't feel much of it. It doesn't give you that same squeeze-y sensation or that same satisfaction in terms of the sensation. But technically, you can flex your biceps there. That is where all the fibers are now lengthened, or stretched out. There's a different amount of sensation associated with that. Does that mean that flex in the bicep up by your side is better than down by your side? No, it just means that it's a different position. But we tend to gravitate more towards what feels good, which is going to be in a shortened position.
The same thing applies to all exercises, all muscle groups. They'll tend to give you that really strong mind-muscle connection when you take the muscle to that squished up, shortened position. And we tend to think that must be great exercise. But then we start to neglect that other position, which where the muscle's lengthened out. And that's really, really important because that joint angle for the arm, for example, where your elbow is completely straight, that's where you can be prone to a lot of injury. That's where you can be prone to a lot of weakness as well. And from a muscle building perspective, that's where you can also induce a lot of change. But we don't pick exercises that really stress our body when the arm is in that position as regularly.
So a quick contrast example that would be a concentration curl, where the arm's really up by shoulder height and you get the contraction there. The opposite would be doing something like a preacher curl where you feel where the weight is applying the most resistance when your elbow's completely straight.
The same thing happens in the chest. Most chest exercises that we do—dumbbell press, bench press, pushups, dips—all of those exercises are really hard at the bottom position. The muscle's really lengthened out, which is great. But what are we doing for the muscle in that really squeezed in contracted position? We're not really doing that as much. Maybe a cable crossover, but a lot of guys will do dumbbell flys instead, thinking "it's the same thing. It's a fly motion."
You need to train your joints how to manage load and manage resistance when it's in that squeeze position. But from a muscular development perspective, when things are squeezed and shortened and tight, that's where guys are going to be able to get that "inner chest." I would suspect that a big reason that guys don't have that filled-in look to the chest is that they don't really have any exercises that stress the chest when it's contracted like that, when it's put into that shortened position. So depending on the muscle group, depending on exercise you're using for it, there's a big opportunity there for you to be making up for some lost time or some covering some lost ground.
You may be doing five or six chest exercises or five or six bicep exercises. But they all might be applying stress to the same in the same area in the same position. And at that point, you're securing a lot of stress, but not really getting that full range of motion benefits.
You mentioned earlier that you focus a lot on the lower half. That's an understatement: You're a leg day monster! What's a finisher or quick leg day session that guys can try to go out and smash their legs this week?
We can actually incorporate it into some of that muscle length speak from before. I would do this ideally as a three-exercise giant set, but it could also be done separately if your gym doesn't allow for it. It's still going to great create the stress that you want. You want to choose an exercise for that shortened position, for that middle position and for that lengthened position, but the order you do them is very important. And this comes down to the nerdy side of things. You're strongest in the middle position, which is why we can lift the most weight on things like squats and leg presses. You're weakest in the shortened position, which is why leg extensions and leg curls tend to be very light exercises compared to their heavier counterparts, like squats and deadlifts. And then somewhere in between on your strength is that lengthened position.
So what I would look at is doing something like a leg extension into a reverse Nordic, which is are those Nordic drops. Then finishing off with any kind of squats or leg press machine-based motion. That could be a barbell squat. It could be a leg press. It could be a split squat.
We're going to do these three movements as a sequence, ideally back to back. But it could be done three exercises in a row. That would be a very efficient and effective leg day for the quads. You could do the same thing for the hamstrings: Do a leg curl, a Romanian deadlift, and finish off with more of a standard, bent-knee conventional deadlift. Three exercises, done back to back. And that will completely just fry the hamstrings.
[For both of these sequences,] you don't need to use heavy weights because you're sequencing in a way where you are in a pre-fatigued state by the time you get to the heavy movements. [Even with lighter weights,] you haven't taken away from the overall stimulus and stress on the body.
For each sequence, do one heavy set of each exercise, then move to the next one. You can do the whole sequence twice, or do two sets of each exercise, if you're doing straight sets. If you do the quad sequence, it's about 10 minutes with rest. Same with the hamstring sequence. So you can do both in about 20 minutes. Your legs are done.
