Welcome to the huberman lab, guest Series, where I and an expert, guest discuss science and science based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford school of medicine. Today, marks the second episode in the six-episode series with dr. Andy Galpin, a professor of kinesiology at Cal State University Fullerton. And one of the foremost world's experts on the science and applications of methods to increase strength, hypertrophy and endurance. Today's episode is all about how to increase strength speed and hypertrophy of muscles Professor dr. Andy Galpin. Great to be
Back last episode, you told us about the nine specific adaptations that exercise can induce everything from strength and hypertrophy to endurance muscular endurance, so on and so forth. And you gave us this incredible tool kit of fit tests for each of those adaptations so that people can assess them for themselves and then, of course, improve on each and every one of them if they choose, by the way, people can access that information simply by going to the first episode in this series with you and it's all there in time. Stamped.
I highly recommend people do that today, we're talking about strength and hypertrophy and so, right out the gate. I just want to ask you, why should people think about and train for strength and hypertrophy? And that question is, of course, directed towards those that are trying to get stronger and grow bigger muscles. But I know that many people out there perhaps have not thought about the benefits of strength and hypertrophy training and how beneficial it can be not just for people that want to get bigger biceps Etc. But
But that have other goals, longevity, goals and health goals, unrelated to what most people associate with hypertrophy. So what are the benefits of training for strength and hypertrophy for the everyday person for the athlete for the recreational exerciser, and so on? There's a wonderful saying I think it was Bill Bowerman, the founder of the founders of Nike. And he always said, if you have a body, you're an athlete. And I think that's very important for people to understand because one of the major Des Services we've done is
Old is convince people that things like strength training are for athletes or for growing bigger muscles and cardiovascular. Training are for things like fat loss and heart health and that is a tremendous disservice because it puts a lot of unnecessary barriers and leads to a lot of false assumptions. And then therefore poor actions, classic examples of this are people who are resistant to strength training because they don't want to put on too much muscle. People who only
On one type of exercise because they wants a fat loss or they're in it for longevity and health. And they don't worry, they're not worried about, you know, being an athlete. And so right out the gates we can actually draw back a little bit to what we were our previous conversation when I walk through the history of exercise science. And the reason I did that is to help you understand, these are the railroads that you're running down and you don't even realize it in terms of everyone thinks of strength training and they immediately default to our principles to optimize muscle growth.
And that's not the only adaptation. One should be after with strength training when we think of endurance training, we immediately default to things like again, cardiovascular health or fat loss, or things like that. What I really want to do across this entire Series in conversations is to just break that immediately talk about all the other things that you can do with your, with your training and so that people can be comfortable and confident in doing an optimal training program for whatever goal they have, whether that be specific like
Like growing muscle or nonspecific like just feeling better having more energy being more prepared, for life and Longevity. And so directly answer your question. I could really, we could do 100 episodes on the benefits of exercise and we could run all the way from mood and focus cognitive tasks to better immune function. You'll get less colds you'll be you'll fight them off more effectively to mortality, right? So some of the strongest predictors of how long and how? Well,
You will live our exercise. However, there are independent benefits that come from, just endurance training and they're independent benefits that come from strength training and so did just give you one categorically. The way that you want to think about, this is resistance exercise. And strength training is the number one tool to combat neuromuscular aging.
You cannot get that through any other form of exercise besides heavy overload strength training and we can we can walk through in detail what that is, but that is reason number one in general, human movement is is a function of number one, some sort of neuromuscular Activation so nerves have to turn on. The second part is muscles have to contract and the third part is those muscles have to move a bone, alright? If you want to be alive and you want to live by yourself, you have to be able to engage in human movement.
If you have any dysfunction in the neuromuscular system there then you're not gonna be able to do that. And again, as I mentioned, the only way to preserve that or fight that loss of Aging is to strength train. So people will tend to hear numbers like you lose about one percent of muscle size per year after age about 40 and that's true. However, what they don't realize is you lose about two to four percent of your strength per year. So the loss of strength is almost double that
the loss of muscle mass with aging muscle power is more like 8 to 10% per year and so we can very clearly see the problem you're going to have with aging is not going to be preservation a muscle. Although that is incredibly important. It's going to be very specifically preservation of muscle power and strength. And why that really matters is your ability to again, stand up and move your ability to catch yourself from a fall. Your ability to feel confident doing a movement that is a function of muscle power.
More than it is muscle size. And so functionality is really what we want to be right? You want to be able to do whatever you want to be do physically and feel confident in doing that as you age, that's going to only be obtained through strength training. So is it appropriate to say that training for strength and hypertrophy is also a way to keep your nervous system healthy and young. Absolutely it is the only exercise route we have for that. If you look at just basic numbers like motor units, you're going to see that
older individuals have like a 30 to 40 percent reduction in total motor units. So when you say older approximately, what ages are you referring to? Because I know many people out there, such as myself, are 40 and older, but I know many of our listeners are in their 20s, maybe even in their teens and I can imagine that people that start doing strength and hypertrophy training, younger will afford themselves, an advantage over time, but that everybody should be doing strength and hypertrophy training for as much of their life span.
As possible. That's really the message that I'm getting. So if somebody is, for instance, 45 would that fall into the bin of older? You're going to start seeing decrements past again, around the age of 40 or so now there's a lot of genetic variation there and a lot of other things go into that equation. Like your sleep and your nutrition. But that's a fair number to sort of think about one actually responses it's actually sort of counterintuitive. The wonderful thing about strength training is you don't actually have to start at a young age.
You can actually, then fact I was reading a paper this morning because of our previous conversation, it was in over age 90. So these are folks 90-plus and they saw improvements like thirty two hundred and seventy percent in things like muscle size and hypertrophy over a very short period of time. I think it was 12 weeks so you don't actually have to start. There are some adaptations that you're going to need for health that you got. You really need to start in your 20s. The reason I like to mention that is because if you are listening and you are 50 and you're like, oh shit,
Haven't been strength training, you're not toast, like you should absolutely start now, but you you're going to be able to get to a fantastic spot very quickly. Similarly, though, if you are 20 or 25 and 30 and you aren't lifting, there are still many reasons why you should do that now. And I want, I'd like to point that out, because a lot of folks would be like, oh my gosh, they said, I have to do it when I'm 20 or 25 or, you know, I'll be sort of screwed and that's not the case at all. There's really no age limit on this. In fact, there's actually
That just came out showing this reduction in muscle strength and hypertrophy that I sort of talked about is basically ameliorated with a preservation of activity. In other words, you don't lose these functionalities because of Aging, you lose these because of a loss of training to state that. Again, you don't lose these because of some innate physiological thing. That happens with genes become less sensitive or you lose functionality, you pretty much can describe the loss of function of strength and muscle and
aging as exclusively because of a loss of training and nutrition and anabolic resistance and some other things. So you can do a lot more than you think when it comes to maintaining high quality muscle. And that's really important to point out, I'm reminded of the words of the great sherrington, he won. The Nobel Prize is a physiologist, I guess the neuroscientist, try and claim him as a neuroscientist, because he worked on the nervous system. The physiologist claim is a physiologist. He is 100% a physiologist. I would call him a neuroscientist. Maybe we can argue
About this later. We well what I think one of the key things that sherrington pointed out was that and I believe the quote was that movement is the final common path and what he was referring to was the fact that a significant fraction of the brain itself is devoted to our ability to move and our ability to engage in resistance, type movements and that resistance type movements and the continuation of movement throughout the lifespan.
Is what keeps the brain, young and healthy, and vital. And there are some much data now to support that, but so grateful that you brought up early this fact that there's a neuromuscular link, because I think a lot of people think about musculoskeletal, they forget that the nervous system is really in charge of the strength of the muscle contractions and the types of muscle contractions that occur. I'm certain we're going to get into that in a lot of debt today or click close there. We're not totally right, but we're closed. Okay, well I look forward to being
Corrected and to achieving the Precision that you're known for around that discussion. So if we are to step back and say strength training and hypertrophy training, is critical for people of all ages. Yeah, for developing and maintaining the neuromuscular system and for our ability to function in the world, not just offset injury but the ability of pick things up and move etcetera. What are some of the other things that strength and hypertrophy training can provide
I know a lot of people use strength and hypertrophy training for changing their Aesthetics. Yeah. What is your sense about its potency for changing Aesthetics as compared to say cardiovascular exercise? Yeah. The the Mantra I always liked is the reason you want to exercise is threefold, right? You want to look good? Feel good, plug it. That's really that comes from sport comes from football specifically. We always say that and what that means really is you want to look good people, want to look the way they want to look, whatever that means to them and
Any versions of what you feel to be aesthetically pleasing and that's totally irrelevant. But people want to look the way. I want to look number two, you want to be able to feel good. What's that mean you want to be injury-free? You want to have energy throughout the day? You want to be able to execute anything, you want to. So whether you want to go surf in the morning, you want to play racquetball, you want to hike, or you want to do all three of those. In one day, you should have the ability to do that, and then you want to play good, which means you should be able to execute any can activities that you want to execute, whatever that means. All right, so backing all that.
I got it with your question. One of the major benefits of strength training is the responses tend to happen extremely fast, so you can see noticeable changes in muscle size certainly within a month absolutely within six weeks. And so we have this wonderful feedback loop that sort of tells. You am I doing this incorrectly? Oh my gosh. Yes, I am also, it's very addicting the feedback, the response to physical changes. Whether this is actually point two or three look, good feel good play good, or it's even just part one.
One. You're starting to see that when you compare that to things like fat loss, that Journey tends to be longer, it's more difficult, it's more relying upon other factors like nutrition, Etc. Strength training is really about like there's some very minimal nutrition requirements outside of that it comes out of the training and the feedback is immediate that's powerful because if you look across the literature, on exercise adherence you'll see that that is in fact the number one predictor of effectiveness of any training program
So what that means is if you were to put any variable possible and figure out what is going to determine whether or not this program works, this is what we typically call the methods are many in the concepts are few. So the methods of exercise, the methods of strength training and most of the methods of hypertrophy training which we'll talk about our are infinite. However there are only a handful of key Concepts that you have to achieve in order for that program to work, adherence is one of them and again is often the top one. So you need to do.
Do something you need to do something consistently. When you are getting that feedback and you're seeing results in your appearance immediately and you see that every single day, every time you take off your shirt, every time you look in the mirror, you see that result that tends to drive it here and really powerfully. So it's important to give people ins especially people who are not, maybe like you and I who are like, I'm going to lift weights and I'm going to exercise like no matter what the rest of my life, because I just love it, not everyone's like that. And so giving them a little bit of carrot of success and you,
You can achieve that in, say, three to four to five weeks already. It's very powerful tool. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is also a separate from dr. Galvan's teaching and research roles at Cal State, Fullerton. It is however, part of our desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme. We'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is momentous momentous makes supplements of the absolute highest.
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Ships in the USA, Canada. United Kingdom select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's a sleep.com huberman to save $150. At, check out today's episode is also brought To Us by levels levels is a program that lets you see how different foods and activities affect your health by giving you real time feedback on your blood glucose using a continuous glucose monitor, many people are aware that their blood sugar that is their blood glucose level is critical for everything from Fat Loss to muscle gain too healthy.
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The specific adaptation. They represent what I mean by that is when somebody is training for strength, what are they really training for? Obviously it means the ability to move more weight, but I know that it includes a number of other things as well. And when one is training for hypertrophy, for the growth of muscle fibers, what does that represent? Because I think if people understand that, they will far better understand the methods and protocols that are going to be best for strength and hypertrophy at it.
Score. You've basically described it. When we talk about strength, we're talking about an actual function. So can you create more Force across a muscle or muscle groups, or our total movement? When we talk about hypertrophy, when our specifically referring to just an increase in size, there's no actual mention of function. So a muscle can grow larger without actually technically being stronger for a number of reasons. However, there is a strong relationship between strength and hypertrophy. So a lot of the times in the general public in the leg
A conversations, we sort of lump those two things in as the same thing. And so we have to recognize people who are new to training or people even our intermediately trained, there is a huge overlap between strength and hypertrophy once you get past that though, they become disentangled and a good example of it is this. If you look at the strongest people in the world, this would be people who compete in the sport of powerlifting, right? That's a true test of maximal strength. So it is a deadlift and benchpress.
And a back squat, and you're going to do a one repetition Max and all three of those. And so, whoever wins is the person who lifted the most amount of weight one time. That's it. It's not like World's Strongest Man where it is. How many reps can you do in a row or your time, right? Is a true maximal strength test and you compare those to say bodybuilders. Now, both of those individuals are strong and both of those individuals have a lot of muscle. However, it is extremely clear, the powerlifters will be significantly stronger.
Then the body builders on average right? There are individual exceptions, but we're just talking Collective averages, and the body. Builders will have more muscle than the other ones. In addition, whether you look at Olympic weightlifting or powerlifting or world strongest man for that matter, there are weight classes. And the reason is, as you go up in weight classes, you will always see the world records, go higher and higher and higher, right? So you can clearly get stronger without adding any muscle. However,
There's a point right where you simply have to add more mass to get a higher number. And that's why we have weight classes in those Sports and in Combat Sports, and lots of other things. So we have the, there's a lot of confusion, right? Because people think, man, either these are the same thing, or if I want to get stronger, I have to get bigger, which is not the case at all. Another misnomer here is, I can't get stronger unless I add muscle. That's not true either, right? This is similar idea.
So what I'm saying is, you have the ability to do, whatever, you'd like, if you'd like to get stronger and add muscle great, if you add muscle, you're probably going to bring some strength along for the ride. However, if you want to get stronger and you don't want to add muscle for any reason, personal preference on Aesthetics, whether you're in a way class, and you simply can't afford it. It is quite easy to get stronger and not add much muscle math, either, and so differentiating. These two things is, one of them is simply a measure of
Sighs. And the other one is a measure of force, and when we talk about strength, what we're really talking about are two unique components component, one is what I call the physiology. So what it, what is the ability of the neuromuscular system? What is the ability of the muscle fibers to contract and produce Force? The other one is what we call mechanics mechanics is simply things like it's minutiae down to how long your femurs are relative to your tibia or other things. Like this is biomechanics. This is also
So, technique, this is skill, this is how smooth you feel. This is, are you firing the right muscle group in the right sequence and Order and all of these things play into strength. So somebody who maybe has more Force capability in their muscle fibers. But their technique in the movement is worse. May lose in a competition or somebody. Again, who's like, if you go into the world of speed and power, especially you'll hear a lot of people talk about like the Rhythm. And there's this a certain Rhythm that has to
Happen. If you want to jump as high as possible, everyone is about as fast as possible, but that's all mechanics at this fundamental level. So when we look at hypertrophy
It's just still simply about how big the muscle is. So those are the really the, the similarities and distinctions between strength and hypertrophy when strength improves. And when hypertrophy increases,
Is there also involvement in the ligaments and tendons, that is, of course, the ligaments and tendons are involved in the movement and yeah, but do ligaments and tendons themselves grow and or get stronger. This field is really difficult because connective tissue is not vascular and so their plasticity is significantly lower than skeletal muscle. In fact, if you look across all the organs of skeletal muscle is one of if not the most
Meaning it's the most pliable the most responsive the one that's going to adjust. It's basically, it's paying attention to everything that's being said in the body. You cannot change blood pressure or pH or macronutrients floating around without muscle knowing about. It is, in fact, this is why we call muscle and organ. People don't tend to think about this if you were ever on like Jeopardy and ask you that question like what's the biggest organ system in the body? People tend to say the skin muscles actually the correct answer. All right. Well I'm gonna
A sight, you when I get it. You're probably right. I don't have any immediate plans, but who knows. Oh, there you go. Celebrity Jeopardy. Had you here? Oh man. Wait, I don't know about the celebrity part but Jeopardy would be fun. Yeah, but I will say the muscle and I'll if you get a phone call in Jeopardy. I don't know. I haven't seen that show. No, very long time. Maybe ever, then I'll call you, but that makes sense, though. That muscles will be the largest organ system. Yeah, the reason I'm saying that is so muscle is both listening and talking it is controlling.
The immune system on its controlling blood glucose regulation it. Is it is the central Depot for amino acids which are needed to do things like regulate the immune system build, any new red blood cells. A lot of the stuff is coming from skeletal muscle. So when we say organ by the way, that's actually like a physiological definition. So something that's communicating to either another organ itself or throughout the system. So it's listening and it's talking connected tissues out the same way and so we do see
The adaptations with strength training in connective tissue. It's just much lower. It's difficult to measure. Effectively, what we know now is, you're going to have a combination of adaptations throughout the connective tissue. It is beneficial. This is probably one of the major reasons. That's a strength training, reduces injury risk, which is very, very important because people who tend to want to pick up an exercise routine after say ten years, the classic clichés like I played all these things in high school that I went to college.
Job. Now I'm 25 or 35 or whatever and you sort of want to jump back into what you did and you're 20, well, there's no tissue tolerance left and what we almost always mean by that is connective tissue, the tolerance in there is not ready for the load, you're about to handle and so you go through some movement and then boom, sprains tears. Even like the more significant ones around I keeley's tear, which is gonna really sideline you. So those are some of the problems and we know strength training as a large role in injury reduction for
Stress and strain and overuse injuries and that's specifically coming for the connective tissue out of tations. Again, the difficult part here is it's very hard to assess. We actually when I was a doctoral student we played around with patella tendon biopsies so I actually had one. This is like a little piece of your patella tendon missing. Yeah because your own. Yeah own lab. So now I've probably had I don't know how many hundreds of biopsies I performed on people probably well over 1,000 certainly well over 1,000. I've probably had
Over 40, done. It myself. There's no problem here. I have no Scar Tissue. I have no loss of function. And I've stuck needles and every leg like all over myself, right quads? My Soleus gastroc. I call up taking tissue out. Yeah. You want? The needle? Looks like a pen basically. And you you know you're lying. You go in and grab a chunk and you pull it out and we can I come to your lab and get biopsy? Absolutely. Yeah you're probably looking under the microscope, you'll just look like the molecule caffeine. There's a there's a mutual friend of ours who came down to the
That is a big, big, big gentleman. Big into lifting very into strength training and he he went through that experience and he was like, oh my gosh, it was not what he was hoping to get. He actually had unbelievable muscle morphology. His fibers were, the diameter of muscle fibers is extremely large. It's one of the biggest sales by volume and all the biology skeletal muscle in human and how large can help myself? Mm, well, you so you have length, right? And you have with right? So,
Is it can be extraordinarily long. You can be the classic example is like your Sartorius, which is like the front of your hip to the inside of your knee cap. Theoretically those cells can run the entire length which would be 1 muscle fibers running that in thing. If I were to do a biopsy on you and I pulled that tissue out, I could actually pull an individual fiber out with tweezers and hold it up and you can see that whole muscle cell. Yeah, I'm definitely not going - get biopsy, you'd be stunned, how big they are. Anyways, his was the size of a rhino. So the diameter of his, now, he has a well-documented
Netted assistance in the area of muscle growth will say. But yeah, those can be large. So what are we even talking about their? Well, I was asking about tendons, and ligaments. Come because I'd like to understand the various tissues and organs systems that adapt when one gets stronger with muscle tissue grows. And I do want to ask about bone and here I'm not referring to Bone mineral density. What I was going to ask is whether or not bone itself can grow and get stronger. And the reason I'm asking is there's a favorite
Out of mine, I have about 3800 favorite results, 3000 pet peeves and thirty-eight, hundred plus favorite results, but one of my favorite results is from Eric candles Lab at Columbia Erik won. The Nobel Prize for learning and memory and his laboratory got really into the effects of exercise on learning and memory. Yeah, and they had this incredible result
Which is that load bearing exercise. Yeah, stimulates the bones to release something called Alice, osteocalcin scuse me, and then osteocalcin acts as a more less a hormone travels to the brain and enhances the memory systems in the brain by enhancing neuron Health. That's the basic, Crux of the studies. There were several of these and The Moment I Saw the first of those studies about, well, here's another reason to do resistance. Type exercise and not just aerobic exercise and
Then it brings to mind whether or not bones themselves, get stronger. When we do resistance training, I don't know the answer to that. Yeah, that's very clearly demonstrated and we've known that for many decades. You have a
Diminishing ability to do. So, with age, particularly you need to do this in your teens and 20s, as we're going to have the largest ability to enhance bone mineral density and it's particularly responsive to axial. Loading. Now, I'm a muscle guy. I'm not a bone specialist, so we would have to consult somebody who can give you more position here. But that's what an axial. Loading its up and down its vertical. So it's almost like a, like, a cylinder, putting his weight on the small end of the cylinder. Yep, on both small end of the cylinders. Yeah, if someone doesn't do this,
In their 20s or teens, however, can we assume that some degree of positive change will occur if they do resistance training? Even if it's a small fraction the answer is, yes it is small. We have worked with a number of women in our rapid health program at the come in and they are in their 20s and they're in their 30s and they have significant bone mineral density problems and eight months later. We can see noticeable changes that are outside of the measurement error of a dexa.
So change positive change is correct and if you worked with the there, many Physicians who specialize in this area you you're going to need a nutrition here. Strengthening alone is probably not going to get you there particularly with women because you have to figure out why and there's a lot going on with the physiology and biochemistry so you probably like almost surely needed to have some blood chemistry done with that. You have to figure out what's going on menstrual cycle eyes. In fact, like oftentimes what we'll do.
For our women, very specifically is we use a thing called The Rhythm plus a 30 day test. So you can actually do a salivary test across the entire menstrual cycle and you can take samples. It's about every other day. So you'll get 15 or 16 samples. And you get a really beautiful picture of what's Happening hormone lie across the entire menstrual cycle. And that's really really important because typically for women, if you get a single sample, or simple time Point, whether it's salivary, urine or blood you can have well,
Like order of magnitude difference in any number of metrics because of what phase are in. This is one of the many reasons why it's been such a challenge to do a lot of physiology research with females some metrics change throughout the most recycle others don't like strength is a very good example. I can strengthen and I can do a one rep max test on a woman at any point, I don't have to do that at a certain phase of their menstrual cycle because it's the evidence I think is pretty clear at this point that number won't change. So I have no qualms including
females in any of my studies where strength is an absolute is an important dependent variable because I don't have to just round most recycle all other factors like anything in blood, anything hormone-related, you're going to have to automatically account for it. So what I would say is those folks should absolutely work with a qualified physician. And you you're going to have to get some nutrition supplementation, potentially, and then maybe even some other stuff going on to make that even more complicated. If you're on any form of birth control, or
Not, that's going to change the entire equation, especially if it's a hormone based birth control. So it just gets really, really complicated to answer it though. You can see a Temptations, they are significantly diminished relative to if you are started in your teens and 20s but there is hope you just need to work with somebody who specializes in that area. So for both men and women, boys and girls,
What are the major adaptations that occur to underlie improvements in strength and if you would, if you could just provide a bullet point list of that and then we can dive into each of those in detail, for instance.
Our nerves getting more efficient at firing our bones enjoying adaptations in different. Yeah, bone connective tissue relationships. That that underlies strength. I have to imagine all these things are happening but what are the major changes that are occurring in those organs and organ systems? That reflect someone's ability to on one day lift, you know, 100 pounds and then a week later to lift 105 pounds, now I'll try to keep this condensed again, this could be an entire University course,
I will also try to give you a little bit of Bones here. So normally as a muscle guy, I only take all the credit and muscle turns out the nervous system gets a little bit of credit to here. Thank you. So as we walk through it, just in as a big picture, if we think about again, what causes human movement? Basically everything along that chain will improve the strength training and I'm not really being using too much hyperbole there. It's quite impressive, so, good showing from the nervous system side of the equation. What has to happen?
For human movement, is a nerve has to send a signal through a motor unit. Now, motor unit is comes down an interface multiple muscle fibers. So if you think about your actual muscle, it's not a thing. It is a component of many individual muscle fiber. So you've got millions if not more think of it like a ponytail. So we collectively say ponytail and you think of it as like one thing but really a ponytail is a combination of tons of individual hairs. Okay muscles the same way so this motor unit comes in and innervates a lot of different different muscle
A now every one of the fibers in a motor unit is generally of the same fiber type so fast which were slow twitch and they are not laid out next to each other. In the muscle. They are spread out across. Horizontally vertically as well as closer to the Bone and further to the surface. So they're moved through up the entire way and this is what allows you to have smoother contractions and you don't have specificity and things like that. So we see improvements from the neuromuscular side like firing rate, we see synchronization improvements that are coming in. You also see,
Improvements in things, like, acetylcholine release from the presynaptic neuron. So you're getting it faster. We see. Calcium recycling is improved back to their. So, in order for without walking into too much of the biochemistry, in order for a signal to go from nerve to muscle, there's a little bit of a gap. There's a physical space that happens, and what happens as you release this molecule called acetylcholine. It's goes into the post synaptic cleft and then that actually binds to a receptor that receptor actually opens up a door that lets sodium in. That's really what's
Happening. So it's not the CEO:. Well that acetylcholine insists on that receptor site. It's broken down, put back and in recycled back up into the presynaptic nerve side. The faster you can do that the faster you can recycle that signal and so almost everything that I described in that entire system improves and has been shown to increase with training so that alone is given give you benefits. We haven't even walked into getting from electrical signal now into an action potential, which is going to cause
A muscle contraction. So, getting from nerve into the muscle, we see thing, everything from improvements in we call contractility, which means the muscle fiber themselves can produce more force or more velocity independent of muscle size changes. This is another component when we ask like, well, how is that I got stronger without getting bigger. Well, in the muscle fiber is self. Its ability to contract Force increases in this because we have everything like the sarcoplasmic reticulum which is the place to stores and releases.
The calcium which is what's needed for this entire crossbridge interaction from the myosin and actin to happen. I know a lot of I just lost a lot of people, but you can go look at some of these images is the sarcasm and checking them and gets gets activated more. It gets more sense. If it is better at releasing calcium, bring it back in and doing it again. The bond between the cross Bridge, the myosin actin gets stronger. The calcium Infinity is the phrase that we use their increases. So we were little
Walking through almost the entire process of skeletal muscle contraction here and every step along the way we see Improvement so that route net result. Is we see again, more Force production, independent of any change in size independent of any increase in contractile units, we didn't add anything to the equation. We didn't change size, we did nothing but improve efficiency, effectively independent of that. Now, we can actually start talking about changing muscle fiber type, so we can change our fibers from a slow twitch, fiber to a fast twitch. Fiber, that
Loan is going to give you more Force production. Again, independent of size fast-twitch, fibers 10 to be larger than slow twitch fibers. But not always, especially in the presence of endurance training. So, if you do a lot of consistent endurance training, it's very common for us to find slow-twitch fibers that are as similar size. If not larger often very often larger than the fast twitch fibers. So if you think slow fibers big slow, very metabolically effective fiber. So extremely fatigue resistant, so it's not a bad thing to
Them slow is like, we tend to say fastest loans that slow has its negative connotation, but it's like quite healthy, like fiber type to have outside of that now. We haven't even gotten into things like pain ation angle. So this is the angle at which your muscle fibers interact with your bone. So we tend to think about this is like a muscle fibers pulling on a muscle. Well, some of these are oriented at almost a 90 degree. So a fiber runs perpendicular into the bone. And some of them are closer to like, a 45 degree and some of them are closer to almost parallel and that confers a
A lot of unique mechanical benefits. So in one area it's actually going to increase Force production. You go the other direction increases velocity and so we have all kinds of changes in the angle at which the muscle inserts into the bone. Now we're already on the mechanic side of it, right? So we've influenced how effectively it pulls in with any of these things. It's always a give and take, so you're going to give up in the case of my nation angle, you're going to give up strength, but you're going to crease a lot, shortening velocity, or if you want to increase the velocity, going to give up sort of strength. All right.
Um, we haven't gotten to any of the energetics at all. So we haven't talked about increasing storage of phosphocreatine which is the energy system needed to power that muscle contraction at the fastest possible rate. So we could continue to go as long as you want here. But hopefully, you're getting the point of a little bit of the adaptations that occur. The reason I want to actually, why I think that stuff is important to bring it back maybe for some oysters. I know I took you on a journey there and you're just like, what the hell just happened that matters, because, again, this is the specific explanation for how
How is it possible that I got stronger, but I didn't get bigger. And this is also why strength and hypertrophy are intertwined and a heavily overlapped, but are not necessarily the same thing. So for example, we can increase muscle size and actually reduce strength because of what's called lattice spacing. So what happens is, you have to kind of remember your muscle fibers, are these long cylinders and the way that they contract requires an optimal space. And so what happens is you have this molecule called Act,
And you have this molecule called myosin myosin sits in the middle and there are six actin that surround each individual myosin in a three-dimensional Circle here. So you got a myosin in the middle that has all these globular heads and they can reach up and grab an actin and again, there's six sort of around them, right? Well, one of the things that can occur is if those those actin are too close together. So, imagine my hands, I'm reaching out and doing a giant tea, right? So, I'm horizontal out there. Well,
If my fingertips, are the tips of the myosin and I'm trying to reach up and grab an actin and I want to pull those Acton's closer to my face. Well, those act than stack on top of each other. And that's what actually makes your muscles grow up. Like, if I flex my bicep, it actually grows up three or four inches because you're stacking these, these sarcomeres or what their called on top of each other. All right, great. Well, if I'm reaching out to grab them and the muscle is stretched too far. I can actually make that strong of a connection. It would be like if I reached out and grabbed something, but I can only reach
My longest finger tip on it, when I go to contract, I can't make that strong of a contraction because my grip is weak. My grips going to break before I reach my strength limit. If I'm too close, there's nowhere to go. I'm already is closed. So if you actually disrupt that lattice spacing too much, you can actually lose a little bit of strength. So it's not that getting bigger will ever make you weaker? It's simply that you're not optimizing for strength. You're simply optimizing for size and so that can that can explain a little bit of the of
The discontinuity between growing and performance. I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge our sponsor athletic greens. Athletic greens is a vitamin mineral probiotic and adaptogen drink designed to help you meet all of your foundation or nutritional needs. I've been taking athletic greens daily since 2012. So I'm delighted that they're our sponsor of this podcast. The reason I started taking athletic greens and the reason I still take out lot of greens once or twice a day. Is that it helps me. Meet all of my foundational nutritional needs. That is
It covers my vitamins minerals and the probiotics are especially important to me athletic greens. Also contains adaptogens, which are critical for recovering from stress, from exercise, from work or just general life. If you'd like, to try out, let it greens. You can go to athletic greens.com, / huberman, to claim a special offer, they'll give you five free travel packs and they'll give you a year supply of vitamin D3 K to again. If you'd like to try out, let it greens go to athletic greens.com huberman, to claim the special offer. What are a few of the major changes that occur?
In muscle nerve Etc. When we experience hypertrophy,
I've heard of protein synthesis. Yeah, changes. I'm assuming. That's true. Maybe you can tell us a bit more about that. Changes in blood flow. Yep. Perhaps changes in neural Innovation. Who knows maybe even changes in faccia. Di, I'm not aware of any specific lie but I have to imagine that they're somehow involved. Sure. So the, when we talk about hypertrophy, a lot of the adaptations are going to be similar because the mode of training is close enough.
So, your nerve probably aren't smart enough to differentiate between a set of five reps, or set of eight repetitions, and they're smart enough to differentiate anything, like they know everything that's going on, but it's going to be huge overlap, the primary difference with hypertrophy is a couple of things. So, if you think about the muscle microstructure, I have a whole series of videos on YouTube, if you want to see the visuals behind this. In fact, in there, I include the specific diameter size of the muscle fibers that I was failed to give you a few minutes ago. We will provide an active link to the way.
Okay, so what happens is this, when we talk about and you hear this classic Buzz phrase of muscle protein, synthesis is generally what we're talking about there is contractile units. And so, when we say contractile units were talking about the myosin and actin. And so, what we're really trying to do is say, okay, there's some amount of protein turnover where we're coming in, and we're trying to add more proteins to the equation. And so, what has to happen? There is a series of steps. So. Step number one is there has to be some sort of signal from the external world.
All this could actually oftentimes. It's things like stretching of the cell wall which is what happens with exercise rights your Contracting or shortening get this big stretch to the cell wall it can come from a simple things like an amino acid infusion, this is just eating protein. This is why protein ingestion alone is anabolic, right? It'll help you grow muscle independent of even moving. So just eating protein will grow your muscles. Yeah. Certainly and those that those data are very clear, of course like anything there's a saturation point in terms of
Total amount, you need to get to and things like that. But yeah, if you were to walk into a laboratory fasted overnight and I gave you 30 grams of protein, we would see a very measurable increase in protein synthesis quite clearly for several hours, probably 4 to 5. Plus h, we could maybe bring us two people that know those data better but many hours with no, wait, hren correct. I am betting that most people are not aware of that fact. You know what's actually interesting about it is, if you do the exact same study again and you just did strength training,
You would also see an improvement in protein synthesis, right? But those factors are independent and the mechanisms are independent. Such that if you do them both together they stack on top of each other which is really wonderful. And if you were to add carbohydrate into that mix now, you're actually adding fuel for the entire multiple muscle protein synthesis process, and now you're going to see even added benefits and this is why for so many years. This is what bore the whole like post-exercise anabolic window thing, which is like you got to get carbs and protein in post exercise to maximize muscle hypertrophy. Now that turned
Out to be, like, not totally true in terms of the window to window, not be as strict as people initially asserted as I recall, but, but that's all. I think that's super interesting. These are parallel Pathways for for protein synthesis, simply eating protein or training, each independently, increases protein synthesis. I can't help but ask is the same true if one doesn't under its type exercise. If I go out for a 45 minute jog, where I can nasal breathe the whole time,
But if I were to go any faster out have to kick over into mouth breathing as well. So called the zone to ish cardio. Will I see an increase in protein synthesis as simply as a consequence of that jog. Now, this is one of the unique factors of strength training. You're not going to say that. In fact, you would it's difficult to measure protein breakdown. That's been as extraordinarily challenging to do in the laboratory but you're not going to see those benefits. In fact, you're going to see quite the opposite. It's an it's an entire molecular Cascade. So this is kind of how it works.
So, you have to have some sort of signal on the outside, and this can be energetic signal, so this could be glucose, uptake, could be protein intake. It could be a physical stretch. What happens is on the cell wall? There is some sort of it could be testosterone rights testosterone. Could bind to beta adrenergic receptors and this activates the whole series of Cascades of signaling proteins and these proteins basically play a game of telephone. So, one tells the next one, is the next one. And I sort of walk this entire well, that molecular Cascade is fundamentally the same thing.
Whether regardless of the insult, but they're different Pathways. And so the pathway from strength training or protein ingestion is going to go to the same nucleus. It's going to activate a whole set of Gene Cascades that are going to tell you two to go through this entire process of protein synthesis, which I'll walk through without using a second. If you do, endurance training, it's a different pathway. And so instead of activating this entire thing of like mtor and a Katie and this is anabolic signaling Cascade. It's going to do a different one, which you can think of more of like as a key K and energy.
Signaling things. So there's a crossover Point here, in fact, one of the things you'll notice is mtor and a Katie don't really influence and PK, but there is some literature that and years ago, showed a k will activate another protein called, TS, c 2. And that will actually inhibit mtor and that was the first molecular explanation for the quote-unquote interference effect of endurance, training on hypertrophy, could you just say a highlight for people what this is? Because as you describe these signaling Pathways, I just want to maybe just put it
Top Contour explanation. The mtor pathway is synonymous with cell growth. Yeah, both during development as organisms humans included, mature and cells. Get larger mtor is abundant in the system just to put it quite simply and then the am PK pathway and some of the metabolic signaling that you were referring to is more synonymous with cardiovascular exercise. Yes. At least in the context of this discussion and fuel utilization. Yep. And what you described as a cross
S / point where certain forms of exercise can tap into both of these. Yep, but at least we're taking this conversation. We're largely separating them. Yeah, because the the byproduct is the thing that that matters here. So the result of mtor and akt getting into the nucleus is going to be increase in protein synthesis. The result of a K running down to the mine is going to be result in increasing mitochondrial. Biogenesis, so the net outcome is different now,
I do want to flag it very quickly. This is an extraordinarily complicated thing and in fact in our laboratory we were able to be one of the first that figured out how to measure all the different subunits of a k and individual muscles by fiber type. So here is a ripping people's muscles out of their knees and their your patellar tendons. So, a just teasing there. Gently removing with under IRB protocol. Of course, so even when you say something like a k, if not one thing, Amy.
We say things like mtor, it's not one thing either it is, you have the total amount that matters you have activation, activation sites, are many of them. So it's not as simple as what I'm laying it on. I just want to get a big concept of kind of what's Happening Here to actually kind of answer your question, which is, okay. So how is the muscle actually growing? What you have to understand is is a little bit of how protein synthesis occurs. So, what I'm generally meaning is you have a whole bunch of amino acids. In this actually goes back to them.
Like middle school biology class, right? So, if you take a bunch of a molasses and you combine them together, we get these things called a peptide, right? And if anyone who's ever heard of like peptides, that's all it really means. You put a bunch of those together. You have a poly peptide, you put a bunch of those together and we now have a protein. So any protein I want to make is going to go through the exact same system. Exact same steps. It doesn't matter if that protein is going to be a red blood cell, it doesn't matter if that's going to be a hair, follicle doesn't matter if it's going to be.
A little muscle that's basically protein synthesis. So when we tend to think of protein synthesis, we just paint this picture of growing more muscle, and that's not the only thing. And so, when we talk about the benefits of having high quality muscle is being this place that's going to regulate most of your protein synthesis. We tend to lose some people because they're thinking, oh, I don't need to gain muscle, and that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about regulating the immune system or regular. We're talking about regulating any protein turnover. So, any Protein that's degradation or needs to be broken down in your, in your
Them at all Itachi. This is the in like this is such an important buzzword that's just protein breakdown of an unneeded or damaged protein, right? That whole thing is going to go through protein synthesis to be able to come back and replace things. The only reason you go through at apogee, so you can clean that garbage out and then come back and build in a more properly functioning protein. So it's not just about growing more muscle masses. Why you want these systems to be operating? Well, so the protein ingestion is going to just activate that Cascade
Because it's basically saying, oh, hey look, we have an abundance of Supply here. Why don't we make something out of it? Because we don't know the next time. This thing is going to be around carbohydrates, and fat are very easy to store. Protein is very challenging, it's more transient and so you can store some of it and keep it around. But most of it you're going to lose. And so when it's available your body wants to act very quickly, it doesn't necessarily care. If you have extra fat floating around in your system, it's all right. Let's pack it up and store it. We can easily bring this back out but
Got protein around, you're going to want to use it and so that's why it alone will activate and increase protein synthesis independent of exercise. So those effects are additive like I said because that signaling process is independent, and once you hit a rate, limiting phase then a you are you're there but it's on set. Those things will work independently. Okay? So that being said, what is skeletal muscle hypertrophy in general? We think about it as this increase in contractile, proteins, those myosin and actin, effectively, get thicker. Okay?
Now, what happens is since they are thicker and as I talked about a second ago, that influences and actually hurts the lattice spacing and so what your body does, as a result is say, hey, let's increase the diameter of the entire cell so that we can maintain our spacing between these things. Right? It's effectively like if you know the two of us were sitting in this room and you doubled in size, and I was like, well, you're in my personal space like and I doubled the size. Now we're in each other's space. The some point we just have to make the room larger and that's exactly what's happening in the cell.
And so as you can continue to increase muscle size, you're going to muscle myofibrillar accretion. You're going to continue to increase muscle fiber size for years. There was this other comment about non-functional hypertrophy and this is often called sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. Now this is not sarcoplasmic reticulum. This is a fancy way of saying. My muscle is larger but it has no function. And the question would be, why the hell is that possible? If I have more contractile units,
It's and I can make more of these cross Bridges. Perform, more of these power strokes. Is what these contractions are called, how could I possibly be losing function. Well, that was challenged from. That was Bro, Science for a very, very long time. And in fact, where it really came down to was, are there different types of hypertrophy training some that induce contractile protein hypertrophy in some that induce, the sarcoplasmic hypertrophy? And that was the significantly challenged until recently. Mike Roberts did a at Auburn did a series of wonderful studies.
Showed quite clearly that sarcoplasmic hypertrophy is probably happening. And in fact, there's probably a pretty easy explanation in general. What happens is it is, it is a increase in fluid in the muscle fiber and so this would allow for the dam to be larger. But since there's no addition of contractile units, no, more Force production happens. And so he actually has a wonderful review paper, I believe it's open access. Well, you can go look and you created a wonderful graph. I think there's someone in my hypertrophy videos on YouTube as well.
And you can actually see that it's likely happening in phasic changes throughout your training experience. So at the beginning of your training but as as the years and year or weeks, rather than months and then eventually years go by and your training, we have a change in the hypertrophy that's coming from contractile units versus sarcoplasmic. So, I think that is an important note because again, people are wondering, like, how the hell is it even possible for me to get larger muscle? And somehow I'm not stronger. Well, if it came from Simply fluid retention and this is
Bloating. This is not, there's no - really to this. It is simply holding of more hydration in the cell than a gets larger and then everything works that way. What you just described calls to mind something similar in the nervous system, which is neuroplasticity, which of course, is the nervous. Systems ability to change in response to learning and experience and damage for that matter. Yep. And we think about it as one term but there are many different forms of neuroplasticity. Yeah discussion that we don't need to get into now but their Spike timing-dependent
Dependent plasticity in ltp and long-term depression which has nothing to do with psychological depression and on and a pulse facilitation and on and on, and on and short-term plasticity. And so, what I'm starting to understand is that there are many paths to what we call strength increase, and there are many paths to what we think of as hypertrophy. Many of these are going to operate in parallel. It's going to be rare that any one of them is going to be active alone. Yep. In order to create hypertrophy or strength changes and that certain forms of
Sighs and certain ways of doing exercises in terms of sets and repetitions schemes, and rest intervals, between sets and between training sessions are going to tap into different mechanisms but also overlapping sets of mechanisms which is why if I understand correctly, you mentioned at the beginning that often not always, but often strength increases are associated with. Some hypertrophy changes and hypertrophy increases are often not always associated with strength and
Croesus, do I have that right? Correct. And the beauty of this whole thing is while we don't yet, know the mechanism specifically. And there's a lot of confusion as a lot of changes that happen. There's a, we actually just submitted a paper, a few days ago. My stuff. Jimmy Bagley at San Francisco and Kevin. You're a cat. One, has a wonderful muscle physiology Lab at Arkansas and we actually is very late article. Actually it's incredibly easy to read. We describe the the role of my own nucleation.
In muscle hypertrophy, and this is actually a lot of interesting, an issue there, but we're learning more and more about it as a quick example. So, skeletal muscle is unique in the fact that it is, so large in diameter, it's also unique in the fact that's multinucleated. What that means is typically in biology. You see, like a cell has one nucleus that's the place that houses and hold to DNA and its control center. Those are to grow strength. I repair that whole thing. Well, skeletal muscle on human is awesome because it has
Ends. If not more those nuclei, which gives it that plasticity. And so a normal cell has one place that has to go to, for any time. It wants to upregulate down-regulate, do whatever. The thing is your muscle fibers. Have these little control centers all throughout them. And for years we were like okay great the amount of hypertrophy that you can experience is probably limited by the amount of nuclei you have because you're not going to exceed a certain size of muscle fiber, if that's going to
mean you lose control and so we're like okay great we found and identified a limiting factor to what will determine how much a muscle can actually grow. And then the next question was in then where are these things coming from? And this is where satellite cells came in and so is very clear satellite cell. That's lying dormant sort of on the outside. The periphery of the fiber will then go in into the into the fiber will turn into my own nuclei and then it can actually, you know, increase your damage like that. So then actually it was like, hey you're actually limited by the amount of these
Satellite cells. You can get in and turn a new Clan and then what evidence came out that showed, hey, what if you D train? So what if I used to lift weights, like a long time ago and I got big but now I've lost a lot of my muscle. If I train again, you actually get that muscle back faster than it took you the very first time to build it. Like that's what we call muscle memory like in our film. Now, on your side of the equation muscle memory is something different, I sander. Well, when people talk about muscle memory, like the ability to ride a bicycle after, so many years of not having tried to ride,
That's actually largely independent of the muscle, has something to do with exclusively Independence. It's it's basically a nervous system phenomenon. Hundred percent of muscle memory has been co-opted by different communities to mean different things. On our side muscle memory is going to mean that ability to remember that muscle size, right? Not hypertrophy. Because as you explained that the motor control thing is that it's a totally a nerve thing. As the one, I'll give you this one. You guys, the nerve people can have this one. Well, it seems to me that there are a tremendous number.
Number of parallels between strength and hypertrophy changes and neuroplasticity. This is coming up again and again in this conversation because we know for instance that if you are exposed to a couple of different languages early on in life, you will learn any number of different languages far more easily later in life of core. And that's because there's some crossover between different languages but she Latin based languages that allows for that. There's a substrate for it, it's similar to the the ability to run on a bicycle again phenomenon or play an instrument.
Phenomenon, but it's broader than that. And again, I think this speaks to the huge number of different adaptive changes that are occurring in the cells and then the nerves that innervate these cells, when one experiences increases in strength and hypertrophy. So to round that out and then go back to her saying, that what we're actually learning now is that nucleation thing. And by the way, this entire trajectory story is probably over the last, like, eight years, like, this is how fast we've changed our understanding of how
How muscle grows the sarcoplasmic reticulum thing, five years, agos was Bro, Science now. It's pretty well established. The mound nucleation thing was 8 to 10 years ago. It's changing every week this paper we just submitted this week showed actually while we could generally thought a few years ago and in fact you can find me on podcasts and probably in some of my videos talking about this. And I'm going to tell you right now, those things are wrong like we've just had new things come out those last couple years where that detraining effect. We thought was the reason of. Well what happens is if you have the muscle before,
And you brought in these nuclei and they differentiated in turning two into a nucleon, then the muscle got small. Again, you would preserve those nuclei and that's why when you go to train again, they were already around. So the muscle grows faster. The second time that it did the first time. Well, now that looks like that's actually not the case. In fact, it's actually probably half what's happening is it's a, it's a epigenetic change in. The nuclei is ability to access the DNA needed to grow muscle. It's effectively,
The analogy we used. It's the nuclei are remembering how to ride a bike. So it's quite funny that you said that because it's not really necessarily that they're being preserved over time. They have learned the sequence. It takes to grow approaching there and it goes it happens faster, the second time and we've also learned that there are specific. Nuclei we've known this for actually a while we found this in our lab, we discover it. We saw this in our, some of our members, but there are different shapes. The nuclei, some are more oval
more elongated and the shape determines a lot of the function. Some of them are hanging out more towards the periphery and some of them are hanging out right around the nucleus. Well, it looks like there's actually probably different types of nuclei, a lot of them that are specific to the mitochondria. In fact, you can see like the on some of the Imaging we have. We just like they're just packed around the, the mitochondria. And there are some that are probably specific to injury repair. And so this is probably explaining a lot of the, the individual variation. I mean, I know you've said, previously, like, you're just a very
You're very slow at recovery. There's a lot of things that go into that, and I would love to walk through sort of all the buckets, maybe later and into recovery, but one of the inherent genetic variations is, could be simply that you maybe have more or less of the nuclei responsible for tissue repair. That's something that's been happening. The last, like, handful of months that's been coming out, we'll see if that holds up is true or not. So as we're learning more and more almost every day about muscle. Physiology what, super fun and interesting and I think the most
Exciting.
What to do and arms in terms of like, how to train and how to eat, and how to do everything else to get these out of patient's has been pretty well established for a long, long time. We're just figuring out how like, what's happening in the muscle now, but we know what to do. So, from a practical standpoint putting together, protocols for any outcome that you want, or don't want for any modality, you don't have a gym. You have weights, you have dumbbells. Only you only.
Of kettlebells, you don't want it. You only use body weight? We can you only have three days a week. You have seven days a week. You want to maximize muscle growth? You want to get a Little Bit Stronger, any of these variables. You want to throw at me. We have a large evidence base for exactly how to get those out of stations and not others. So, while we have a lot to learn about the mechanisms and the physiology, we have pretty good legs to stand on terms of what to do to get whatever adaptations you want. So what are the essential components of an effective strength and hypertrophy protocol? Okay? So what I would like to actually do is walk you
Through both of those. Because as we mentioned, before they overlap, but the training needs to be differentiated so that you can optimize either strength hypertrophy, or if you actually want, you can get a combination of both. This allows you to then get the adaptation, you want avoid ones you don't want and then get it even a combination if that's the preference. So you a lot of people talk about, I want to get a little stronger. I want to add some muscle. That's a different answer than someone who wants to truly maximize muscle which is a different answer from somebody with maximizes.
Max my strength, which is a different answer from somebody wants to maximize strength but not actually gain muscles. So we have all these combinations. What's important to understand before we get into the details, there's a couple of things. Number one, we've been teasing this concept so far of the concepts or few but the methods are many and so I want to hit those Concepts right now. These are as you as you see, these are the non-negotiables that have to happen in any training programming and I'm referring to these in the strength and hypertrophy conversation. But these are true of
Power developments be development, muscular endurance, endurance. Any other thing, these are things that just have to happen for any training program to work. I mentioned one a little bit earlier which was adherence and so the my frequent collaborator Dan Garner will constantly say consistency beats intensity again, in fact, the literature will show you very clearly. Inheritance is the number one predictor of physical fitness outcomes. So we want to do something that you will engage in will
You'll put effort into and you'll be able to repeat consistent over time. So that's number one. The second one is and this is a major reason that people don't hit their fitness goals. In fact, I would argue outside of not doing it. The number one mistake, they make is Progressive overload. So I'm going to walk you through exactly how much you should be. Increasing your sets and Reps and weight etcetera per week per month later, but that's the biggest thing you have got to have some sort of overload.
The body works as an adaptation mechanism, right? So in fact, we talked previously about the Harvard fatigue lab and one of the things actually people don't realize is the concept of homeostasis is actually comes from research of the harbor fatigue lab. It was work that they did on an endurance Runner. I forget his name and then it sort of realized that after a long period of time working out, this is an acute exercise about the body actually comes back to some stable place, despite the fact he was continuing to work and that's exactly what
The phrase steady state and that actually, then they launched offensive. Wow. There's this state that the body wants to be in and we'll call this homeostasis. So that will those all concept came out of exercise physiology which is really really cool, right. We don't get a lot of love, a lot of times scientifically but that's a good one that we took. So why that all matters is we have got to achieve some sort of overload without going excess. So we'll cover that later. Exactly what to do. And I'll get picked up, potentially getting over training and Lon.
Touring and Mary things like that, but you have to have some sort of consistent predictable, overload. That's what's going to cause that option to continue to cause stress, if you don't do that, you can still do things like burn calories. You can still get some of the other benefits of exercise, like improved mood, cognitive function, etc, etc. Flexibility increases all those can happen without a progressive overload, but if you want to see these gains in strength and hypertrophy, you really need to progressively over though. That's concept. Number two,
The third one here is going to be individualization and this is where we can get into things, like personal preference, you know, equipment, availability. You have kettlebells or dumbbells, you only have bands. We have none of that. These are all smaller details, but that's an important component to it. The last one, I really want to get into is picking the appropriate Target. And we went through this when we talked about the fitness protocol, and if you run through something like that and you run some tests and figure,
We're your biggest limitations are that's going to help you identify where you need to go. So if you can do all those things, you're going to be in a good spot to balance specificity and variation. All right, so if you want to, make sure you grow your biceps, you better, make sure your biceps are working. Having said that, if you over rely on specificity, you're going to increase the likelihood of overuse injuries which is going to come back and actually hamper consistency over time
All right, so this is when hedging towards specificity is important but too much can cause a problem. If you go the other direction and you go too much variation. So imagine you're just sort of doing all kinds of different exercises. Every time you work out that's actually not enough stimuli directly on the muscle or muscle groups or movement pattern. If you're wanting to learn a new movement to get you very far. And so this is a classic problem of I'm doing a lot of work but I don't have a very clear Direction I lack specificity, so I'm working, but I'm not seeing a lot of improvement.
Movements and this is like in the business World cetera. This is like, doing a whole bunch of different things means you get nothing really done. So that's the game. We're going to play here, right? How do we overload this stuff? How do we make sure we're balancing specificity and variation? How do we make sure I want to do this? And then how do I individualize it from my needs and circumstances and and movement restrictions and of time availability and my calendar and desires and all these things. So those are the concepts we absolutely have to hit.
The methods that we choose run across a handful of variables, and we call these things modifiable variables, because as you modify them, or you make different choices within these variables, you get different outcomes are adaptations. This is exactly what determines the nine out, up, tations, we that we've been talking about. So the way that I like to say, this is exercises do not determine adaptation so you can't simply go. I want to get stronger. Therefore, I'm going to choose these
As exercises, that's not how it works. What determines that application is the execution of the exercises. So deadlift is my favorite example. A deadlift is a common example that people think of when they want to choose a lower body strength exercise but a deadlift will not increase your strength unless you're executing it in the proper fashion. I'm not only talking about technique here, I'm talking about these modifiable variables. The same thing for power exercises will commonly see mistakes of doing activities like a
Jump, which is great. People think, oh, I'm going to get improved my power which we know is extremely highly correlated to activities of daily living and particularly living unassisted as you age. Right? Is reduction of power. So they'll do an activity like a box jump, what they're failing to realize is unless you do it powerfully, you won't actually increase power. If you don't move fast, you won't get faster. So the the way that we manipulate these variables is everything to determining the adequacy.
Temptation. You get organ. Don't get so without Foundation I think we can kind of run right into these things and we can start off with perhaps speed and power. And what I would like to do is walk you through all those modifiable variables, what to do with them and then hit you with as many different methodologies as we really have time for. And then we'll move on to strength and hypertrophy and kind of round the entire thing out. And then maybe at the end we can talk some other variables. Like what happens?
If I have a training protocol and I'm halfway through and I can't finish my workout. What should I do? Reduce my weight or reduce my duration or things like that. So there's lots of wood if scenarios that we can go through the potentially a lot of people listening have questions about. So sound like a plan, sounds like a plan. I'd like to take a brief break to acknowledge our sponsor inside tracker inside tracker is a personalized nutrition platform. The analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you reach your health goals.
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What sorts of Behavioral do's and don'ts? What sorts of nutritional changes? What sorts of supplementation would allow you to bring those levels into the ranges that are optimal for you. If you'd like to try inside tracker, you can visit inside tracker, dot, coms huberman, to get 20% off any of inside trackers plans. Again, that's inside tracker, dot coms huberman, to get 20% off. So, just interrupt briefly and make sure that I and everybody else have in mind, the proper nine out up tations, and we've been referring to and that were discussed in detail in episode 1.
I have listed number one, skill and technique. Number two, speed. Number three power, which is speed times Force number for strength number five, hypertrophy number six, muscular endurance. Number seven and aerobic capacity. Number eight maximal aerobic capacity and number nine. Long duration, steady state exercise. Yep, you nailed it. Thank you for that as probably.
And clarification for everybody. So that being said, let's jump right into speed and power. Now, I'll do these a little bit simultaneously, they are different. If you're a high performance athlete, you really need to separate these two things for the most people do, we can probably think about them as the same thing. There's not a lot of pure speed training that the general public is interested in if you want to actually further breakdown. So be there are multiple components. There's acceleration, there's top-end velocity, there's change.
Direction or agility things like that, so we'll just kind of call All That speed and power. For now, now at the onset, there's this 325 concept that we talked about many times where this is really fairly true for speed, power or strength. Now, I didn't develop the 325 is just an easy way to help you. Remember one concept that will run true across all these things. So 325, it refers to
Three to five days per week, pick three to five exercises, and you're going to do three to five repetitions per set. You'll do three to five sets and you'll rest three to five minutes between each set. If you do that, and you execute any of the exercises that you choose at a high-end tent and that part is critical. You don't get faster by moving kind of fast. You can't improve Power by moving. Like
Like and powerfully you have to be trying regardless of whether actually moving faster or not, anytime you're talking about speed or power your by definition using submaximal weights. So you're going to be able to lift it. That's not the question. The question is, how fast can you lift that? Implement? And so intention is incredibly important. So if you do that the same for strength by the way, so if you land on that, that allows you to run the gamut from, as little as three days a week, you're doing a three exercises, you can do, three,
That's a three which is a very, very low volume. It's a very low amount of days, easy to handle all the way to five sets of five of five exercises, five days a week. So, it's again, it's just one sample. That's something easy to remember and is quite effective for a very long time and this has been tested quite extensively in both the coaching Realms, as well as the scientific grounds to be quite productive and easy to follow and grasp. If you do that, all you need
Need to do is slightly increase the load or the volume but mostly the load over time and the number. We want to look for there is something like a three to five percent increase per week. So an example would be if you're going to do an exercise at £100, you can't necessarily just add five pounds every week. That's kind of tough to you pretty quickly and so you may have to run some smaller increment. If you're doing like a lower body exercise, where you might have a couple of hundred pounds on the weight, you can probably
Get away with adding five pounds, because it's still a low percentage of the total load. So that's roughly the guy that we want to get 24, speed, power and strength. So that sounds incredibly, simple and effective. Yet, I have a number of questions here. First off,
If somebody is using the 325 approach, does that mean they should not be doing any other weight training of any kind in those workouts or at all know. You can certainly do that in combination with anything else. You would like, especially if you think about speed and power, those are very non fatiguing. And so if you can imagine, you're going to go to the beach and you're going to take a ten pound. 220. Pound medicine ball with you.
And you're going to do four different exercises or you're throwing the medicine ball, as high as you can. In the air four times in a row, taking a break and you two or three hits that you do, maybe three or four different types of throws that's very good for improving power, extremely good, but it's not very fatiguing. So you could certainly finish that work out in 20 minutes and then run on and then do any number of other things. So you could do some high intensity and aerobic capacity. Work you could do studies dates of you could you could even do hypertrophy on top of that. So there's a there's
Two major categories of what we call period ization. There's there's many, many, many of them, but the two that have the most scientific literature are what's called linear periodization. And another is called undulating are often daily undulating periodization and I'm flagging these two again. Despite the fact there are many, many, many more because they represent two different concepts so you'd actually just touched upon so linear periodization is a hall marked by basically saying, we're going to train one adaptation at a time. So imagine going say
To eight weeks, and you're only doing strength or you're only doing hypertrophy or endurance for that matter. So, in that particular case you, you would not do anything else. And combination, if you contrast that to undulating periodization, you would actually be doing multiple different styles of training, even either within the same day or just different days. So could be Monday is power. Wednesday is strength, Friday's hypertrophy, whatever or it could be a little bit of strength every single day. A little bit hypertrophy everyday, a little bit of power
Every day and you would just change the amount of each that you do within the day to alter the emphasis right now.
If you look at the studies in there had been many rcts on this.
The result of both of these training programs is generally, basically the same thing, they are equally effective. Here is the major difference, though. One, if your goal is very specific to one outcome, you want to hedge or specificity. So if you're like, hey, I'm trying to maximize the amount of muscle I can build in the next eight weeks. Then you don't really anything else besides that. Is just distraction and potential interference. Does it really matter or not? Doesn't matter, but it's not helping anything else.
So linear periodization is fundamental and providing focus and therefore the adaptations tend to be often times larger in that specific area the downside is you now go six to eight to 10 weeks of doing nothing else and so you are losing. Those other adaptations that are great at a faster rate and you can imagine doing something like speed work, only again, speed work by definition is non fatiguing. So when often times, we think of speed work is like oh I did ladder drills and I did all these things and like I threw up at the
That does not speed work. You just did a different type of endurance training, okay? Which is great and important. So true speed work is very high, rest, very low fatigue. And actually, truly trying to reach a new level of speed or velocity. So non fatiguing. If you did that exclusively for 10 weeks, you would pretty unfit by the end of it because you did, you would also lose a decent amount of muscle mass not because there's an interference effect, but simply because the fact you have not stimulated muscle growth for 8 to 10 weeks. And so neither one of these is better.
Than the other. We're going to see this classically across all program design or periodization strategies is it's just a it's a give and take, there are tons of different systems and perhaps at the end, we can talk about some of the more advanced periodization Styles. These ones are both effective. You can do these with beginners. You can do these with Advanced athletes. You could do them any of the spectrum. But there, there are some of the more, well documented ones, it's just a pro and con game, right? It's what are you willing to? Give up the way that you solve, that problem is going,
Act, that fitness assessment and your analysis and really, truly understanding what your goal is, is your goal to do a little bit of strength and a little butter. Okay, great, maybe undulated periodization as an approach. If your goal is really to maximize strength and maybe you can wait on putting some muscle mass on. Maybe a linear periodization is a better approach or another style of predation that's optimal for strength gain. So it's just simply about addressing the things. One of the major problems folks have in addition to locking Progressive overload,
Is they don't have any foresight past the next day of the training, right? And so it's really important that you set off blocks that are anywhere between 6 to 12 weeks long, where you're going to have the specific plant. Ideally you have an idea for the whole year. I actually have like a structure. I can walk you through for that, but even if you don't have that, really think about what you want the next 12 weeks, and then maybe the next 12 weeks after that. And that's going to give you a lot of guidance about what to do and what to focus on.
Terrific. What about warming up? I was taught that one. Should you hire repetition movements with lighter weights in order to warm up? And then one of the things that did make a big positive difference for me, in terms of strength and hypertrophy training was to do a moderate repetition, warm up with a fairly lightweight, but then to actually keep the number of warm-up repetitions fairly low and work progressively toward the first so-called work set.
When you say three to five, that's 325 work sets. Correct? Yep. Are you also going to tell me 325 warmups? No. Are you also going to tell me it has to be done between 3:00 and 5:00 p.m.? So in terms of what I mean I have friends in all seriousness. What does a good warm-up look like? Yeah and I realize this will vary depending on how cool your training environment is time of day etcetera but as it kind of umbrella for a good warm-up, okay, what should people do
The you've already sort of jumped the gun with my answer. It is honestly very dependent upon the person, so some folks respond very well to a minimum worry about others. I've had lots of actually professional fighters. I've worked with where they'll actually have a major league baseball player right now. He's one of the best pitchers pitchers in the game. Probably the best and the longer we warm up, the better, his numbers get. We actually did a vertical jump test with him. He's gonna kill me because he got so mad. I wanted to see how long it sort of took him to reach a peak.
Come and most times this takes people something like five to ten, sort of reps, and I said, take it up all the way to a maximum, vertical jump. And then, what I want you to do is continue to Jumping until you have three consecutive jumps or your down lower than 90 percent. And so I what we're trying to look at is, sort of when is he going to break? Because and baseball he's gonna throw like a hundred pictures or so. And we're trying to figure out when is his Peak velocity on, his fastball going to drop, and sort of basis conditioning on that. So different style of conditioning, its power endurance,
He's really what it is. He called me in the middle of it, I'm like oh he done whatever. And he's just like no like how many of these am I supposed to do? And I was like, what he's talking about. He's like I'm on Route 130 or something and I was like, what? And I'm like, what rep did you peek on? He picked on up, seventy something like that. 69, I think technically because he's goofy, so he's a classic example of. I've worked on for many many years. We have a ton of data on him, a ton of biological data a ton of neuromuscular stuff. I'd like all kinds of stuff in it. Just the more he warms up.
An absurd amount of warm up the better he gets and the better he gets in power production and the better, he gets his speed and velocity. So his warm-up prior to games is it's totally absurd. And just the more volume we throw at him, the better. He does. I have other folks, you get past, like, two or three reps, and fatigue starts to set in and now, you're actually, like, reducing power production. So there is a ton of variation that goes in that I can give you some guidelines though.
You need to differentiate if you're training for speed power strength or hypertrophy. Here's what if we understand a little bit about what's causing the adaptation. That's going to tell you what you need to do or avoid. For example, volume is the primary driver in hypertrophy.
Intensity is the primary driver and speed power and strength. All right, what's what that means is you need to preserve intensity for the first three. You need to preserve volume and this echoing at most. So if your warmup is so extent, extensive in the hypertrophy training that a compromises your training volume because of fatigue. Even if it compromises, the last step of the last exercise then you're actually probably walking yourself backwards by doing that. Extensive you'd have been better off. Starting your first working set, slightly suboptimal
Right, because it's not really, you're just trying to our crew volume at that point strength and power is the opposite until you're moving very, very fast or powerfully, you're not really causing the adaptation. So there's no point in starting a working set until you're really basically in 100%. So the warm-up should be as long as it takes you to get to where your Mobility is in the right spot. Like your joints, feel good, you feel fresh, you feel activated and you really feel Peak power anything before that is a warm-up set.
In the sport of Olympic weightlifting. A lot of times the coaches will measure barbell velocity Travis Mash has done a fantastic job with this. He's got a lot of data on what's called velocity Based training, Brian man, at Missouri and Miami tons of work here and generally, those communities are not going to count any repetition as a working set, until you exceed, 70 percent of your one rep max where that's changed because of a lot of people doing the velocity based stuff. Is now they're basing that simply on and achieved velocity.
And so really, the warm-up is irrelevant, they don't even purse. It's sort of just like, do whatever you want and we're going to measure the barbell until you actually had an outcome and now your order working set. So different ways to think about it, depending on what you're training for. That'll give you a little bit of a guideline if you're training for anything past hypertrophy then really and especially even hypertrophy. It just comes down to, are you feeling ready to work? Are you cold, are you moving to their correct positions? And if all those things are fine,
I don't care if you start a little bit early and save some gas, the end of especially if you're a person like you who may be a bit more inclined to fatigue quickly relative to Trevor, who's just has no response to fatigue whatsoever. Is it useful to do
more warm up at the beginning of a workout say before the first exercise? And then once one has achieved both local and systemic. You have warm up in air quotes then perhaps on the second or third exercise.
Eyes. Fourth exercise, Etc.
One? Or maybe even zero
warmups? Yeah, fair point. We generally think about warm-ups and a couple of ways. This is a really, actually, this is a very clever question. You want to have some sort of General Global warm up scheme, we tend to prefer Dynamic warm-ups. So this is whole body movements, rather than like sitting instruction static stretching, things like
that. So something that involves
momentum, yeah, momentum or movement, right? So this is like, think about this in like old gym
Yes, it's like your Heinie's and your butt kickers and just different things like that. Where you're moving in different planes, you're moving joints, through tons of range of motion. You're getting a lot of movement there, so you're getting the local warm up. You're also getting the total systemic, activation, everything else is going on there. So that is what we consider to be a general warm up. Five minutes is a very sufficient number perhaps 10. If your ass logo or a key and some things like that and you really got to get the ankle warmed up. If you're doing lower body stuff, really make sure.
That's moving correctly, the hips and knees will follow upper body stuff. Really good? The shoulder blades and the neck like making sure you're going there and the elbows will follow after that. So, five to seven minutes of a general warm up, a lot of times like classic exercise science, it will even just put you on a bike cycling for five minutes. I don't like that. Personally, Dynamic movement is more preferred. If you really just move, if I decide minutes you'll be fine there. Now, specificity within each movement is very important. That your first exercise
Is that a is generally the thing you've prioritize that's oftentimes the most important you're going to do for IT. Oftentimes is also the most complex and the most moving parts so it tends to be multi-joint tens. Therefore, you need to have movement precision and skilled dialed, right? You don't typically start your workouts off with the forearm curl, right? Like that's, you don't need a tremendous amount of warm up to get going on that, you're going to start off with medicine ball throws or a snatch or some.
Agility work. You you need to have the whole system going because multiple joints are moving position matters technique. There's just a lot of skill, requirement, Etc. So the individualized workout, or this specific workout for the specific movement for that? Very first one, my general rule of thumb is like, whatever it takes to move perfect in that first exercise past that you don't necessarily need to do individualized warm-ups for your next movements, unless it is a movement, you're trying to learn or just even get a
It better at, I drop the load a little bit work on some accruing, some practice reps, fantastic, or it's another dissimilar complex movement. So let's say your first exercise was a front squat and you got loader for that and now you're going to move into a pull-up but your mechanics aren't the best there. And so you really need to change and do some may be more specific activation of warm-ups for that or something else or it's running or something totally different. So yeah, you don't need to rewarm up for every single exercise as you go.
Generally, once you're good to go, the same muscles that you're going to use in the next exercise are warm. Same joints, then, you're good to
go. You talked about intent within the movement. What about specific? Cadence has four repetitions? Yeah, I was taught that one should lower the weight slowly. This will call The Eccentric portion of the movement and then to try and
Explode, the weight through the concentric phase and then also make sure that one is using full range of motion and perfect form. Yeah, as it were now, of course that is one tiny slice of the possible rep. Cadence's. Yeah. And ways to approach resistance training, although I think it's a pretty good one. Yeah. What are the general parameter sets that one needs to consider? You could imagine lifting
Four seconds, concentric pause for one pause for too eccentric. I realize there's an infinite number of variations here. Yeah. But is there a way to use rep, Cadence repetition Cadence? That is, as a way to work through weak points and to be strong in every position of the movement?
Yeah, a lovely question. I think the way I would like to answer this is
Maybe going back, just a touch to get directly to that. So I think if we walk through Power strength and hypertrophy and I hit you with the concepts that are specific to each one that's going to lay out your answer because the most true answer there is, it depends on the goal, the answer for what is optimal for strength is diametrically opposed for potentially, what optimized for hypertrophy, the same exact thing can be said for momentum so we've classic the heard things like this, you know, don't bounce.
It's at the bottom you're cheating, right? So if you're doing a lat pull down or something, you know, you don't, you don't bounce some rebound. You don't, you stop at the bottom, slow down. All these things are thought to be truisms of strength conditioning, but guess what? Those are all truisms. Assuming we're trying to grow muscle. And that's that actually goes back to our conversation and episode 1. About a lot of things. We think are just fundamental truths about strength. Training are just fundamental truth that came from the
Rebuilding world and they're not wrong, they're good ideas, but there are all their adaptations. One needs to get from strength training that are not just maximizing muscle growth. So what I will lay out to you as a case for, which you should bounce a case for when you should go fastest case for when you should be under control, all these things are different variables. We can modify and get different adaptations for
it. Is there a way that you could lay out for us? Optimal repetition. Cadence's for
Or strength, specifically versus hypertrophy specifically just to sort of book end, the conversation and then migrate toward the middle in terms of rep, Cadence's that would satisfy the desire to have a bit of both.
We can get pretty close. Yeah so when you're talking about strength versus hypertrophy, remember strength is movement, hypertrophy is muscle size. That's that's the key to your answer here. So when you're trying to get stronger, what you're effectively trying to do,
Is get better at producing a certain amount of force through movement, okay? Now, force is mass times acceleration. So what's the mass in the bar X? How well, I can accelerate it intentionally going slower.
Is only reducing acceleration.
Right. So it's hard to argue that going slower is going to improve strength because you're simply reducing acceleration so you need to practice.
Lifting heavier at a faster rate. Now does that mean if you're trying to get stronger there are no phases of your training in which you will slow down or pause. No of course not. There are certain rules in different organizations where you have to pause the bottom. Like there's there's all kinds of little things like there but in general we want to think about what are we trying to do here? We're trying to get better at moving a heavier mass at a faster rate of acceleration that is more force, that is more strength.
Atrophy is not that the goal here is not a functional outcome, it is what is needed to cause the most amount of hypertrophy. And when you get diaper tree, then, your optimal Cadence is up to you. You can do any combination of fact, you could do it the same exact Cadence that you did your strength training with and get the same adaptations as a tree. If you modify, the other variables appropriately, or you could go slower, or you could do pauses, or you could do.
A thing that is called triphasic training, where you spend the first phase, several weeks of your training, we do East entrance only. So you just lowering the barn, you're basically stopping. You could then do the next phase of your training which is isometrics you just holding it that bottom position. And then the next phase of your training, you're focusing on the concentric portion of it, right? Triphasic 123 eccentric, isometric, concentric. So that's a fantastic way of developing actually strength little bit of hypertrophy but you're manipulating the variables in terms of how you.
The repetition range, you can actually induce a lot of hypertrophy moving the weight fast as you mentioned even down. So under control. Now one thing will never Advocate is moving any sort of weight or load uncontrolled. The Assumption here when I'm saying go fast is, you're always in control. I never want you bouncing and crushing your sternum with the barbell off your does but you can move at a lot of rates. You can the isometric, I mentioned, because this is when things like body weight training, come into play. Absolutely, you can gain
Length. And even a little bit of hypertrophy especially in the upper body doing isometric is much harder to do this with the lower body. You just you just you outrun that coverage really quickly, you need load, but there's a lot of ways. This is also probably why people have done things like gone to yoga only or Pilates or some of these things that our body weight based in there's no external load and they've actually increase muscle
size. So I'm getting the picture. There are a ton of options in terms of rep Cadence's. However,
Can we say that one should pick a given rep Cadence within an exercise, rather than changing it from set to set within an exercise? Or that one should perhaps even pick a certain rep, Cadence for an entire workout. I'm suspecting that your answer is going to be, it depends? Yeah, it is. But if, you know, I'm not going to use the, if you had a gun to your head kind of situation. But if you had a gun to your head, what would be the rep Cadence that you would prescribe? Yeah, for strictly strength or as much strength.
With as little hypertrophy as possible. And in picking that rep, Cadence, then it therefore has to thread throughout the entire. Yep, exercise bout.
So you're actually right, you can because of that undulating periodization stuff I talked about, you can actually do this in a lot of ways so you could do one exercise at the beginning where you have a set Cadence say 311 it is like a
very one so that's coming. So that's Lifting for three. Pause for one lower for one
generally, the
apis. Okay, so the first number is always the east.
Rick generally. Okay, so depending on exercise lowering the weight for a count of three. Yeah, pause for one,
it totally doesn't exercise like a dead lift starts con Centric and finish this eccentric but a bench press starts the. Okay. So start to finish start to finish is the better way to think about it. Yeah, so in I'll clarify actually, when we say 311 were generally talking about almost always The Eccentric is this lower portion regardless if it's the first or the last, right? So whether you're doing a bench press or The Eccentric is lower.
During the bar to your chest. That's the first part of the movement. One, two, three, pause 11 up. Which means accelerate as hard as you can on the way up, that's
what you describe. As opposed to say, a row a
row, which is actually going to be starting off concentric. So you're going to be pulling that thing to your chest as fast as you can under control. Not slamming off your chest holding for one second and then taking three seconds to lower it back on the rack or on the ground or whatever. So the reason we do that is somewhat intuitive but it is again to make sure you're not
Dancing's a bar or an Implement on to your physical body, at an extremely fast rate, that's very difficult to deal with. So a 311 is a very standard strength protocol. That is something you can just run with, if that's all you ever wanted to do, it would be absolutely fine
lower the bar for a count of three, it actually ends up being approximately 3 is super hardly. Anybody is counting off snap s precisely? I mean it's I suppose it's doable but then pausing briefly.
Yep. And that brief is almost that
Is is almost unmeasurable. It is simply. Are you under control before you transition from the center to concentric our concept Beijing, it's just a safety thing. So once you feel down, you've reached complete range of motion and ready to transition, then just go, you don't really need to go like thousand want and then go up, it's just making sure again, we don't slam weights off of body
parts. And that final one in the 311 is really as fast as the execution of the usually concentric portion of the
exercise. Yep. As fast as you
possibly can. Okay, so
It would be four.
The majority of the outcome being strength. Yep. Okay. And of course, we should acknowledge again there are ton of variations that one could Implement their but that that would be a good starting place on the opposite side for somebody who's mainly interested in hypertrophy. Yep. What would be the rep Cadence that if you had a gun to your head that you would
prescribe? I would probably do the exact same thing. But I would like, I would make the last number two.
So 312, you could also just keep 31 on it is still very fine, even the exploding on the contract, you can still affect highly effective for training hypertrophy, so if you want to keep it super simple and just make rep, Cadence, not a variable that you play with because you have other ones to move. That's great. If you want to add a little bit of time to the concentric phase, fine, it's not going to do. It's not going to make enough of a difference for most people for you to read.
We worry about, I guess that's sort of the point of really want to make this is where classically. This is a classic example of where deep into a method, right? If you'd long as you get the concept, I talked about earlier whether you want to do 3 1, 1 3, 2 3, 3 3 3, triphasic, it seems this is just a method Choice. It doesn't mean they're irrelevant. They ought there are subtle changes within them. It's just 80/20 rule, right? So 80% of the benefit is going to be from the concept. 20% assist, small thing. If you're super into this field or you actually want to work with a qualified
Fide certified coach or something. They eat. There's lots of reasons to play with this. If you're just on your own here and running, this thing 311 is fine, 312 totally find anything like that. You really just want to make sure that in the strength side of the equation you're under control and you can add enough load to stimulate strength and not get hurt with an acute trauma, right? On my perjury side, you're just wanting to load enough to where you can hit volume because you got to put it on.
Down there. So, if you want to go lighter, if you want to go slower fine. You if you go slower in your repetition. So maybe even like a five-second eccentric. A two second, pause a three second Rise. That's great. You can actually then stimulate the same amount of hypertrophy and either do it with less weight or do it with less repetitions. So it's a variable you can play with if you're like hey
I don't have enough weights at my house. I only have a kettlebell or a dumbbell. How am I going to stimulate hypertrophy? Your only option is really doing more reps. Will eventually that that train runs pretty shallow. Okay, here's the thing you can play with maybe just add time under tension as we're calling right just you know do slower repetitions go longer ones and hold it so it's a variable that we use to individualize programs rather than something that you should really be focused on is like a core aspect that's going to be driving whether or not your program.
Works. It's just a tool. We can play with in the what-if scenarios. I will use this stuff a lot when I'm traveling. You can do a tremendous work out in your hotel room. Just doing like a 10-second eccentric. A 10-second. Hold attend Centric
concentric? Yeah, I've had some decent hotel room workouts, they're not my preference but by simply doing things like 10, second lowering handstand. Push up against the door. Totally obviously, assisted for me.
I don't I can't do a free handstand pushup. Yeah, I bet just don't have the skill or the strength or both. You can do some sort of configured dips between the beds or chairs and this kind of thing real
for the elevated, split squats or great to do in hotels but your back foot up on a on a bed and get a amazing split squat. Workout done? Yeah. Like glute Bridges. Lots of stuff to do
that. Yeah. And with a jump rope, if you've ever heard someone jumping in the in the morning, love ya may or may not be me, could be any number of things, but I known to skip rope and
Tell rooms, not to get overly detailed, but I think there are going to be a number of people wondering about how to breathe during repetitions and how to breathe in between sets. So I'd like to just briefly touch on this and this is something that I know we're going to return to again when we have our discussion about recovery. Yep. But is there a general rule of thumb for how to breathe during repetitions during work? Yep, for strength, maybe even strength versus
Hypertrophy in in a way that maximizes oxygen input to the system. You know, keeps you alert conscious but that also protects the body by creating some rigidity in the system, right? Because certainly being deep with all your air exhaled, the body is a very different beast in terms of stability than with the body full of air versus, you know, breathing during the repetition
movement, there's a maneuver that is long, then labeled the valsalva.
Technique. So what that really means is you're trying to use air to create intra-abdominal pressure. And what you're really trying to do is create a cylinder around your spine. The real issue you have to play here is regulation of blood, pressure and spinal stability. Now, you should be able to breathe Embrace, what I mean by that is you should be able to create total intra-abdominal pressure, regulate spine control, while breathing it's just very hard for a lot of people to do it's a skill you should absolutely work on. You can actually
You can do this and you can go around like I do this trick in class and students can come and I can push any part of my entire abdomen is super tight. And I can talk now, it's going to be a little bit labor. You can hear a little bit of a difference, but you should be able to do that if you have to like, hunched down and you can't even muster breath, and it takes that to create pressure. You're not actually you don't really understand the abdominal control necessary to create that stability. So, step number one is, that's the goal. Now, with the blood pressure thing, we have to be careful.
Because a standard blood pressure. Ideally, if we sat around right now, it was probably something like, 120 over 80 systolic versus diastolic. That's a normal number, right. High blood pressure is something over that. Well, with an acute bout of exercise. You can see that number reaches high as like 450 over 350, which effectively means you have total blood occlusion, right? Your blood pressure. So, high blood is not moving anywhere. And so in the middle of a very heavy set, especially complex movements, especially when they're loaded on your body, this could be an overhead press.
Or squat variations in like that blood pressure is going to be problem. And reason why that matters is that's going to make you pass out. It's not the fact that you ran out of oxygen in three seconds. It's the fact that blood pressure got so high, you blocked out. And so we want to have, we have to play this game of releasing a little bit of the pressure, so we can actually get blood to move a little bit. Making sure that we don't lose spinal stability. So, we can finish our workout. That's really the question you asked, right? How do I play this game of? Oh, I have several hundred pounds on my back or my chest. And I
Don't want to Exhale, right? So that I don't lose spinal stability, but at the same time, I don't want to pass out, right? Which is a, which is a problem. So kind of a couple of rules of thumb, if you're going to be doing something in which you can complete the entire exercise without a breath, and it is of a maximal or close to load. That's probably your best strategy. So, in that particular case, you'll see a lot of breathing techniques where you're going to take a very large inhale. Ideally, this is done through the abdomen, not the shoulders so we shouldn't seen clavicles Rising during this thing.
You see common mistake of the bars on their back and you see people do this like, big inhale thing and all they do is Elevate their clouds. That's not necessarily going to increase pressure through the abdomen, which is what you're looking for. So, you want to be thinking about belly, moving out in all four areas in front of you to your left and right and to your back. That's that quadrant sort of idea of stabilizing your spine. You can do that independent of your clavicles, moving your shoulders, don't need to rise for that. You don't really need the oxygen for a metabolic purposes. You're just using
In the air for a brace, that's really all you're
after. So you're trying to visualize your torso as more or less a cylinder. Yep. And you're trying to fill it with air. The logic being that if I were to push down onto a say, a full, unopened can of soda. Yep. Water for all your sugar folks out there, soda water. And then push as hard as I could, it's going to be hard for me to crush that can, but if they can were empty or if it were a little bit kinked in the middle,
Back
then I could likely Crush that camp.
Yeah. What you're really doing is you have your spinal Erectors in the back, right? And then a whole series of abdominal exercises and you actually have some neural control. So somatic control of Contracting those, but the you don't have muscles on the inside that you can do. So you're basically bringing in air and saying I'll use air to push from the inside out and I'll use muscles to push from the outside in to create this brace. And I don't want over compression with the muscles. This is a like if you see people that have just enormous spinal Erectors,
Hers. Sometimes that's an indicator of actually a poor breathing or bracing strategy because they're using spinal Erectors great. All the compression and not actually using the inside enough. That's not always the case, but sort of like a thing to think about. So over compression through the spinal Erectors is not necessarily ideal. If you wanted the best scenario is a little bit of abrasive both. So we use some air to push this side. We use some musculature to press that way, and then that that spine is is nicely held in position.
Again, not in a position where I've locked on my diaphragm, and I can't get any air out. I should be able to get that braced pattern and then be able to speak with acted. Like I'm doing it right now and you'll see like a little bit of a you give you really paying attention to my voice. You can hear a little bit of a subtle difference but I should be able to do this for quite a long time, right? Like I could take a maximum grew up right here in this position, whether I'm over at pressing, doing some sort of row, like anything and feel fairy braced in the entire
quadrant.
This is very helpful. I'm going to work on it, but can we say that an effective way to start off in terms of breathing during repetitions would be to take a gulp of air. During the lowering phase, The Eccentric phase and then to Exhale during the yep, concentric exertion phase. I ask that because that's what I've been doing for a while, and it makes me feel safe. I don't know if I am and it allows me to Exhale as I exert the the
Artist portion of the exercise. Yeah. And perhaps I also borrowed that from martial arts where one tends most often is trained to Exhale on the, on the
strike. Yep. If you're going to be doing again, the number of repetitions can be completed without a breath. A lot of times, you're better off saving that exhalation until you
complete.
Well, but you don't have to but for a reasonably heavy set of hack squats or even leg extensions and giving that ice already can't leg extension. My body weight, maybe this is garbage. Maybe this is why the idea of holding my breath for an entire compound set. So again, I'm kind of like to mine, you know, like where is my insurance card, who's going to drive me to the hospital? This kind of thing in all seriousness. What if I want to breathe during the set? Yeah, so
I'll clarify. I'm generally meaning. If you're doing like a one rep, max or something like
that. Okay. So he certainly could hold my breath for a one repetition
maximum that, you know, maybe like a double or something like that depending on what you're doing. Like maybe a triple a bench press, you can probably do three and get away with it. A squad. It gets harder that lift. So it kind of depends on the exercise. You want to take that Beth breath though. Prior to The Eccentric portion.
Not during so the free or breathe in La corset and now start our movement pattern, whatever is going to be exhaling on the concentric portion during it is fine. It's no problem, especially if you're not extremely
heavy and your, what's your, what are your thoughts on grunting and screaming? Yeah, fine. I don't care. I don't tend to do that. I'm occasionally known to squeal or whimper, but I do it that matches your person. I do it, very quietly.
I think of you and I think squeal a absolutely thanks. If you're going to be doing
Multiple repetitions what we actually do for the NFL combine, as we teach them, a very specific Excel strategy. So there's one test that they do which is they benchpress 225 pounds for as many reps as possible. A lot of these people will get 25 to 40 repetitions so we have a very specific breathing pattern. It would be something like if we think that they're going to do around 25 reps. Say that's like our goal, we might say, okay do the first 10 without a breath and then exhale we set and then do five breath and then you might do five breath, three breath.
Breath. And then one breath per rep until we can't get any more. So, we'll have very specific strategies for them. So, what I would say is think about how many you're going to complete and then breathe, according to that. And it tends to increase in frequency as the number gets closer to failure because you're going to want that that are a little bit but you just want to make sure that when you reap your breathing back in you're in a safe spot. So you don't want to be catching that like re breath when the weights on you you want to be in a locked up.
Position or away from you when you're standing. So it tends to be like at the end of the exercise, not in the middle of it, which is going to be a recipe for problems. If you take your breath of
that, one of the reasons, I'm so happy to have you here having this discussion as we can really get into the weeds but also hit a number of questions that I hear a
lot. Yep.
How does one contend with the first attempt at a lift? Not working out. Is it too? Heavy something goes wrong. Hopefully, not injury promote.
Being wrong, but something goes wrong. Do you count that? You reset the workout and then it counterpart to that question is what do you do? If it's too easy when wrong because you didn't put enough weight on the bar. Do you pick up a heavy enough? Set of dumbbells, do you abandon the set and, and replace it with another. And I guess this is really a question of how much margin for error is there in volume? Yep, when doing this three by five program, sure two
things,
I'd like to start with number one is, I talked about linear periodization and undulating periodization, there's actually a new model newish model called Auto regulation. Which basically says you're going to go in today and depending on any number of biomarkers performance markers or your performance, you will adjust your training based on how you're feeling that day. And so 70%, is that maybe? For example, not necessarily 70% of your one arm, petition, Max highest ever. It's 70% of what you can actually do that day.
And so it actually allows you to Auto regulate, your training based on actually, what's happening? And so you don't have to have as much long-term planning in your program design, because it'll sort of figure itself out. As you're going, you can use velocity to determine this Auto regulation you can use actually. It's like taking it up to close to a Max with a day and then basing all your percentages on that daily Max or a lot of different ways. So that is actually one of the very effective strategy and there's a lot of research coming out and autoregulation. There's a lot of different ways to do it. So,
That's one thing to say, another thing to say is this 325. Okay? It depends on if we're going for speed power strength because while all those other variables are the same three to five, the core difference between whether that is a power workout or a strength workout is the load, right? So, if you are at a moderate load, say 30% of your one repetition, Max up to about 70 percent that's going to be a power based adaptation. Assuming you're going with
my intent.
Sorry, I have to interrupt, maybe just clarify what intent is.
Yeah you're attempting to move the implement or go through the movement pattern, as fast as you can't. Great, thank you, if you're trying to go for strength and your below 70%, you're not really going to be improving strength because the total mass is not heavy enough. And so, really, when we say strength, we're assuming you're at at least generally 70% or higher now,
If you're new to training totally different thing, right? But if you're moderately trained to highly trained, you're going to be well, north of 70%. So anything below that we don't really count. Anyways, that's those are warm up sets basically. All right so one thing to actually give you some very specific numbers here and I don't have all of these memories. We can perhaps provide a chart later or send out something to them but there's a chart that you can look up called Aprilia open chart. How do you spell that? PRI l ipin
For a little bit and there's actually been a few studies on it. It's a it's a it's been old, it's been around for very long time. It's sort of in the coaching realm and a handful of studies out of New Zealand came out verifying and validating a lot of it. But what it effectively does is if strength is the goal and this comes from the powerlifting weightlifting sort of communities or optimizing for strength. Then how much time do I need to spend at each intensity range. So 70% 80% 90% etcetera because
It e is going to say this, if you want to get better neuromuscular guy at shooting a basketball, the most important thing you could ever do is shoot a basketball under the exact circumstances that you're going to do it right specificity? Always wins. If you want to get better at strength. The most important thing you need to do is that exact movement at that load. And in this case, if you want to get better at benchpress lifting at, 100% of your max on a bench, press is the most specific thing you could ever do.
Do the more you can do that, the faster you will increase your bench, press Max. However, that's very hard to do without getting hurt. It's also not addressing what I call your Defender. So if the reason you can't bench press higher than whatever you're benching. Now it may not be your pure strength. It may be any number of things like you don't have enough muscle or technique or is things. Okay, great, so specificity over here variation on the other side. So we're playing this game. We've talked about of
how do I make sure that I can have enough specificity in my training without leading to overuse injury? All, how do I maximize or how do I reduce my chance of injury while getting enough specificity? And so we have a classic Paradigm over here. One actually training protocol. You can look up is called the Bulgarian method and the bulgarians were amazing at the sport of Olympic weightlifting. Probably, in fact a the
The patriarch of this entire thing recently passed away. I've been debate ibjjf neum sulemani glue pocket Hercules. One of the greatest weight lifters of all time came out of the system and they do a lot of things. But one example in the Bulgarian system is you're going to do a one repetition maximum snatch. Going to take a little bit of a break, you'll do a one repetition maximum clean and jerk. Take a little bit of a break do a one repetition maximum front squat, take a little bit of brake and you're gonna repeat that two to three times a day every day.
That's specificity, right? Those people get extraordinarily strong. Now they don't do that all year round, they don't do that with all their lifters but this is when we're trying to peek for a major competition. Like the Olympics, we are going so far into specificity and that was very counter to the Russian system of the time which is much more of our classic periodization sort of approach. Okay. Specificity is tremendous but in doing that, the bulgarians just brutalized a lot of athletes, right? Because it's very difficult to handle something like that. And you can't really do that that long without getting.
Getting wrecked and their the goal is to win
medals. The goal is to with it's a totally different thing than longevity out of here, right? Like we're trying to push the boundaries of
or aesthetic changes unless someone has a naturally balanced physique total in general. If people do one sort of movement, I find that they tend to resemble the equipment that they did that movement with overtime, right? That was a joke against
kettlebells course, of course. Of course I got it. So we know specificity is technically optimal but it's not realistic. Not for that. Kind of a, you know.
Extreme situation. So how do we balance these things? Well it turns out this perilla pain chart gives you guidelines for how much time and by time I mean how many repetitions to stand in each of these references so that you get kind of the best of this world you're going to find the same thing by the way when we get into endurance training, there's only so much training you can do at 95% of your heart rate before it starts becoming like quite detrimental. You need to actually spend a lot of time at those lower intensities. So the pillow pain chart walks you through.
How many sets and it gives you a range? Like the, I think that the bottom of it is like, how much time do you spend at like 60 to 70% everyone? Right Max. And it says like, you know, minimum of this set to maximum of this set but the ideal number of reps per set per week is like 18 and it walks you through. And so there's four criteria on it. I think it's 55 to 65 percent again. How many reps there? It's like 3 to 6 reps per set, 18 to 30 reps total. And I think the ideal rep ranges
Like 24, something like that. So, it gives takes you 55 to 65 70 to 80, 80 to 90. In the 90-plus percent. What you'll see is, the 90-plus percent. Number is more like one to two reps per set for a total of about seven total repetitions. If you start cruising past that other bad things start to creep up in there. So that's a really effective chart. What it really highlights though is even somebody who's trying to maximize strength
You're going to spend something like 35 or so percent of your training time between this, like, 55 to 65 percent range. So you're asking her like, well, do I even count that one? The answer is. Yeah, you know, in that range if it's below, 55 60 percent, you probably don't count it. Now again, some coaches don't count unless it's a bit about 70 fine. It's not a major distinction, but you're going to spend the bulk of your time. You know, accumulating some some technique basically and skill and tissue tolerance very
And The Next Step Up is like 28 percent, I think is sort of the cutoff of how much time you spend between 70 and 80%, everyone are Max, and then it jumps down like 23% and then all the way to 70 percent. So you can walk yourself through that and that gives you an extremely good guideline and you'll notice all of these are still in three to five range. It's just really you're manipulating it by total sets or total exercises so that can give you some structure to play with.
We will provide a link to the Philippine chart. Yeah, in the show. No captions.
Training to failure when the goal is
strength. Yeah.
Should one do. It should one avoid it or does it
depend? Well, yeah, it always depends on the way that I'll generally say it is because of what we just outlined it in the broiler pan chart. You don't have to go to failure to see strength, gains, especially early or even moderate. And I'm talking maybe five plus years in your lifting
career. Would you call beginner zero to five years of training, intermediate, five to twenty years of training.
Yeah, something like that
and then Advanced would be people that really put the time and energy into fine-tuning their program. The vast majority of people who
think they're Advanced are really what we would call intermediate
in all domains of life Fair.
Even as a scientist, it's quite rare to reach that number of advanced. So I actually don't have any problem going to failure quite often. I'm also fine with people who don't want to go all the way there. You can get, most of what you need, getting what we call technical failure. So this is like, okay.
That was really challenging boy, you started have some breakdowns a technique. We're going to call that good. The Only Exception here. I want to point out is people who are either novice or beginners. They really have no concept of what 100% means, and so I think it's actually very fruitful to take them to 100% just to give them a guideline of where it's at. Now, of course, do this on exercises that they are comfortable with or closed and the you've met
Maybe that maybe this is on a machine, maybe this is single joint movements or whatever it takes for them to have confidence. But actually, I don't think you should be scared of these. They're not really that much more dangerous than anything else. There's I mean, think about it, if you're going to do a front squat or any exercise, and your one rep max is 200 pounds, is it really that much more dangerous to do one? Try at 205 pounds, then it is to do five tries at 190 pounds.
Like is it really that much more know? Like it's not. So you can do like we talked about in the the first episode you can do a repetition Max estimate when you get to like 85 to 95 percent of where you think you are. And then instead of adding load you just do as many reps as you can Google that number and it'll tell you the conversion estimate of what your under-eye Max's that's fine but also have absolutely no issue. In fact, I generally encourage it to take people up to that level certainly not day one or anywhere close to that. But at some point, let's
You actually got, I'm just I'm just going to cut it off early. What I'm going to consider to be one or two? Max, anything more than a minor technical breakdown is for that group were going to stop and call that
good and ideally with a spotter, especially, you know, bench-pressing, don't bench, press alone in your basement, kind of thing. A few people die each year from bench-pressing alone in their basement. Yep, we're use dumbbells if you're going to do that. Yeah. Hard harder to die using dumbbells. Suppose you could drop them on your head or something but not get stuck under them.
Exercise selection and frequency of exercise implementation across the week. So, I can imagine with this three by five routine done, three to five times per week. You can imagine changing up the exercises every workout. Although, considering that most of these, three by five routines are going to be done with compound movements generally the sooner or later one runs out of movement. If the goal is to hit,
Major, all the major muscle groups. Yeah. However, Let me Give an example and ask if it's okay to for instance, do the three by five routine, where one of the exercises for back is a bent over row.
You do that Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Okay, you know, I can imagine one could do that and still recover and improve over time, but five days a week bent over rows, 5 days a week. Is that okay, mean can one still progress and there? I could imagine it's a strong answer of Depends because some people recover more slowly in others. I'm very comfortable doing hitting muscle groups once directly per week, and once indirectly that's worked for me, farb.
Better than two or three times per week, you know, I get, you know, look, so sympathy when I say this but it's actually, it's just how my physiology Works. Kind of. Yeah. Well, and maybe I'm not optimizing a number of different features, but the point being that some people really do seem to be able to train it, a muscle every day, and still make progress. Other people seem to have trouble when they train a muscle every day. So how does one establish exercise selection? When the goal is to make progress and
Brings up something very important and we're going to have a whole episode about this, but local versus systemic recovery. Yep. That, you know, is the whole nervous system becoming fatigued and is the muscle group and the related musculoskeletal systems becoming
fatigued. We're going to go back to thinking about when you make these comments about it, takes you three to five days and you've got better results in there. The assumption that you're probably running under is your training Style,
Is more reflecting that recovery time than it is your physiology. It's not you. It's how your training. So if you look at again all the Olympic weightlifters that are competing they're going to be squatting or some variation of squatting everyday.
That that's going to happen. Like a lot of the times you're training multiple times a day and they will be doing some basically barbell full squat. Multiple times a day. Every day. Six days a week? Yeah, something like that. They're the best in the world at getting powerful. They are tremendously good at getting strong.
You can do it, right? It comes down to. What does your volume look like? What type of movements are you doing? What? Rep range? What overall volume are, you hitting and how are you doing it? If you look at athletes,
They train their legs every day.
When they're running around, they're doing Speed and Agility training, every single day. They don't need, you know, three days to recover can imagine a basketball player trying to ask for like three days to recover between
practice, right? Well, to be fair as you as you chuckle at me, I'm doing other things on the intervening days. Yeah. So I'll train a muscle group like legs and then I'll give it four days before I do an indirect. Yeah. What I call an indirect exercise for, like, switch for me would be sprinting. Yeah. Then I get two days and then I'm training them
again. But nonetheless, an athlete has to do.
Every day. Right? Right. So the absolute answer is, you absolutely can train any of these muscles every single day. It really comes down to volume, right? And it comes down to movement type, and how are you getting? So within the case of weightlifters and athletes, what we tend to see happen is, there's not a there's two things, there is a long period of conditioning. And I don't mean endurance, what I mean is is tissue tolerance and conditioning, so they're not going to start off their career at that pace right there.
Ear mites tie, talk start off at five days a week, but maybe every other of those days is a PVC pipe only and you're just training the movement patterns, you're working on techniques cetera and then eventually maybe after six months or a year those PVC pipe days turn into barbell only days. As so now you went from a pound to 45 pounds and eventually as your years go on that matches up so it depends on the style in general speed and power stuff is so light, it almost required because it's non fatiguing it.
Cars, almost know about of no recovery. So if you were truly doing say like, you know, your when you say you'd is funny because when you say I do legs on Mondays, you don't even realize it but an athlete does legs every day. But you're saying legs and you what you're really saying is I do hypertrophy legs Monday's
pretty much that I don't want to get into what I do specifically because it's less important than what other people choose to implement but the repetition ranges anywhere from 4 to 12. Correct. So you're covering
up. Pretty your smack dead in the
Soreness longest
recovery rate volume is relatively low intensity is very, very high. Yeah. Workouts are very, very
so if you were to switch that and you were to stay under full repetitions higher quality, higher rest in between them, I would be willing to bet a large amount of money that you'd be fine the next day, certainly 48 hours. And if you were to actually go way lower and keep, you know, 325 I keep it very, very light and train for Speed. You would have absolutely no issue the next day. So it really comes down to function of training. You're right in that hypertrophy.
He's on which is something that you probably need 14 hours at minimum to recover from because what you won't see our body builders training, the same muscle group on multiple days, like very often at most, it will be indirect, but generally they're not going to do that every single day, the same reason. So your training in that cell, that's what it's going to take to recover if you trained any different style than it, wouldn't take
that long to recover. So, for the person starting out
Would you recommend they pick three to five exercises and stick with those so that they can get their skill and movement and positioning and breathing all that really dialed in and then start to experiment by varying, one, or two of those exercises over time.
That's great. If you look at the, the conjugate model. So these are the strongest power lifters as a collective group that ever existed, the but they're very good at as they keep almost the exact same weekly structure. But they make a very small change in exercise variation. So for example, same say, Wednesday has
Stay right there. Going to always bench on Wednesdays. But maybe this week, they're going to do close, grip, bench, and then maybe next week it's going to be maybe a special type of barbell and then maybe the week after that is, you know, maybe they'll change the range of motion a little bit. So it's actually the exact same exercise where they're making a very small variation. And that change alone allows them to do enough specificity, but also gives them enough variation to where it's not the exact same stimuli in the exact same spot over and over and over and that's what allows that group.
Plus lots of other assistance, but it's what allows that group to train. Very, very, very heavy. Very consistently, not have to worry about too much planning for periodization and other stuff like that. They get their back off by making small variations in exercise. I will say a major mistake folks do make is they change your exercises entirely way too often. If I were to have to pick one or the other, I would say don't change anything on your exercises for six weeks, probably realistic, maybe even
And the 12 weeks and then you can make some changes. You should not be changing every single week, the general help you just you're not going to see progress. It's going to be very difficult to do that. So it's going to take you three weeks. Generally to figure out the groove, the exercise, to figure out how well you can load it. What's too much to where you woke up unbelievably store, that was a train wreck. How much do I load it at? What position, how long is this going to take? It's going to take you three or so weeks. And then you can really start pushing their so changing it before that are in that time frame is
you're not gonna be able to progressively overload because you're just not going to know exactly where you're at, on all the exercises. So, it's very important to create standardization within them and then see some progress in a movement or muscle Group whatever you're going for and then make some changes.
So, before we dive into our discussion about hypertrophy, could we just get a brief recap of the general parameters for an excellent power and strength training
program. Okay, let me hit you with these rapid fire and then you can maybe come ask questions along that.
Remember those modifiable variables? Okay, so let's go through them in order and then what they mean specifically for power versus strength. So modifiable variable, number one is called choice. So which exercises do I select for strength in general for power or speed or strength? We want to select compound movements, you don't often see people doing maximum strength work for like a tricep Kickback, right? It's typically multiple joint movements and typically complex movements
In selecting these compound movements, we generally want to actually think about exercise selection of movements, rather than muscle groups. So this is an important distinction because we'll see this as a different answer. We can I purchase you? What I mean by that is when we think about again, strength training, we tend to think about bodybuilding Concepts. We go to the gym and we do things. Like, I gotta make sure I get my chest today and I got to make sure I get my hamstrings. And now, you're selecting exercises based on a muscle. You want to work for strength development and power. We want to think about movements rather than individual.
Muscle groups. So there should be like things like I need to train explosive hip extension which is like a vertical jump or something like that. I want to train pushing or pulling movements are want to ten road trip. I want to train rotation, which is a whole area, we haven't gotten into, which is very important for overall health and wellness longevity. So we want to select big movements by the muscle, the movement patterns that we want to introduce and we just want to select a reasonable balance between these. I don't
What the exact ratio is, you just don't want to go an entire six months without doing anything in this rotational area, or an entire eight to ten weeks without doing something with a lower
body hinge, right?
So, any number of examples there, so just think about the rough movement patterns, upper, and lower push and pull. And then some sort of rotation, that puts you in a pretty good spot. If you're using 3x5 method, and you're going to pick as little as three exercises, just pick one from each one of those.
Those group pick a rotation pick a push. I pick a pole.
I can easily think of a pushing a pole. So for example, bench press or shoulder, press share row or chin for pull and then squat or deadlift for hinge hip, what would be a good example of a quality rotational
movement? Yeah so anytime you can use a cable machine like at the gym and you can do, it's kind of hard to describe this exercise but basically you going to stand facing the cable and
To pull it towards yourself and then rotate, like you're pivoting, like you're either swinging a golf club or hitting a baseball bat. So you're facing One Direction, I'm facing you right now. I'm pulling the cable towards myself, and then I'm going to spin do a 180 degree pivot and face exactly away from you when I finish, and then return it back. The same spot. So, that's a
rotation great. We will provide a link to an example of that. That you consider a quality
example, a medicine ball. Throw any number of things like this are great rotational exercise. All right.
So we select our exercises based on that, we generally, then the K because of, that is the case. We don't worry about things, like eccentric versus con Centric, because you're Denley doing a whole body athletic movement, right? Which The Eccentric concentric portion is going to be folded into that. You really can't separate them out. All right. So that's exercise Choice. Our first variable, the next one is exercise order. So because that everything driving power and strength is. Quality-based, you want to do these at the beginning?
Of your workout. You would not want to do anything fatiguing before this so no cardiovascular training. No, other repetition to failure stuff. If you do those before and now you're slower, all you've done is practice, getting slower. And so these need to be done when you're fresh. You also need to do them when you're very fresh because they are the most neurologically demanding their complicated. They tend to have multiple steps, and they're often in multiple planes. And coordination is a difficult thing. And if you're trying to do all that a maximum speed your nervous system,
To be tremendously fresh. And so, any amount of fatigue here is only going to compromise results to kind of recap that one of the major mistakes when training for strength and especially power is people worry way too much about fatigue. Those things should not be part of the equation and in fact, if they are that's a very good sign. You're not doing this correctly. These are non fatiguing movements, especially speed and power. So Choice order is next. The next one after that is volume and we sort of hit volume and intensity.
Is the other one we talked about that. The volume is basically identical between power and strength. The general number, we're going to look at here is something like 3 to 20
sets total per workout
Core workout, but that would be like 20 would be a bit of a special case, 325 IS when I told you earlier, right? I'm just saying like sometimes you can actually go quite higher in this cases but that's the general range and one
somebody finishes the 3x5.
Workout for power or strength, if they decide, they want to throw in some calf raises and curls, and totally have forearm work or a little bit of jogging on the treadmill or something. That's
okay. Absolutely. There is very little risk of interference for things like speed and power strength. You have a little bit of a risk only, because now you're introducing fatigue, which if you're really pushing strength, that might compromise your recovery.
I could imagine doing the
Five routine for strength or power and then somebody finishing up with 10 or 15 minutes of hypertrophy arm work and then being very seriously compromised if they try and come in the next day or even the next day. Correct. And do those big compound movements for Speed and power. That's right. Not just because they're sore, but the muscles may actually still be damaged. And I know later we're going to talk about the somewhat tenuous relationship between soreness and
Recovery. Yeah, yep. So that's a really nice here.
Mystic to pay attention to is you can but just be careful, Energy starts to matter at that point. If you're really truly trying to maximize strength, you would do nothing at all outside of that training. If you're just like, I kind of want to get stronger and some other things and you're willing to lose strength, you know, 5% of your strength gains then you're totally fine on the same can be said by the way, for super setting. So super setting is an idea that says, like, wait a minute you're telling me dude, I got to take five minutes.
In between each
set. Well that's not so much a problem nowadays with phones and smartphones because people are filling their inter set intervals with social media and texting
correct. You don't really have to go that long. In fact, there is actually a study that came out in the last month that showed, you know, like really two minutes is probably sufficient for most people. Having said that, if you really are trying to push maximum strength adaptations, like 325 is very, very reasonable your, those training sessions are long.
Because you have to take your spending more time, not doing anything, then you are doing something but you're trying to maximize quality. So that's the sort of like part and parcel. If you're not super worried about it, you can actually do super setting which is let's imagine. Again you're going to do some some lunges and while your legs are resting doing there, three to five minutes, you can go over and do an upper body row or pull. And when your upper body is resting, you're going back, two legs. So that really cut your time in half, is it ideal? No, we actually ran a study, maybe ten years ago in our
And we looked at that specifically and we did see a reduction in strength performance in the super setting group relative to the group who do not superset, the question then becomes like is it enough for you to care? So if you were to, if I were to say, hey, I can cut an hour off of your workout time, but you will lose 5% of your strength gain, almost everyone would take that exchange with accepting of people who are getting close to competition or really trying to set a new lifetime PR something. Then you might say, no, I don't want any interference there that last little margin is what I care about.
Out. Give me the extra rest. Great. So it's not a does, it work? Does it not work? It's always a, what are you willing to give up versus? Get
the practicalities of super setting or staggering? Push? Pull push pull in my mind are real because you have to take over large segments of the gym which oftentimes leads to a situation where your rest times are too long or highly variable because people are working in where you
can't finish your set because someone jumped into the machine right
totally screwed, right? Use three to five of your friends.
Because it's obnoxious when you're taking over all the equipment but in all seriousness, I think it's wonderful if you have the space and the format to do it, but at least in my experience and observation these people know who they are, it's not practical to do on a regular basis. If you train in an open commercial
gym. Yeah. Tough to pull off. So we've covered toys order volume and intensity to a sufficient level. The last one is frequency, and we've already sort of
Directly talked about that, we're frequency can be as high as you'd like in this area. It really depends on your recovery. If you really truly pushing maximum strength, you probably do need a few days to recover, although that's dependent upon you, but speed and power can be done multiple times a day almost every day. Basically, the one exception would be maximum, sprinting speed. You need to be careful there for things like hamstring injury, especially if you're pretty fast so you want to be a little bit cautious of that. But if you're doing easier movements like medicine ball throws or kettlebell swings or
You could do those quite often as long as the volume is, is staying pretty low. Last little piece here is progression how I progressed over time. So I mentioned this earlier but just want to fill this Gap right back in before we head over to hypertrophy which is 3 to 5% increase per week of intensity in general. And you can do upwards of about 5% increase in volume per week over time. And I generally recommend running that for at longest eight weeks. But probably most realistically you want to go about five.
Weeks or so. And then have some sort of a deload or back off week. If you do that, you're generally going to be a pretty good spot. So those are like the Core Concepts. Now, there's a whole bunch of fun methods. You can play with within all these categories and I would like to actually cover just a couple of them if we've got a little more space for
that sure. I'd love to hear about those. I'd like to also just queue up one which is while I joked about people texting and doing social media between say
And I that's not a joke. Well, I confess I stopped bringing my phone into the gym because of the urge to, you know, take my mind off of the workout and I just started enjoying my workouts a lot more. Yeah. And the workouts go far better that way and there's just much more efficient. It for me, I realize that some people their careers take place in the gym and so forth. I don't look down upon anyone using their phone at the gym, but that really tends to help me but I do wonder whether or not there's an
Animal behavior or mindset in between sets. I've heard before that pacing around can actually help diffuse some of the lactate and other metabolic byproducts of work and exertion. Yeah that can lead to better performance. I've also heard that, you know, shaking the muscles out. I mean there's all sorts of Jim lore about this but maybe there's also some decent science. I'm just curious if you have any specific recommendations that people could play.
They're
try. Yep. So for, for Speed and power, you want to walk this balance of stiff but fresh. And so if you were to literally finish a repetition, sit on a bench for five minutes, you would stand up after that, fairly stiff, and you wouldn't feel so receive. No, this is all sigh. This is all nonsense. This is all practical application, right? And I could data and Big Data. There you go, strength is a little bit different, but it's the same concept you're walking that line in general, a lot of the time.
As if you see powerlifters weightlifters in between sets, they're going to sit down and not move. For hypertrophy can be a little bit different because you're getting towards fatigue. And so the factors you mentioned like a clearing lactate. Well, first of all lactate is not actually causing fatigue. That's a giant myth that will,
which is why I teed it up? No, I'm just
kidding, but in the case of against being power, you're not going to fatigue. So fatigue Management on a really, an issue, you want to make sure that you're getting complete neurological recovery, which is a little bit slower than muscle energetically, you're not out of any gas whatsoever, right? You are
Not a lack of fuel doing. Three repetitions of a vertical jump. Yep, no. Close any of glycogen.
Totally. What about stretching between sets
yet, you probably don't want to do that either. There are very clear examples of pre-exercise stretching, static stretching being quite detrimental for maximum power production, the same thing for speed and strength and that's been shown actually a number of times in a number of Laboratories which is like a classic Hallmark. Any scientist looks for of like really jumping on board with an idea.
If it's shown not only multiple times but in multiple Laboratories for multiple scientists and they're all saying the same thing, you start to get a lot of confidence that that's a real finding and that's been shown. We've done that in our Center for sport performance, not myself. But one of my colleagues has done a lot of stretching research and he's seen that a lot on everything from vertical, jump to isokinetic dynamometers, and force velocity curves. And there's we've seen this is sprinting, we've seen this in speed, we've seen this in loaded stuff. So you don't want to spend a ton of time stretching statically stretching a muscle
Prior to if you do that and you have to do that. Say say for example you finish that you're like feeling really tight yeah go ahead like you need to get the right position especially for most people. Where are you willing to sacrifice? 10% of power to make sure you don't get hurt. Yes that answer is almost always yes outside of some very specific athlete scenarios. So if you're not in the right position, I actually remember having this conversation with Kelly Kelly. Started a long time ago. It was just like yeah fine. I'll lose 5%. That means. I'm not going to get in a bad position and hurt my
Jack and I totally totally agree. So if you got to open up a hip or an ankle or something to get there, get in the right position. Number one, will live with the five percent reduction in power and if you do just reactivate so before you go to your working set, go do something fast again a vertical jump, a short Sprint and acceleration and sort of get that system cleared back up. If you didn't stretch it for long enough and you didn't hold it for long enough, you should be able to be just fine. So when it comes to hypertrophy now you can really stretch like one
Cuz we're not, it's not driven by intensity or outcome. It's being driven by an insult into the tissue. And so, if your pre fatigue for hypertrophy, it doesn't matter. If your pre-stretched doesn't matter, we're not going for quality of outcome. We're going for quality of internal signal, which is not going to be changed by your Force output. So it doesn't really
matter.
You mentioned a few other things that one might consider. Yeah. In light of the list that you provided of choice order, volume frequency and progression,
right? So starting off with power, just wanted to hand the the listeners here with a whole bunch of different methods to go play with, right? So as long as you have those Concepts the repetition range for power, 30 to 70% of your one repetition Max depending on the exercise and your training status, you're going to get power as long as you're attempting to go fast, it's gonna be great.
A lot of things you can try Plyometrics are a great example of things that are effective for. For power development, we've mentioned medicine ball, throws short Sprints. You can even do sprints on like an air bike which is a great super safe activity. You can do them from Like a Rolling start where you kind of like get going a little bit and then you explode. 45 seconds to see how fast you can get or a dead start. Like both of those are very very acceptable weightlifting movements. So snatches
Has and clean and jerks are tremendously effective. In fact, they are pound-for-pound by far the most effective exercise choice for power development without question. So those are good ones, clapping push-ups speed squats. These are a whole host of different things that you can do for Speed and power development. I'm depending on your a kettlebell swings, another great one, all these can be done depending on your preference exercise availability what's that your gym or not? Jim any of those things?
If somebody is more focused on
As opposed to power. What are the additional variables? They should consider again within the context of this overarching theme of choice, order volume, frequency and
progression. Absolutely. It's almost identical with a couple of small exceptions. Number one, you probably can't do as many working sets per week for strength because now, you're introducing a heavier load and that's going to represent some sort of fatigue load on the tissue, all those things so you could probably get away.
He's doing 20 sets of to of a vertical, jump four, five times a week you probably couldn't do that at a 90% on squat, right? So the total amount of sets in the total amount of weekly load, you can get to just needs to be lower and then the intensity, right? So we talked about that needs to be generally higher than 70% with some portion of that being working sets of some portion that really truly being at 90%. Plus everything else is pretty identical. You still want to emphasize maximum speed despite the fact you may actually
Not be moving faster because you've introduced load, you still need to be attempting that. But you're going to be picking complex exercises, you're generally going to be hedging more towards barbells and machines. So this is a case where body weight training can be effective again particularly for the upper body. But at some point you're really going to have to move past that because there's just a certain amount of load you can't put on the lower body with just your body weight. You get limited by how much you weigh or I mean there's a couple of things you can do.
Do. But you're going to run out past that pretty quickly and so, and when it comes to strength, they tend to be less athletic movements because, you know, we have to have a barbell on us, we have to have a, we have to be on a machine or something like that, and so that's a subtle difference and exercise choice. We need to also be careful about The Eccentric portion and things like that. We don't have as much risk in and like a speed or power 1. So some of the different things you can play with their. We've talked about doing things like pushes and pulls. I also love carries
So our Farmers carry pushing a sled, dragging, a sled, all kinds of things. A you'll clock all kinds of carry modalities that are very, very effective for strength. There's eccentric overload training which we really haven't gone into. But it's really Advanced technique where you can actually load at greater than 100% of your one repetition Max, but you're only going to do The Eccentric portion of it. So physiologically you are much stronger essentially than you are concentrically for a variety of
All tissue reasons actually. And so, imagine if you can do a bench, press at 200 pounds, and what you might actually do is load it to 220 and you would have a spotter and maybe even use it in a rack and you would lower it down under controlled all the way to the bottom. And then stop your friends would lift it back up the top and then you just practice that eccentric portion. You would actually be able to lower say 220 pounds. Effectively, despite the fact that you wouldn't have been able to lift it back up, you don't need to start there but that is a very effective method for increase in fact,
Are you one of my one of my doctoral students right now is doing a project on the set USC and he like, he's focusing directly on this. And it's quite clear that often times more effective at strength development than anything else because you can actually just like, in the speed example, where you want to actually practice moving faster. So instead of practicing 100% of your one arm actor, strength, you actually practice that higher than that, to get better at it. So that's another much more advanced tool.
Please don't let me get sued by saying all that. Like folks, be careful. Make sure you're doing the proper exercise and your positioning and in like caveat caveat caveat, okay? But outside of that it can be is totally fine and
safe. Yeah with it, when people get injured they can't train can't train, you don't progress you lose progress. So certainly that's worth highlighting. So
two more little more advanced techniques that I want to throw out there and one of them is called cluster sets. So cluster sets are there's a bunch of ways to do it but imagine taking a mini
Break in between every single repetition. So say, you're going to do five, repetitions are in a row but you're actually going to do is do one repetition, set it down. Pause for 5 to 10 seconds and then do the next one.
Pause do the next one. Pause, pause, pause, pause pause. So you can imagine doing like a squat and you going to go down? Explode, up your stand. They're going to rock it out. You kind of like, shake back out. Catch your breath. Walk back in. Do another one.
Rock it out and you'll repeat that until you've executed your three or four or five repetitions and then you take your three to five minute break before your next set, that is an incredibly effective way for both strength power and actually even hypertrophy because you can keep the quality, the force output, the power output. Very, very, very high because you're getting these little mini breaks and you're not getting fatigue setting in by the time you get your say, third or fourth, or fifth repetition in that set after repetition one.
You start to see very small subtle, reductions power up, but because you start to see a little bit of fatigue, you take those five to ten seconds off. Even up to 20 seconds, you can actually do it. You don't see any drop and force output over the course of the five. And so, what you really have done is you've gotten five in this example, first repetitions, which is the way we would kind of say, right? So, all five of those have the same quality as rep number one, which is again, as we're talking, that's the driver and strength. And so that's the one we want to preserve. So it takes
A little bit longer for some exercise is not very good. It's great for like a dead lift because you set it back down, she can back out regrip hard to do with the bench. You got a re-rack it back in, then rewrap it back out. That's like kind of a pain in the ass so there's some exercises it doesn't work well with and some that it does but cluster sets and a lot of research on those very effective.
Would you recommend if somebody's doing cluster sets that they do them for every session within that week or just this is an occasional.
Thank you.
You could do it that this could be your training strategy. Yeah. Absolutely. So you can really take it that serious. In fact, like if you look at again, the weight lifters they will do cluster sets by default not even trying still say, they'll do like a clean and they'll drop the weight back out there supposed to be doing, say a set of three, but almost always they're going to like Shake It Out regrip and then pull it again and sometimes they're set of three takes like a minute and then it's like you here is funny because it's like I, like I said a true triple PR like no, you did three singles, like, what's the difference between doing three singles, and a set of three when you took a minute between each,
Rep. I love that community. So yeah, I mean give your strategy like it could be like hey for this five-week block. This is all my training, especially for your compound movements if you're going to go to start doing some of the smaller movements, maybe you give up on that. It could also just be something you do for your one, primary exercise for the day. So do that thing that is the most important first and just do it for that one in the rest of them, you can kind of ditch it if you need to save a little bit of that time, it can also be something you do by feel.
So yeah, your to representing you go. God like, I'm not feeling like poppy here. Like three racket. Guys are ready for a quick second and do it. So it doesn't have to be ultra planned. I guess what I'm doing is I'm giving you an excuse to make sure you're super fresh for every rep. It matters. The last one I want to talk about here is what's called Dynamic variable resistance. So Dynamic variable resistance is fixing the problem we have with What's called the human strength curve. So Theory,
Have constraints again. You're only as strong as you are in your weakest point of the movement. So, depending on the the movement you do this happens at a different range of motion. Well, the deadlift is use this example. It's also because we've done like research in my lab, using this stuff on the deadline. So I can speak to a very directly when you go to pull it off the ground. Some people are going to fail right at the bottom meaning they won't get the weight off the ground. All some people will feel just below the knees. That's like the kind of like the hardest transition period And as some people will feel right.
Right at the top just before they can lock out. Okay, great. So what that means is at some point of that lift,
You're going to only be limited by your strength in the weakest area. All right? So if you have a constant load on the bar, in those other two parts of the range of motion, where you are not the weakest. They're never truly being tested for their maximum strength because they're always being limited by the previous one. This is the same argument that we would get into if people ask about, should what do we think about using straps?
Right? Strapping, your handlebar for deadlift, things like that, there's pros and cons here. There are times when you want to use a strap and there are times when it's a bad idea. So, what dynamic variable resistance is is either using things like a heavy band or H or chains on the bar if you're seen people do that. So, in my lab, we actually have a force plate on the ground. And then we have built-in basically hooks on the front, the back. So we can actually set a barbell on top of the force plate where you stand on it and then run bands from the back to the front running over top.
Of the weights. And so when you stand up as you're going up vertically, the bands are getting Tighter and Tighter and pulling the weight towards the ground. So, the weight is getting heavier and heavier as you stand up, so as you start to gain mechanical advantage and your positioning, you start to increase load because the bands are getting Tighter and Tighter and Tighter. So, this allows you to train that full part of the strength curve and a challenge. You're stronger areas with heavier weight and you're weaker areas with lower weight,
Can do the same thing with a bench press. You can do it with the squat and any other exercise variation and dynamic variable resistance is incredibly effective for a number of things. You're going to give up a little bit because the total load you can put on the barbell is lower because you're going to be adding in large cases, several hundred pounds of band tension and so it pros and cons. It's always a game. It changes the curve, but it's a very good technique.
That that people is fairly easy to implement. It's fun. Fact, if you try this on a bench or squat, you're going to be the first time you give it a go, you're like oh my God because the bands are pulling you all over the place. So you have to get very stable, very quick, been shown a number of times, a handful of studies that are many Laboratories to be a very effective training technique a little bit more advanced but I wanted to throw that in there for the folks that are maybe just tired of sort of doing the same barbells and dumbbells the machines and you want to try something different? A very effective
technique sounds like fun. Yeah, it's great.
With your permission, I'm going to read back. My summary list of training for power and training for strength, according to your description and you can tell me where I am right and where I'm wrong.
I'm going to pick three to five exercises, and these should be compound exercises. So, multi joint movements, I'm going to perform those exercises for three to five repetitions each.
I'm going to do three to five movements total per workout and I'm going to rest 3, to 5 minutes between sets
Okay, if I'm training for power, the weight, loads on the work set. So not the warm-up sets, but the work sets are going to fall somewhere in the range of 30 to 70% of my one repetition maximum.
Yep. And the larger the movement, the higher that number goes, so on a squat, you're okay getting 50 or 60% on a bench, you would not want to go that high, you would want to stay close enough, 30 to 40 percent range. So the way you scale that up and down is dependent upon the difficulty of the
movement.
Great. If training for strength I'm going to have my work sets be 70% or more of my one repetition maximum.
Yep. And the only thing to add there is in the case of a actually all of them. It's okay to go less than three reps per set so a single or a double one or two represent is also fantastic so we use 325 is the concept but less is okay. Going more than that is generally not a good idea.
So less is okay. More generally
not okay and then you list it off a number of really valuable. I don't even want to call them fine points, but important points to keep in mind within each and both of these programs, one that really stands out in my mind is this idea of if I perform this three by five program but I'm also including some hypertrophy work for arms or calves or muscle groups that might not be hit as directly.
As one might like during the three by five component that's okay. But do that after the 3x5 training and keep in mind that that additional work can potentially compromised recovery for the 3x5. Power, promoting or strength promoting program, the example being for instance, if one does arm work on the first workout of the week or even the, you know, the third workout of the week or the fifth workout of the week and that arm work is high repetition hypertrophy.
Directed work, it's reasonable to assume that it might impede some of the 3x5, power, promoting, or strength, promoting training in the subsequent work out. So just to be mindful of that. And perhaps, throttle back on the intensity or the volume or if my goal is strictly power or strictly strength, probably best to leave out other forms of training.
Yep. Love it. One last little thing. I don't think we did Justice is in tension and the reason I want to go back to this now is
Is because we've talked a lot about specific loads, you have to hit and that's generally the case. But if intention is there, you can fudge. Those numbers in terms of how much load goes on the bar. In fact, you can get as low as no load on the bar, a great example. Here is like a plank exercise, so you can do a plank in which you get in a position and you simply contract the least amount necessary to hold the position. Also, you could contract as hard as possible pulling your
Copy that down and back. Squeezing your core squeezing, your quads squeezing your glutes that is actually going to still help strength production because you're attempting to contract. Very, very hard even know. Quote unquote, the load is the same that thing extends to wait on the bar. So you could theoretically see large improvements in strength at 50% of your water max. If you're Contracting as hard as possible. And so there's a lot, lots and lots of different ways.
You can train for strength that are outside of this weight, lifting weight training spectrum and it'll be people if you hear things like this and you're like, wow I know, I read this book or I saw this other coach who, you know, like I got so much stronger that way. Well, if intention is there, those are absolutely possible. This could be anything from bodyweight style of training. It could be very low load Implement stuff. So a kettlebell like kettlebell or a ball, it could be single leg training is like all kinds of different.
It's they will only work for strength though. When you're past your first you know handful of months of training if intention is there and if it is in these specific numbers and protocols don't matter as much so don't get too caught up in them if you're not worrying about exercise quality and this is very, very important because you mentioned earlier about how you stopped taking your phone into the gym with you. One of our former students Ramsey nijem is the head strength conditioning coach at the University of Kansas
And he made it, he made a great post a couple of days ago where he gave sort of a tip of how do I improve training quality? And one of those tips is set your playlist before you go to the gym. And the reason is people send spend so much time in between sets just finding the next song of a like it makes their work out so long and so on productive so that is one strategy or do what you do which is Ditch the music entirely when you don't have music or phone to. Look at you only have one job. You only have one thing to pay attention to and what?
We'll find is the quality of the training will go up exponentially. You will feel kind of quote, unquote board, but that's just means you'll go back to training and you'll get a lot more done because you have one thing to focus on. So you can get a lot more done when you avoid those distractions and when you're doing strength and especially power work, since it's not fatiguing strength will be a little bit but Power won't be people tend to get very bored. They're used to either feeling a pump or a burn or a sweater and that's they're like perception of my quality of
Work out these exercises will not hit that for you so there has to be another metric. You're looking at which is I'm going to try to move as well as I can. As hard as I can, that's going to produce your results. If you can't do that then you might as well just not do these workouts, go do something else. You're just going to be wasting time, you're going to be burning a very low amount of calories. You have wasted an hour and you can go right back to the place you were. So be very intentional. There are actually some, some studies showing that music can enhance performance.
And we've done some of these are lap. So, what's that mean? It's not about the music per se. It's about the focus and intent and do whatever it takes to be very focused and intent, and you could actually get in and out very quickly and get a lot of work done and see a lot of
results. Love it. Okay, let's talk about hypertrophy. The topic that occupies the minds of so many youth young men, but also a lot of women, I think one of the really interesting progressions that's taken place in the last decade or so. Is that far more men and
Women are using resistance training in order to evoke hypertrophy growth of muscles for aesthetic, reasons, and for all sorts of reasons. What are the ways that people can induce hypertrophy?
So not to correct you or insult? You but probably a better way to think about that. Question is really what stimuli do I need to give the muscle to induce hypertrophy. Now there are hormonal factors that are important. There are nutritional factors
Just to stick with the context of training, this is really going to frame a lot of our answers. And as you'll see, it's one of the reasons why I call hypertrophy training kind of idiot proof in terms of programming. Now the work is hard difficult and all that, but the Precision needed is a lot less than what we saw in power and strength. And so if you note there like, it's very important that you do it in this style with this intent and with, with these Within These parameters and if you're outside the parameters, it's not
To be hypertrophy has a very broad range in terms of your actual applications. And this is why you have and will continue to see countless styles of training that I'll work. I mean, I know you were mentored earlier in life by one of my favorite people in this entire field, Mike mentzer, like just an absolute character. His style was completely different than what you would see in a classic textbook or any unknown number of different.
Influencers, or coaches, or individuals. And if you've ever thought to yourself, like, why is it all these programs work and people love to jump to things like, well, that's the steroids. Like just, get that out of the equation for now independent of that, our thoughts, not even part of the equation, you're still going to see results. And the question is like, why? Well that's because what's driving changes in strength and power are the adaptations of specificity was driving changes in hypertrophy.
Is much more well-rounded and so you have options to get that. Remember your training a movement and now you're training a response and I muscle the constant growth. That's very very different. So if we look at like the classic Dogma, we have to basically challenged the muscle to need to come back. In this case specifically bigger and the nutrients. They need to be there to support that growth. Get the nutrients aside, perhaps we can come and a few more minutes and talk about that.
So all we really have to do is going back to our our dogma of activation of something on the cell wall. We've talked about this earlier, that's got to induce that signaling Cascade. That's got to be strong enough to cause the nucleus to react to it, to go to the ribosomes to initiate this entire Cascade of protein synthesis. Okay? So that signal has to be one of a couple of things either has to be strong enough. One time, it has to be frequent enough or it has to be a combination of these things.
All right, so I can get there with a lot of frequency and a moderate signal, I can get there with very low frequency and a large signal like more akin to what you do with, with Mike back in the day. I'm
sure and still train that way. Still trying each muscle group mainly once a week directly and once a week
indirectly. So all you can all you have to do there to not fail, is to make sure the training is hard enough and it's going to work. If you choose the frequency path then you actually have to make sure you're not training too hard to where you
Can actually maintain the frequency. The only wrong combination here is infrequent and low intensity and low volume. That's it. As long as one of those, three variables is high, you're going to get there because the mechanisms that are needed to activate that signaling Cascade are wide-ranging. And this is why, when we even see things like Blood Flow, Restriction Training, right? This is when you put like a cuff on your arm or your leg and you block blood flow and you use no load or as low as say 30 percent of your maximum and you take it to fatigue failure.
That actually is an equally effective way of inducing hypertrophy despite the fact that, you know, you're using 3 5 10, maybe most 20, to 30 percent of your one rep max. Why? Because you went through the route of metabolic disturbance, okay, other ways say a higher load, may be as heavy as you can force, a eight repetitions is going to get through what's called mechanical tension. And so there's there's these different paths that we can get to the same spot. Now eventually these things have a saturation point so you don't need all three of these mechanisms.
Isms the third one, of course, being muscle damage, our breakdown. And I and I know we want to chat a little bit about that, but none of these three are absolutely required. You can have multiple of them in a session, you don't have to have breakdown at all. That is a complete really. It's a flat-out lie that you have to break a muscle down to cause it to grow. That's just not needed at all. You have to have one of these three things though, and so again this allows you a lot of flexibility which is why crafting your program, which is best
You is actually fairly simple. When it comes to hypertrophy, you just have to make sure you do the work. And you want to make sure you have a few standards in place with the exercise choice and some other things that we'll look at in just a second, but that's really the fundamental way of getting to it. Making sure. Either that signal is loud enough or frequent enough to give the nuclei a convincing enough, reason to spend the resources because you have to remember two things in order to grow new skeletal muscle.
You need amino acids, which are your supply and then you need primarily carbohydrates as the energy source to power that synthesis process. You remember, basic chemistry? A says, if you're going to take two atoms and you're going to pull them apart or put them together, right? That's going to take energy, typically and most of actually metabolism when you split a bond, you're going to get. It's called exergonic you're going to get energy from that. But when you put them together, that's going to take energy. This is why we call that protein synthesis, right?
So you have to convince your nucleus that one invest those resources in energy, primarily carbohydrate, but number two, and more importantly, invest that Supply, there is a ton of possible ways to get energy, but there's a very low amount of amino acids available and you need them for many more things than just taking your biceps from 17 inches to 18 inches, right? It's not going to do that. If you're in a position where again you can't sustain immune function. If red blood cell turnover needs to be higher or any of the other main like tons
has of things that you need proteins for. So you have to be able to say like are you sure you really want to spend these resources and build it in a muscle? Because once we do that, it's very difficult to go backwards, break them back down and bring the amino acids back into the other two that availability pool. So we can use them for either another function entirely or even a, another muscle group that's called protein redistribution. By the way, when you say maybe you don't do a lot of upper body work and your training and you're not eating.
Enough protein or minimal amount and you're doing a lot of lifting, your legs, you'll your notice, your legs will get larger. But that's actually, a lot of times you're pulling the protein from so your upper body, in this case and redistributing it back down to the quad. So, that's the way you have. That's what you have to get to. And in terms of application, what numbers to hit, we can go through each one of our modifiable variables, just like we did with speed and strength and power and walk through some of our best practices in each
category. Yes. So I'd love to talk about
Those modifiable variables as they relate to choice of movements, order of movements volume. So sets and repetitions and frequency of training. And I'm particularly interested in frequency of training because that relates to the so-called split where typically one is not training their whole body every workout. Although, there are, I'm sure hypertrophy workouts that are whole body workouts but where people are dividing
Their body parts on, on two different days. So, would love to go through this list, one by one, starting with exercise
Choice. Cool, great. So, in the previous section, we pretty much said, exclusively, choose your exercises by the movement patterns, and you want to balance between pushing and pulling and rotation and things like that. In this particular case, you have the option to do either. Here's my recommendation. Most people default almost exclusively to Choosing by body parts here, right, I'm going to do calf's and
Shoulders today and chest and back whatever combinations of things they want. That is clearly effective strategy. However, many studies active have actually been done where you choose by movement patterns and that is actually equally effective. Now, one little caveat actually should have said a few minutes ago. When we talked about the research on muscle hypertrophy, it is important to distinguish. The fact that the vast majority of This research is coming from a novice to moderately trained individuals. There's actually more and more research coming out on trained individuals, but that's still
bill.
Moderately change, right? Even those ones. So what happens in those people that are actually way past that point we don't know scientifically. It's very difficult to do research there. So that's an important caveat. I will acknowledge when I say hey you don't need to do this or you have to do this, you're assuming a training status of moderate to low may or may not be true past that we don't know scientifically. I have certain thoughts personally but the science will only take us that far. So that being said, you can actually choose by muscle.
Oil or by movement pattern here, whichever is your personal preference and this is actually where you can act just become a good coach. Whether you're coaching somebody else through this fitness journey or it's yourself and give them a little bit of autonomy. So maybe you select the first three exercises and then let them select one every day. And so if they especially want to make sure that one muscle group grows, let them Target that muscle and maybe the rest of the day, you've actually split it up as Push Pull or something else like that, all those strategies are effective person.
Reference is long as the total amount of volume. On the working muscle is equated throughout the week, which will get to those numbers in a second. Then you're going to be in the exact same spot. No problem. I would actually generally encourage people to choose exercises in a variety of Fashions. I actually think that it's important that you do some number of combination of what we call bilateral and unilateral exercises. So, bilateral being think about it like a squat, we're bi meaning, two lateral. You have two feet on the ground moving.
In sequence, here unilateral is 1 so this could be something as simple as a rear foot of limited split squat. It could be a single leg leg press or single leg. Curl could be a pistol squat. Something? Where the the individual limb is moving one that time you need to have a combination of bilateral and unilateral training. That's good to do for strength as well. Probably not super important for power but I'm also very important for making sure.
For hypertrophy sake, you're not getting any imbalances as you progress, especially through months and years of training. So, make sure you're doing a little bit of a combination, whether you want to pick specific implements, that's really a methods question, and a preference question, then, it is Concepts. So dumbbell, great kettlebell, find barbell. Awesome band doesn't matter. Body weight does. None of these things are as important because all you're trying to do is create a certain insult in the tissue, and the Implement is just
One you feel best doing it. And this is where actually machines come into play a lot machines are greatly underappreciated. There are a fantastic resource especially somebody who's either early in their fitness journey or somebody who really is having a hard time targeting a muscle group with a bigger compound movement. So when you're choosing exercises for hypertrophy, you're going to want to start with those bigger compound movements, that's going to be drive, a lot of the adaptation you can get
To these single joint movements like a little bit later. But having said that, because of the way that people move differently, their bomb are there anthropometrics and they're biomechanics, and even their technique the same exact exercise will not necessarily work the same exact muscle groups for multiple people. So if you and I both went and did a back squat, if you did it little bit more of what we call a high bar, squat. So this is the bar is literally sitting up, higher up on your neck, you're keeping your back.
More vertical. And because in order to do that, you shift your knees, much further, past your toes. Keeping of course, your whole foot on the ground, then good position. Okay. That's going to generally put more of an emphasis on the knee joint, right? And so that's not a bad thing. You tend to see a little bit more work in the quads. They're a little bit less work in the spinal Erectors and back because you're actually not supporting the weight horizontally, which is ADD, if it's a much more difficult position, it's vertically. Stacked okay.
If I were doing the classic little bar squat, which is again, lowering the bar down. But for the down my back towards one more like my shoulder blades, I probably take a little bit of a wider stance and when I squat, I drive my glutes back further away from the midline in, as in fact as a general rule, if you take the midline of your body, the thing that moves is the farthest away from that, midline is likely to be the thing that's activating the most. So, in the case of the front squat, you're not generally going to be using your glutes as much if you're in.
Not in front of just that high bar squat, where you're very, very vertical. Your knees are going to be moving very far over your toes. It's just fantastic. Therefore it's little bit more need dominance. Can we say it the other version here? You can keep your shins really close to Vertical. You move your butt backwards, you're going to have to then lean forward with your torso, which means it'll be more low back more glutes and a little bit last name. Now that's a general statement, it's not necessarily always true but as a guideline there that is one exact exercise. We may be going man. I'm trying to improve this
Lear weakness. I have in my quads. I can't even leg extension. My body weight. I have a significant problem there. So maybe in your particular case, if I'm hammering you or your hammering yourself in a squat exercise and you're wondering why your quads aren't getting any stronger or growing in any size, it may be because of the style of the movement. So I may need to go Andrew. All right, look squats in general, if you look at the research are an excellent exercise for Quad development, but for you there, not because of the way you stand or just because of, you know, neural activation.
Doesn't matter. So I need to take you to a machine and isolate that muscle group, so we can make sure we see development in that. So if you're trying to grow a specific body part area, individual muscle, it's very important that you're actually seeing progress there and don't worry about well. And the textbook, the bench press is supposed to be good for your pack because if you're not actually moving the right position or depends on the angle in which your sternum actually sits in your body. Benchpress, may actually be doing very little for your PEC and you may need to adjust to say an incline bench or
and bench or a PEC fly. So machines can be fantastic at letting you isolate without having to worry about things like stability your low back position getting hurt or your neck at. You can really concentrate on just the movement concentrate on the muscle and let everything else kind of go away and ensure you're getting training in that specific
area. Those are excellent recommendations. One thing I want to ask about is prioritizing specific body parts and therefore specific exercises.
And here, I'm not necessarily referring to trying to bring up a so-called weak body part, you know, area, that tends to be either genetically deficient because in some cases, I learned for instance, having seen a lot of competitive track and field championships. I love watching track and field as a spectator of the Hayward Field in Oregon, whenever there's a meat and I'm sure really love that. The sprinters are amazing. They have some of the highest calves in the world that I've ever seen. I mean, like little like, my little micro calves.
They're
fast as hell. Yes. In it. Right behind the knee and they have a very long distance between that calf and their foot which it makes it propulsion
an excellent, right? They wouldn't stand a chance as a competitive bodybuilder but because something different is being selected for in bodybuilding but obviously they're they're magnificent for sprinting. Most people of course, reside somewhere between the extreme of, you know very long muscle bellies from, you know, origin to insertion or very very short muscles that usually people have one or two bottles.
D parts that they want to emphasize for whatever reason. You know these days it seems to be people are really what are they saying now? Like glutes are the new biceps or biceps. Are the new glutes are? I don't know. Anyway, you see this stuff. I love them.
By the way, I am. So Pro curls in the squat
rack there. You love it right. There you go. So
nobody kill me. So everyone has their thing
but the that they would like to emphasize but I have a question because we're specifically talking about hypertrophy, which is
Should people give themselves permission to not train a body part? If their goal is balanced, hypertrophy. I'll give a couple of examples. One of the reasons why, for instance, not done a lot of free weight squatting is because despite my quadriceps being rather weak. According to you, they tend to grow rather easily relative to other muscle groups. And the goal for me is always been balanced development. Yeah. And so, I emphasize hamstring work and I emphasize a, you know,
Fork and hamstring work. It's not that you don't train my quads at all, but I do far less for them and I avoid the big compound movements for them occasionally, do them. And what again this is not about what I do or don't do yep. But I think that in the context of a conversation about hypertrophy is it appropriate to give people permission to say? Listen, if you're just genetically, you know, strong large lats doing a lot of chin-ups and Rose. Might actually be the worst thing for you if your goal is balanced development and I
I ask because I don't often hear anyone, any, you know, credential people give people permission to completely avoid training, a given body part if their goal is balanced development. And yet, I think most people who are resistance, training are seeking balance development. I don't know anybody that actively wants to have big upper body, small legs. I think that comes from neglect and laziness in most cases sometimes injury related or other things. But I think this is an important point to remember.
Is that any good program for hypertrophy? I would think would have to take into account people's genetic and natural variation sport-based variation in which muscle groups, just tend to grow easily for them and which ones require a lot more focus and
work? Yeah, absolutely. You first of all you have permission to do or not do anything you'd like to do in terms of hypertrophy training, I generally would not recommend disregarding a muscle group entirely. I know that's not what you actually suggested but just to make sure that people
Don't hear it that way. What I would do is in this example is, I would continue to do those big movements. I would just keep the volume low. So I might do two sets or something twice a week, there's a whole bunch of reasons. You want to make sure that those motor patterns are there. You want to make sure that the, especially the benefit of these compound movements. Is you get to work so many complementary muscle movements at the same time. So in the case of like loaded, squat, you're not only working stability in the hip as well as the knee, but you're also working.
Upper body, your rhomboids are keeping him position, your neck, has to stay in position, your toes, everything is working. And so it's really difficult to get those things. When you take that movement out and you replace it with say a machine hamstring curl that whole element of balance and neurological control is very, very important to maintain over time and that's just gets removed with if you go to machines only. So I would keep some of those things in, maybe even not all year round and maybe 1/4 the year to come.
Orders every other rotate at something like that as long as getting your not. If the reason you weren't doing this, a those squats was because you're like, I hurt my back or so. Okay, great, then leave it out but if it's just simply, you don't want your quads are go too much. I would just keep that volume low and do something just to kind of touch it. Keep it activated. And to maintain all those other things like flexibility range of motion, I would bet anything. Your adductors were probably underdeveloped, right now. You can get those by doing your squats because you're not really doing. I'm sure much adduction.
And so this is the things like that, that just get lost. When you're only thinking all big muscle groups that come inherent in doing the larger movements and so you don't have to worry about them, are trained them separately.
I appreciate that. And in reality I do two to three really hard work, sets of hack machine squats per week. Yeah. Which is plenty for me to maintain and even get a Little Bit Stronger. But per our earlier discussion about a year ago, I shifted to doing very low. Repetition range has two main strengths.
In that move. There you go. But I am actively avoiding hypertrophy in that muscle group. Yeah. Or another
solution would actually be do something like one set to failure and week. Not even extremely long. Just you know do something in the 8 to 15 repetition range. At the end of all that strength set and just a little bit of pomp there then, and then it's just so just so that those muscles can touch that level of fatigue, touch that level of strain and mechanical. Tension, Walk Away.
Great, thank you for that. What about exercise
order?
So, implicit in this exercise Choice thing, it's what you're going to notice is these modifiable variables interact with each other, right? And you can clearly see how when we talked about volume and to clarify volume is the repetitions X. The sets, that's typically how we express volume. Well that's going to be directly influenced by intensity the heavier load. You put on the barbell. The less repetitions you can do and the inverse, right? Rest intervals, the shorter. You keep your rest intervals. Then neither the lower, the weight has to go the intensity or the lower the rep range has to go order is
The same thing, choice is the same thing. So all of these things, modify each other, they play a little bit of a hand and what everything else does. So with the exercise Choice thing rolling in the exercise order, you get to play a couple of games here when we talked about strength and power, I basically said stick to the big movements, most complicated and compound movements. First you don't have to do that with hypertrophy. You can do this in a couple of ways you can do the thing. You're just simply most interested in first, you can do this thing, called pre fatigue. So say,
Going to do a back day. You could go in and do nothing but isolated biceps as your very first exercise, and then roll into your pulling movements because what you'll see is during most pulling activities to biceps are a secondary or tertiary muscle group, but you've pre fatigue them. You've guaranteed that muscle of most interest got its most training in and everything else is secondary. So you can start, if you want with single joint movements, you can start with isolation stuff, or you can start with compound stuff, either way, it just really comes down to preference and what you're specifically.
Trying to develop. Now this also goes back to the exercise Choice question, right? Because it's sort of the same thing, right? Like which one am I choosing? And where I wanted it to cap? This was the exercise splits. And so we just sort of talked about, am I doing by part splits? And I know a question. I get a lot here as well, which one's should I packaged together? I'm not really concerned with it. What you all you should worry about is how many times per week, and in fact, total volume you achieve on a muscle group per week.
It doesn't really matter how those things are folded and it's really a personal preference issue. One mistake that we see here commonly is grossly under appreciating that, the legs are not a muscle group, right? So the legs have a whole bunch of muscle groups in them. So we see a classic split like, I'll Do shoulders and chest Monday. And then I'll do, you know, biceps and forearms Tuesday and then legs Wednesday,
Or whatever. And then back to upper body and it was like you're like wait a minute, you have four days dedicated to the upper body and one for quote unquote legs. Well like you hope you can see the imbalance. What's that's going to happen over time is you're going to do is, do far more upper body than you are lower body and that's not appropriate. So you just want to think about your lower body, like you would do if you're going to do body part splits, then include those things as well, and not just chunk everything in as legs once a week, if you want to do that, that's actually, okay. But that day has to be
Very very challenging and you probably should do a quite a bit of volume there because you're almost surely not going to hit the total weekly volume needed to optimize muscle growth. If you're literally only doing once a week of your quote-unquote legs.
So, along those lines, Let's Talk Volume. Yep, how much volume does each muscle group need per week in order to generate? And for that matter, maintain
hypertrophy, right? So the kind of a minimum number were going to look for here is ten working
sets.
Per week, correct per muscle group, correct? And just to make sure that everyone's on the same page, if I do a chin-up or a pull-up, I'm going to mainly be training my back muscles. My lat,
if I'm doing it correctly, well, that's and rhomboids and biceps and if
so, but they'll be in direct targeting of the biceps. So, would you include indirect targeting? So, for instance, if I, you said 10 sets per week, let's just use biceps because it seems that that's the
Go to generic muscle for what? Why is that, by the way, that when people ask somebody to, you know, Flex their muscle, they always flex your bicep, they don't flex their calf or their quad or their glutes or something. I guess there's some, you know, public decency issues. But I can
tell you with my children, that's the very first muscle. I thought them to flex their glutes. Know. They're cool. They're advice.
I got was gonna say all right. Good. Good healthy parenting advice from dr. Andy yelping. So if it's 10 cents per week,
For biceps in order to maintain or further grow the biceps. But does that mean if somebody does 10 sets of chin-ups, or ten sets of chin-ups and Rose that they are checking off any of the boxes for biceps assuming that they're doing the movement properly. Yeah. And targeting the major muscle group, that a given movement is supposed to Target, which in my mind when you're doing chin up, you're supposed to mainly be using your back muscles, and then there are secondary muscles or secondary.
Ian of other muscles. But of course some people, their arms grow like crazy when they do chin-ups and their back doesn't grow at all. So this is where we're back to the kind of genetic pre loading of the system. Yep, if you will. So how does one meet this 10 sets per week, minimum, when dividing different body parts and thinking about this direct and indirect taxation?
So, to think there's no specific exact rule here. And this is why these set ranges are ranges, right? And this is why we don't say like that.
Is so 10 would be sort of the minimum number you want to get to the more realistic number that most people especially if you're Advanced or even intermediate is more like 15 to 20 working sets per week, okay? Now if you're very well-trained, you probably want to even push more towards like 25 and in fact passed that there's not a lot of research so the optimal number, maybe 30, we don't, we don't really know. It's just hard to get that much working. It may actually be
detrimental and here we're referring to Natural athletes. That is people who
For whatever reason either because they're not taking any prescription drugs or maybe if they are whose levels of steroid hormones, mainly the androgens like testosterone Etc. Do not exceed the normal reference range values either because that's what they are naturally or that's what they're replacing through pharmacology. Yep. Whereas, when we think of technically, someone could be taking exoticness hormones, to replace a deficiency, and then there's still a normal range, okay?
But I just want to clarify because you work with athletes, and number of different sports, where drugs are in are not tolerated, etcetera. And the general population that what we are talking about here is for the general population in out for steroid using athletes, correct?
Okay. Yep. Great. So, so ten was this sort of that like absolute minimum number to maintain which is actually pretty cool. If you think about it this way, if you went in and you did three sets of 10, the very sturdy sets of 10
repetitions correct.
You already have three. You do that. Three.
Days a week. You're at your 9. That's almost 10. If you also just want to gym one day a week, you did three sets of ten and you did three exercises here at 9:00, is that working sets? You're basically done so achieving 10 sets per week per muscle group. And now we're not even talking about indirect activation of a secondary. So you're going to hit 10, fairly easy extension to that hitting 20 is actually still not that hard because of what's actually going to happen there. So in your example, if you're doing your chin UPS,
Well, with the biceps count, there's no exact rule there because there could be technique issues could be hand position. So you mentioned chin up, very specifically a chin-up is actually going to put your hands in this position where your palms are facing up, right? This is supination and pronation, so you're going to be there. Well, that's actually quite different than a pull-up or your hands are in the opposite direction. So the chin-up actually is going to be pretty good. Activator biceps for most people. So you would expect actually to probably count that because it's going to be
Very difficult to not see some fatigue, in your biceps, depending on your mechanics, depending on. And by that, I mean just the the segment lengths of your bones like that's where your muscles or originated insert. There's nothing you can do about it, not even a technique or a focus issue. Is simple fact, the matter of, that's how you pull best in that area, the position with your hands are on the Barbara wider grip, more narrow grip is going to change muscle use. So we talked about earlier, I think in the previous episode
Exercises do not determine adaptations applications do but exercises do, determine things like the movement plan The Joint you use and typically The Eccentric concentric sort of ratio as well as oftentimes, the muscle groups involved. So there's just not a lot of things you can do, depending on how you are built of, you know, some exercises activating a secondary group, you don't want it. So it's not always a technique issues. May just be that's how you're built right on the same could be true for us.
Squat the high bar versus low bark, sort of example, we talked about earlier. It's, you know, you can see plenty of evidence on muscle activation studies where people even doing the vertical back squat style, have tremendous glute activation and folks doing the the low bar have tremendous quad Activation. So a lot of it depends on personal mechanic. So, what I counted is, the question, really? You just have to ask yourself number one. Do you really care that much? You know, you have a range to get to if you were anywhere.
Between 10 to 25 working sets, you know, you're fine. So if you count it or don't count it, it's just going to change the difference between whether you did 17 working sets or 23 and either way you're fine so I don't really care. Number two, are you actually feeling anything there? So if you're doing your chin ups and your biceps are blowing up, I'm counting that right if you're doing it, you're like no, I don't feel any fatigue there, it's all my, then I'd probably say, okay, we're not going to count that is towards so you can just let that guide you a little bit towards your
account. Yeah, I've always noticed that there are
Certain muscle groups that are very easy to isolate yet when under load and those are almost always the same muscle groups that are easy to contract very hard without any load
whatsoever. Bingo, you know, that's actually really insightful so you can kind of use this heuristic of. Like if you can contract your lats just standing here. You're probably going to track them very well when you lift, if you can't you can probably assume about the same things going to happen. So
Yeah, you'll know, this is actually the last were actually really interesting because they tend to be one of the more difficult muscle groups to learn how to activate. So if you're in your journey and you're just like I have no idea and you can look up like a lap pose. So how do you like, how do you pop your last night? How do you show it? And if you do that and you're like, wow there's no movement here just recognize that's extremely common and that is probably going to take you many, many, many months of trying before you start to see some movements and probably even a few years.
Before you really start to see Activation. So you're not some sort of like, specific, like special genetic anomaly, it's very, very common. It's uncommon to not be able to activate your biceps, right? That everyone can do that. But if you're just like, man, I can't get this here. I'm just going to stop doing it. Do not do that. Just keep at it and just keep concentrating. And thinking about that muscle group, it will take some time. It's very common to have challenges activating W.
Yeah, I've noticed that many of the muscle groups that were
Isabel for a large fraction of the work in the various sports that I played as a young child are muscles, that are very easy for me to selectively isolate and induce hypertrophy in. I suppose, I'm one of those mutants where my lats happen to be one such of those muscle groups. I think that's because I swam a lot when I was a
kid. The literally going to ask me this summer. Yeah, so Telltale see
every kid in my town swam and played soccer. Hey! And then later, I, skateboarded and did
some
You generally hear that answer, is that? So you either were a swimmer or you're a wrestler. So it's like that polling and pulled too hard to use is thousands of repetitions allowed you to get very good at
Contracting but because I also played soccer and skateboarding. But I didn't do any baseball basketball or football muscle groups like deltoids are very challenging to activate nicely. So, I do think that early development is superimposed on a genetic template that sort of predicts, which muscle groups are going to be easy.
Are harder to isolate and trains.
Also a very good case for why it's important to do as many different athletic activities as you can in your
youth. Yeah. And if you do skateboard, definitely learn to ride switch. Because every, every skateboarder I know has one leg that's larger than the other one Catholics larger than the other and actually, for that matter, people do martial arts, the don't learn to if they're not Southpaw, if they don't learn to switch up and do their their work Southpaw, do you see the same thing? I mean you're building an asymmetry in to the system.
And it's not just muscular its neural. Oh strawberry neural. Yeah so yeah kids parents, get your kids doing a bunch of different things. I suppose gymnastics would probably be the best sport all around in terms of movement in multiple planes and activating all the different muscle
groups? Yes, or no, there's a lot of benefit no question about it. There's a lot of other things though that it has limited ability. So almost everything in not like gymnastics great but almost everything that is pre-planned.
Which is a major downfall, right? So the joy of skating is there so much proprioceptive input that you have to make decisions very quickly in small Windows. Now, you have a little bit of that. When you're flipping in the air you have to land but you gymnastics gymnasts tend to have a very specific routine that they're working on and they work on that routine for years ago out. So
I'll skate boarding up for me was Transportation. It was freedom and it didn't require any coaches or parental oversight.
Yeah, Ball Sports have the beauty of reaction and things like that. So all of them were wonderful. Yeah.
Good to do a lot of them.
You've established that 10 really to 20 sets per week. Yeah. Is the kind of bounds for maintaining and initiating
hypertrophy. Yep. If I were to like flag one of them I would say 15 to 20 is this. That's right that you want to get working. Now it gets complicated when you ask well, how many reps per set, do I have to get to? Okay, well we also can complicate that by repetition type and Tempo just sort of
Let all that go for now and just think if you're getting close to that range you're in the spot and all you have to do now is balance two things recovery and continue training, okay? So if you're somewhere in this 10 to 20 working sets range and you're in a position where you can continue to do that, you're not so sore and so damaged and beat up that, you can't maintain that volume for eight weeks at a time. Or at least six weeks at a time. Then I would probably say, either the style of repetitions you
My repetitions per set, you're doing are too much, the volume is getting to you. However, if you not sing at a patient's then I'd say maybe the repetitions aren't enough. And so that's like that's the kind of game you're running. Now. There could be plenty of other factors, intensity. Of course. Yeah, intensity intent. And then, of course, the other things, sleep nutrition, Etc. All these other things, that go into our visible stressor category that we always analyze. This is sort of brings up this idea of responders and non-responders. So we get this one.
A ton. So why is it some people? My gym, buddy, my roommate, we go to sleep the same time. We're on the same nutrition plan, we work out together. She triples in muscle size and I don't have like no game whatsoever. Well, there's a lot of work that we're trying to do to identify the molecular mechanisms behind responders and non-responders because they clearly exists. In fact, this is one of the reasons why every paper I basically will ever publish again. If I, you know, if I do always reports individual person data. So,
Rather than group averages, you get to see, you know, if there's 10 subjects in it, you get to see how each of the ten responded because the group average can get confusing, but you really want to see is how many, actually people got better. How many got worse? How many, maybe change? And if so. So we'll always report those individual data because you, when you go to train your you you're not the group average. That's very important to know. So if you do that, you can see a beautiful line of these hyper responders, the bell curve in the middle of the normal sponsors and
Folks who like through any training study, just won't get any better if you can tease out what you can't. But let's say in science, you could tease out all the extra factors, total stress, load, hydration, sleep, Etc. What you often see is non-responders, a lot of the time. It's not that they have a physiological inability. It's just like, they did. They need a different protocol. And a lot of times it's they just need more volume. So if they can handle that and are not excessively beat up, just give them more volume and they tend to see a lot of breakthroughs. You see the same thing with plateaus
So typically sort of just like, okay the routine you're on you've been on it for too long. We need to either go to the other end of the hypertrophy Spectrum for intensity, which means like if you've been in the like 60 to 70% everyone repetition, max range, maybe we actually need to go heavier at take a repetitions down, maybe even our total volume down and go heavier. Try that a great way to break through plateaus of grand. If all the other boxes are checked,
The other one is, is do the opposite, which is like, okay, we're going to go higher when I go sets of 20, such a 25 High, very high repetition range and really get after it not to do as much damage because you don't tend to get a sore, from those really high repetition ranges. You'll get more sore from lower repetition, higher intensity range. Then you will typically the other ones and then see if we can bless bus through some plateaus there. So, it just generally means you need to do something a little bit different than your training
partner. So we've talked about exercise choice and
Talked about the number of sets that one needs in order to induce hypertrophy per week. What about repetition ranges? You've mentioned pretty broad repetition ranges. How many repetitions per set is required in order to induce a
church. Yep. So, there are two caveats here before I give you the number is somewhere between like four to Thirty reps, 30 repetitions. Absolutely, in fact, I think you can go much higher. The first 20
have to be feel exceedingly light,
Right. Correct? And during those first 20 or so, repetitions is the goal still to contract the muscle as hard as possible on each
repetition. So, this is the caveats here. So, caveat number one is, there is an assumption that by the end of this set, you're getting somewhat close to failure and so you don't have to go to Absolute failure to to induce muscle hypertrophy, but you also have to get kind of close. So if you're going to do is
225 and you finish it and you're like whew. Yeah. Like that was kind of starting to get hard at the end. That's not going to be enough if you're going to do a set of five or six and the same sort of expression comes out of your mouth, it's not going to be of. So in that case, it doesn't matter what your rep range. If you're not getting somewhat close to failure, again, it doesn't need to be complete failure. A good number to think about is like, minus 2, which is what we call reps and Reserve which is sort of like I got within 2 or so reps of failure and then I stopped. And can we
Define failure?
At least for sake of this portion of the conversation as the point in which you can no longer move, the resistance could be your body could be, yeah, weight machine Etc. That you can no longer move the resistance anymore in the concentric phase of the exercise movement in good form.
Correct. But that's a really nice momentary muscular failure, is how we typically Define it? There's a wonderful review. I think it's open access that just came out in the last
Of months, Eric Helms is team at a New Zealand. Eric's is a great scientist and a very experienced physique coach and competitor himself. So he knows a lot about this area and that paper went through, all the exact definitions in detail, all the caveats that we're not gonna have time to get into today. So I would recommend folks, like check that out. They want more information, but I'll try to get the highlights of it right here. So what they basically show it is going all the way to failure in the defining failure, like you just did, right? So,
Momentary muscular failure. You can't complete another repetition through a complete range of motion through whatever range of motion, you determine prior to, as well as with good technique. So, other body parts aren't being compromised, sort of etcetera, and doesn't need to be total failure that - to failure is still needed in caveat to, which is again, very, very highly trained individuals. You won't see people who are like Eric or folks who are six to eight to 10 years into very serious training.
Who don't have to go to Phil, you're probably a little bit more than what I just said. So the the layout that they brought in their paper was very nice and they basically said, okay here's a couple of scenarios in which going to failure, is, maybe the best way to do it. Number one, you probably should do it on a little bit of the safer exercises. So maybe taking your back squat on a barbell to complete failure and doing that as like a standard protocol multiple times a week. It's maybe not the best choice. So maybe
Be if you're going to do bar while back squats, you take that to your, you know, your your one or two reps and Reserve stop there. It's a lot of work. It actually going back to our discussion of the prolific chart. It's a similar idea, right? We're going to spend most of your time in these working sets, 70 to 90 sort of percent. And then you're going to take that failure to maybe the hack squat machine, or maybe even the leg extension machine. So a little bit of a safer exercise. They also can tend to be single joint exercises don't have to be, but they're just ones that are not as complicated.
And you're not likely to injure other body parts when you're doing it. All right? So that's one. One, way to go about it. Another way to go about it, is simply doing it on, like, the last movement of the day, right? And so again, you're not going to do it on your first three or four exercises, but whatever your last finisher is, you'll hit total failure on that one and that kind of keeps you in a range of. Yeah, you hit some failure. You got a lot of overall work done. So, that's a lot of stimulus. That's a lot of noise going to that nucleuses grow. Grow grow.
Grow grow, but you didn't totally obliterate yourself, especially if you don't have the assistance of anabolic steroids, right. That's very, very important. You have those, you can push this a lot harder because your recovery would be significantly enhanced. If not, you kind of want to walk away from
that. I have to assume that you know, 99% of people listening. This, do not. And, and yet among those who are not taking anything, in terms of anabolics there, I think is a large range of recovery quotients out there. Some people just have
Recover better. Some people, I think also are far more diligent about what I would call the necessary, but not sufficient variables of yeah adequate sleep. Yep, proper nutrition. Limiting stress. And and so on.
Yeah, I can't wait to break all that stuff down. I got a whole very long discussion for all those
things. We will get into it in all its practical realities and actionable before long. What about rest between sets?
Great. This is the interplay now.
So when I actually think we said for a long time, as you want to stick between 30 to 90 seconds of rest between sets for hypertrophy and that's because you're trying to activate this metabolic disturbance or disruption, you need a little bit of a burn, a little bit of a pump to go there more recent research, a lot of these out of Bradshaw and sells the lab and others have shown that. That's just doesn't seem to be the case again for moderate to newly trained individuals. Whether that's the case for the highly trained folks.
I don't necessarily know, I don't think there's any difference here. So you can take up to three to five minutes of rest in between sets and be fine. The caveat here though, is this, if you're going to rest longer, that means the metabolic challenge is lower. So you need to then increase the challenge in either mechanical tension, which think about is weight load or muscle breakdown. So you can't lower one of the variables, keep your Hangouts, the same and expect the same results. So,
If you're going to have more rest than you need to either, preserve the load on your bar or the volume, one of the two has to happen. So this gives people a lot of opportunity. I generally tell people if you're going to train for hypertrophy, it's probably best to stay in the two-minute range at most. You can go longer but a lot of people have a hard time actually coming back and then executing that next set with enough intent to get there and or it's going to make your workouts tremendously long.
So you can stick to the shorter one. You don't have as much mechanical tension, but that's okay. You can still get there. But in reality of it is you can do whatever you would like
tell me if this is a reasonable structure. Given what you've told us three exercises per muscle group, first exercise, slightly heavier loads. So repetition range is somewhere between let's say 5 and 8 with perhaps hitting failure close to it on the last set rest periods of somewhere between.
Mean to or let's let's get wild and say five minutes sir. Okay. So it's a little bit more of a strength type workout at that point but then moving to a second exercise of three or four sets where the repetition range is now 8 to 15 shortening the rest periods to 90 seconds or so. And then on the third exercise,
Repetition ranges of 12 to 30 this number, 30 kind of makes me. Why do I know that camera? Last time I did a set of 30 thinking it was for hypertrophy but what you're saying makes absolute sense and is very is research back. So very short rest intervals, maybe 30 seconds between between sets, would that allow somebody to Target all three forms of major adaptation? I mean, my in my mind it works, you know you're talking about me
Loads. You very much stress and damage and you're talking about metabolic stress. Is that better than to for instance do all the high repetition work in one workout per week and then higher loads in the other work out. It doesn't matter if you divide them up or combine
them, it would not matter. I would say it matters in the sense of your personal practical
situation. Well, long rest for me I love training heavier with longer rest, right? But
I'm hearing that there's real value to doing these higher repetition range.
Yeah. So the formula you set up there in a second is great if you want to do it the other way, that's fine. You really, it's kind of idiot proof. You can set this up, however, you'd like, you could actually do the inverse, theoretically you could do the sets of thirty first and then move to your sets of eight. It doesn't really matter because we're trying to just get to a certain total stimulant and you're going to hit it eventually. So you have a lot of room to play here. You also have a
Room to adapt. Based on your circumstances I'm short on time today. Typically my workout takes me 60 Minutes for this plan. I have I've only got 35 today. What do I do? Well, if you're training for strength, that's a different answer than if you're training for hypertrophy, if you're training for hypertrophy, you need to make sure you hit that total volume. So in this particular case, lower the load lower the rest intervals and just get the burn and get going as much as you can. If you're training for strength, I would rather you cut your
Volume in half, get those few repetitions down at that high load and just don't do very many sets today. That's the better result. So the goal that you're going after is going to determine what we call chaos management which is that thing like that running out of time today. My time is short or getting even think my time is short. Something I cut off. I'm not feeling it today. I'm in a hotel. Etc. Etc. Etc, which is life right now. That's going to be 10 to 50 percent of your workouts is going to be chaos management. Well, how you make those
Those decisions is going to go back to understanding. Number one, what goal you're going after the number two, what are the physiological consequences called these physiological limiters for each one and that's going to tell you what to select and prioritize the volume, the intensity or whatever else.
I'd like to ask about frequency, but I'd like to frame it a little bit differently than that. I'd like to ask about total workout duration, which dovetails with frequency because if one is hitting the appropriate number of sets per week and one is combining different muscle groups on the same days. Well, then workouts are going to be a very different direction than if one is doing a different body part each day for instance. And so,
Like any discussion about frequency has to be within the context of workout, duration, and vice versa.
Yeah. If you are a lifting junkie and you're very consistent your schedule, I'm actually okay with body parts but most people are not that. And so, the concern there is, if you say are isolating and waiting to do your glutes on one day the week and something happens on that day. You might go another 13 days. Now, before training, it being in between workouts, and that's really difficult to maintain.
Frequency won't be high enough unless the load and volume on that one day is astronomically high. It's just not going to happen. So while if you look at the research frequency in terms of how many days per week doesn't matter that much, as long as the total load and failure are equivalent practically, it's a challenge. So it's hard because life gets in the way for most people especially if you have kids and a job and all these things are there. So I actually prefer
doing something more like 3 days a week of total body. And if something happens, you've just missed that body part for 48 hours, 72 hours. I like that. A little better for most people not because it's more effective but just because it's a little bit more resilient to life and you can get there if you wanted to actually do a little bit of a combination. So, if you want to do like, two days a week of whole body and then two days a week of a little bit of a body part split, then you're actually sort of hedging against all risks are as long as you get to that total number.
There. Now there is actually some evidence in a couple of ways that maybe a little bit more frequently is a little bit better but the difficulty is now going back to the practicality question of like how many people really can train just their strength training six days a week. Well, that doesn't count any of their long-duration stuff. It isn't other high heart rate their flexibility their work. Okay. It's just really, really, really hard to get all that stuff in. So it is, it tends to be easier on folks in terms of execution and long-term adherence, in my opinion,
To get that volume accomplished and a little bit more frequent patterns, but not once a week. So I like to kind of have it right there for most people, not again, not because it is technically quote unquote, more effective but because you're less likely to fail to progress because of skipping a workout, something popping up, your power going out in your, you know, garage door being locked on you or
whatever. Imagine that happened to me this morning, folks can get out of my driveway because their gate,
electronic gate was down because the power was down. Anyway, solved that problem? Yeah, the way you describe it, my senses that workouts will last somewhere between one and two hours of real work is that about,
right? It doesn't have to be nearly that long. I mean, you can certainly get enough to work done in 30 minutes if you
live in a whole body workout.
Yeah, absolutely. So if you're doing that three days a week, so remember the numbers were trying to hit here. Let's say we're trying to hit 15 working sets per muscle group per week, that's five working sets per day.
Muscle groups. So if you did one exercise for that day, let's say it is squats. You did five sets, he did three days a week, you're done. There's your 15
but there are other muscle groups to hit on the same day you're doing squats if you're doing a whole whole body.
Yeah, so you've gotten them already and so like all the leg muscles in, that example are taken care of
so you would not do separate hamstring, work
- you wouldn't need to. Now I hamstrings is actually a little bit of a caveat like that's a good example of an exercise or a muscle group. That's probably really good to make sure you isolate. It's challenging to
get with your standard deadlift and squat. It's one of the probably one that's most important to go Target outside of that. But in theoretically the outside of that you would get most of your leg muscles done with even a single exercise and even if you wanted to change it up so you said alright Monday I'm going to do a squat variation Wednesday. The next day left, I'm going to do some sort of deadlift hinging variation and then maybe Friday my third day, I'm going to do some sort of unilateral. Maybe rear foot elevated splits
Water something like that. All right, maybe even a lateral lunge, maybe a different plane. Okay. You're in a pretty good spot you're going to hit most of those muscles to your 15 working sets especially if you take sort of that last set each day it's a pretty close to failure that's going to get some more serious work done but you're not going to be so fatigued. You can't go back and train it a couple of days later and you'll be fine. So you could even split that up into two days a week and now all you really have to do is hit something like seven working sets. So maybe that's two exercises per day.
Maybe some sort of leg press and a leg hinge, you know, three to four sets each unit six to eight sets that day. You did that three days a week. Now sudden you're at that 20, 24 sets, but having a bit of them, same thing with your upper body. I just gave lower body examples because, you know, I like the lower body more. So it's not that challenging to get to those numbers and split and those workouts can be extremely short. So if you would if you were doing that three days a week you know you're going you're doing that one exercise everybody one exercise lower body that
Really shouldn't take more than 40
minutes. I'm happy to hear that. Not because I don't like training. Yeah. Freeze please excuse the double negative. But I found that resistance training workouts that extend longer than one hour of work and certainly longer than 75 minutes of work, leave me very fatigued. Oh sure. And fatigued to the point where concentrating on cognitive work throughout the day can be challenging need a longer nap in the afternoon. I'm a big proponent of naps in the afternoon in any case, but requiring longer naps in the afternoon.
Moon Etc. So at least for me restricting, the resistance training workouts to about 50 50 to 60 Minutes of real work. Yeah for me three or four times per week has helped tremendously. So it's a case we're doing higher intensity work in a shorter period of time and actually hitting muscle groups less frequently for me that's again once directly once indirectly yeah as worked really well. And as you mentioned earlier this could very well. Be explained by
My recovery quotient as some sort of genetic or physiological variable but the way that I'm training and indeed I like to do a few for straps and go to failure on tourney SATs and you know, weaned in the in that genre of training.
It's also fun like to just train
hard, it is really fun. It is. I think that I've learned a lot by training to quote, unquote, to failure Court. I think there's a lot of learning in their provided is done safely. But what you're describing actually, inspires me to at least give a try to these other sorts of splits and and ways.
Of training for hypertrophy and strength because this notion of not necessarily having to go to failure and still being able to evoke strength. And hypertrophy adaptations is a really intriguing one. Dare I even say a seductive one and that leads me to a question that is based on findings that I've heard discussed on social media, which means very little. If anything, unless it's in the context of people who really know exercise science and you're one such person and that's this idea.
Via that because resistance training can evoke a protein synthesis adaptation response.
But that adaptation response is last about, 48 hours before it starts to taper off that the ideal in quote frequency for training, a given muscle group. For hypertrophy is about every 48 hours. Is that
true? Yes, and no. So a couple of things there. Remember, in order to grow a muscle, there's multiple steps here. So you have the signaling response, which actually happens within seconds of exercise and kind of last depending on the marker.
You know, up to an hour or two hours. Step number two, then is gene expression. And we see that that's typically peaked around 2 to 6, hours, post exercise. And then you have following that protein synthesis and that's that longer time frame somewhere between 12 hours there. It's certainly not peaked for 48 hours. It may be still there. 48 hours from now but it is, is absolutely coming down at that point depending on sort of a number of factors so that part of his sort of true. So that this is a combination of like some half-truths and some like maybe just
Antic things that aren't really that important to differentiate the real question I think is, is like, okay, is it okay to train sooner slash is a better to train sooner or actually, is it better to wait longer? There's no real reason to think that you need to train. If the goal is hypertrophy any sooner than 48 hours afterwards, I can't think of an advantage. But that would confer I also can't think of any practical applications athletes physique,
Body builders coaches that ever found, tremendous success doing that. So I would be very skeptical that that is at any way better. Now could you do it in some instances of say? You know, you've got travel coming up like that so that you just Smell.
Ya want to preload the system by destroying the muscle no problem. Then waiting seven days or 14 days, I've known people have done that before I do occasions or
lay off every time, like every single denial
ate themselves and then take it totally clay off.
Yeah, and it's like there's no benefit there other than psychological like,
I just love it, it feels great to be super sore. I feel less crappy. Not training. For those couple days because I'm like, I'm
super sorry. Do you need the extended
rest? Yeah, of course. And it's just like
It's just a crappy justification in my brain that like, excuse to do something really wild and that I totally don't need and get way sore that I should
get dr. Andy Galvin suggestions and what not to do, but that he does. Yeah, 100%. So do as I say, not as I do, the famous words of every research
Professor, I think 48 hours is a reasonable time, to wait, can't think of an advantage going sooner than that. There's really not a tremendous amount of advantage of waiting much longer than that. Certainly 72 hours is fine as long as you're hitting these
Concepts. We've talked about you can let really life determine that. That mean there's situations to with like a particular athletes where we have to kind of break that because of schedule obligations, they're playing every fifth day or every third day or something like that. You're just going to have to lift them back to back days. You just have to get it done. But yeah, I can't think of why I'll go out of my way to do that.
The second part of that question is, let's say somebody trains a muscle, they train it,
Really the hidden, the appropriate rep, ranges and appropriate, rest, Etc. That the stimulus is there. The adaptation is set in motion. They're getting somewhere somewhere at 48 hours or so, a protein synthesis Peak that's going to taper off. Yeah, but they don't train it, 48 hours later or 72 hours later. They train it five or six days later, not because they're lazy, not because they, they don't care, but because they have other priorities that are woven in with getting hypertrophy.
In this muscle right. There are people who exist only to get hypertrophy in a given muscle group, but let's be fair, most people would like to grow that muscle group. But then does it necessarily mean that the muscle starts to revert to its pre hypertrophic state. That is does it atrophy and get smaller again? Because if it doesn't, I could see a lot of reasons for hitting a muscle group. Once every 5 days or seven days provided you hold onto the hypertrophy that you initiated five or seven
days ago. Yeah, there's no reason to think you will lose anything in that sort of a Time domain 5 to
Next. The only challenge with training that infrequently is, can you actually get enough total volume done? So if you're going to train them also once a week, you either have to go to real failure, real damage and soreness, or you have to figure out a way to hit 20 cents that day and that muscle not at all impossible. Especially if you think well actually, I have to get this 15. I'm gonna do five sets of three exercises. That's not outrageous, not at all. So like absolutely possible if you're wanting to go more towards 20.
Or getting closer to that 25. Now it starts to get pretty challenging. So scientifically the research will suggest it's going to be equally effective practically. It's challenging for people to hit sufficient volume without just being so demoralized afterwards because they're in so much pain that can't get out of their car because their legs are so trashed. I can't sit on the toilet and get back up without crying for pain. So that's not good. No, that's not good. I say that because those are actual examples that have happened in my
life. Yeah, I realize
As we're having this conversation about ways to stimulate hypertrophy that I've sort of defaulted to more intensity as opposed to volume because of the time factor, I have a lot of other things going on in my life. And So within that hour, I Can't Get Enough sets in across all the muscle groups. I need to hit and I'm only gonna do it about once a week and so it's at least for me, more advantageous to just train extremely hard. I actually use the pre-exhaustion technique that you mentioned before. Yep, or pre fatigue is you referred to it of hitting, something really strong with it isolation.
Exercise then doing compound exercises. I'm starting to think based on what you've told me that pre fatigue and then a compound exercise in some ways, it's not really two sets. Because if you're going to failure for straps, you're kind of pushing past failure, then you're doing a compound exercise and you're doing that two or three times. Well, that sounds like four to six sets, but the force repetitions are almost like an additional set. Yep. And so it's not
That's but it's four to six, really, really hard sets that go beyond what we normally think of as a set. Totally. Okay. It's sort of the difference between running on concrete and running on fan when I go for ass and run. It's a very different
experience. Totally. Yep. And this is why I should have mentioned, this is a very, very beginning of our chat today. But all of these numbers that will give you for any exercise that updation. You, you cannot think of them as hard lines. They are gradients. And so, when we think about the number,
For hypertrophy than terms of repetitions. I said 4230, what do you think happens at 3:00, do you think I purchased stops are in fact, the number you'll see in the literature is more like 6230i actually slide it down to four though but personal preference because of that. But it just Fades away. What do you think? Happens at rep 3135? There's no, it's just Fades, gradually over time. So you actually sort of brought this up on an earlier questions and I'm not sure if you were even thinking about this or maybe you were, I just babbled on about something else. But if strength happens between
In this like 125 repetition range, and hypertrophy typically happens in this like 8 to 30 range. What happens if I were to do two sets of six or God forbid, seven like seven and nine are these numbers. You just absolutely don't do in strength training crisis like such a one two three, four, five, six got eight ten twelve like do not program a set of
third. No no I'm training sets of seven and nine. It's great.
Well use such a seven a lot with weightlifters because you can actually count numbers more effectively
but what happens in 79?
Granger. So this is actually wonderful area of these like five to eight repetitions where you're going to get a nice combination of a lot of strength gains and a lot of hypertrophy. So someone is coming in going man. I want to get stronger and I want to add muscle. What do I do here? Well, that's actually really nice answer, train pretty hard in that like 428 repetition range and you're going to get a lot stronger and you'll still induce a lot of hypertrophy if you want to really maximize hypertrophy, I would probably
And most of your time in the 8, to 15 repetitions per set range. You can go up to 30 admittedly, though. I don't think it's optimal to spend most of your time at more than 15 reps per set. It's very challenging to maintain the focus required at rep. 27 to actually get sufficient failure by rep. There you just, you just give up way too early. It's hard to do. The same thing at the bottom end of the Spectrum, in terms of really heavy to get there. So I really honestly think 8215 is
Still it's cliches that textbook number but that's a reason that's a textbook. It is tried and true and very very very effective. If for instance you want to get stronger though and not invoke a lot of hypertrophy. You have a couple of tricks. You can pull number one, stay south of that, five repetition range. You do sets of one sets of to go as heavy as you can. With all appropriate, considerations and stick with it. Maybe even up to three reps per set. You start getting 24, 25 26.
Now you got to start itching towards that work that I portray a rank. So stay down there. Do we lot more total sets? So do a classic example would be something like eight sets of three, right? You're going to get a lot of practice. You're going to get 24. Very high quality reps with a lot of rest in between. Okay, you go from, there you go, to managing caloric intake, making sure your protein is still on point. You want to recover, but if your total calories aren't greater than 10, to 15% above, your maintenance needs. Then you're not going to be able
To put on a whole bunch of muscle mass because you just don't have the fuel for it. You can also then space your workouts out so that stimulus isn't coming extremely often. So if you do that thing a couple of times a week, it's not enough frequency and that signal. So remember that signal has to be frequent or loud, you didn't make it super loud and now you're not making a super frequent. You can get very, very, very strong like that and put on very low amounts of hypertrophy, if that's sort of the choice.
So you told us a lot about volume and
Frequency and how that relates to protein synthesis and Recovery to evoke the hypertrophy adaptation response. How should people think about systemic damage and Recovery? Because obviously the nervous system and the way it interacts with the neuromuscular system is the sight of all the action here or at least a lot of the action.
And the nervous system can, in fact become fatigued, you haven't, you know, that has a great capacity but the whole system that we're talking about, can be worked to the extent that even if a muscle group, like the biceps or the back is being allowed to rest while you're training legs and other muscle groups that your whole neuromuscular system needs rest. How does one determine whether or not your entire body needs complete rest or low-level active? Rest or exercise of a
different kind? Yeah yeah sure. So I want to actually tackle this because
We're on the topic of hypertrophy. I'm assuming that that's the goal in mind
here. Yes. Here I'm asking specifically when the projects of hypertrophy I realized that for other training goals that the answer. This question could be quite different.
Yeah. Okay, so we actually do this in a couple of different ways. Let's start local and work back to systemic, right? Because number one, what you're really concerned about is at the local muscle level is, am I going to create excessive damage? And I don't necessarily mean muscle damage. I mean injury, right? So the kind of rule of thumb we use is like three out of 10 in terms of sort of
If you're more than 3 out of 10 in terms of soreness, we're gonna start asking questions. If you're higher than 6, out of 10 were probably not training. This is a subjective measure total subjective measure, right? And you'll, you'll know where he quickly, right? If you like if you can barely grazes your PEC with your fingertip and then you're like, oh ha ha, I don't care what you score that we're not trying there's just no damage. If you're 3 out of 10 if you're just like well I'm kind of like a little bit stiff here, but once you get warmed up, you start feeling, okay. You're probably ok to proceed there. So that is is
A very easy way to just think about soreness, you're going to be a little bit tight depending on training frequency now, zooming out to systemic, we use a whole host of things. So we actually have a whole host of biomarkers. We use, you can get a lot of these from blood. So you can look at things, like, creatine kinase, that's the very common one marker of muscle damage will actually look at LDH will look at my own globulin, that's just like, if you think about hemoglobin is the, is the molecule that carries oxygen throughout your blood. The myoglobin is
Part of that that's actually in muscle. So when muscle gets broken down that gets leaked out and put in your blood, that's one of the markers actually going to be associated with things like rhabdo. Which is a like your to see you yearn is purple and it's extremely dark because you've got so much muscle breakdown, that happens and kidneys. Gave a problem in, you put a bunch of stuff in there so we'll use those biomarkers. Well actually also look at probably a couple things you're familiar with alt and AST these are excellent biomarkers of muscle breakdown. So if we are actually suspecting that this is a chronic problem, we're going to actually go in and pull some blood.
And if it's just like, I'm super sore today, we're going to use that subjective marker. But if we're seeing this as constant, like, man, are we really pushing you way too much, is there some sort of systemic problem, we're going to blood. I'm going to look at all those different things. Now, AST, 2 LT is really specific and I don't want to take us too far off track here, but the ratio to those things is actually very important as well. So if you look at the AST and ALT ratio typically, the number will look at as like, 1.67 is that ratio is like higher than that. You have a pretty high risk of muscle damage, but really between, you know, me,
You and a few of these listeners, anytime we start seeing AST outkick alt where immediately thinking it has in the ratio being higher than one. We're immediately thinking like there's something happening muscle damage y. So that's actually a sneaky good indicator of just total muscle mass because the vast majority that's going to be in muscle. So those are actually some markers that we like a lot. If muscle damage is the thing we're concerned with. If we are more concerned with things like total training, volume systemic overload, then we may turn to something more like
Like sleep. There's a lot of information we can actually get gleaned from changes in sleep behavior and function. You could also look at things like HRV, heart rate variability, which is a very classic marker and much more sensitive to changes with training than something like a resting heart rate, which is, which is one thing you can actually do this. Totally cost free. Just look at your changes and any elevation resting heart rate over time, especially more than three to five. Consecutive days is indicator, but HRV is much more sensitive to
Like training induced overload. So that's a quick version of stuff that we're going to pay attention to the last one. I would add there is simply motivation. So if you're really training hard and you like training hard and you just like cannot force yourself to go anymore that and of itself can be a good indication of its, maybe not the day, maybe not the week. With all of these things you want to be careful about overreacting to a single day measure. Again, we look. We need to look at at least a trend of more than three days. Honestly, I'm looking at more than five days, I'm going to
To pull back from that and think about what phase of training or in what part of the Year where in typically with our athletes aren't in season preseason postseason, offseason etcetera, to make our decisions about what we're going to do about it. Are we canning the entire workout? Are we doing a modified lower version, lower intensity? My default generally if hypertrophy is the gold, remember volume is the driver there. So if I can like can we get in? Can we go real light? Let's go to 6 out of 10 rpe so relative perceived exertion
Maybe we'll reduce the range of motion, maybe we'll make a little bit easier, maybe go to machines, or instead of going a squat, we'll just do, you know, leg extension, something like that. But I want to still get enough volume in there. That will keep you on target. Any again, even going at 50%, not not too high repetition, you know, 50% for a set of ten. Three sets is get a nice blood flow in there, get it in, get it out, Aidan recovery, and then move on, and come back the next day. That's probably what I would do rather than canning the entire session.
How
how do other forms of exercise combined with hypertrophy training? For instance, can I do cardiovascular training for two or three days per week provided that cardiovascular. Training is of low enough, intensity and not disrupt hypertrophy progression. And
Can I do that cardiovascular exercise before or after the hypertrophy training? Or does it need to be separated out?
The answer to this is really what we call the crossover are interference effect. It's really an energy management issue. So the only time endurance, exercise starts to interfere or block or hinder. Attenuate, hypertrophy is in one of two broad categories. Number one, total energy intake or your balance is off. So you can ameliorate
This by just eating more. If you do that then the interference effect generally goes away. The second one is you want to make sure you avoid exercise forms for your endurance training that are the same working group and specifically The Eccentric portion. So, for example, we see much more interference with running online hypertrophy. They leave cycling.
Right, less eccentric, pounding and loading, less damage less things to recover from the tissue seems to be totally fine. The only other thing you need to worry about here is total volume of your endurance work. So if you're doing a moderate intensity for a moderate duration, say 70 percent of your maximum heart rate for 25 minutes, it's unlikely to do much damage. And in terms of blocking I portrayed you're totally fine. Do you can you do it before or after your workout? It's probably not going to matter that much. All right, so pre fatigue is okay for hypertrophy. So if your
We fatigue is coming from endurance, then you're totally fine. Not a big deal afterwards. Cool. You want to break it up into multiple sessions, that's probably better. Right? So if you do your endurance work on a separate day, that's probably best case scenario if you can't do that but you can break it up into two workouts. So you lift in the morning and then you do your quote-unquote cardio at night. Maybe that's the second-best. Third, best is doing it at the end of your lift and finishing it. That's fine. Just make sure that you're maximizing your recovery on all the other tricks will talk about later.
Make sure the calories are there, make sure you're not doing a lot of eccentric, Landing in that endurance stuff and you'll be just
fine. And where does higher intensity cardio fit into a hypertrophy program? So, higher intensity, cardio, for instance in my mind is getting on the assault bike and doing you know, eight intervals of 22nd Sprints in 10 second rest in between, or perhaps going to a field and doing some bounds and Sprints and things of that sort, not going all out.
Out, not up, you know, running for one's life, but getting it up to about, you know, 85 90 % of of running for one's life.
So we have a lot less information on the potential interference or not of high. Intensities of it, the stuff we do have suggested it may actually Aid in hypertrophy and that's because if you think about it, one the potential paths to activation of muscle growth is this metabolic disturbance. You're going to get that a lot with the the high-intensity real thing. So it's not a terrible thing to do. I wouldn't do it to the level that
Compromises your ability to come back into your primary training. So if you're so fatigued, your legs are super heavy. The depleted you now have to ingest extra carbohydrates to replenish. Muscle glycogen to be able to handle both recovery and continued training Etc, that could then lead to a problem. But in general, we really don't see any reason why that is going to completely block or make it such that your training was quote-unquote wasted or didn't work. And in fact actually a very recent study came out where
They had individuals perform six weeks of purely aerobic, endurance, steady-state, long, duration of drones for six weeks, I think prior to starting a hypertrophy phase compared that to individuals who did not do that. And those folks that did these six weeks of just, I think it was cycling actually. Just endurance work had more muscle growth at the end of their hypertrophy training than those folks that did not. So this shows you very clearly. There are a lot of advantages that come with being physically fit
Growing muscle. So Folks at also have actually hit plateaus a lot. One of the things you may actually see some benefit from is actually doing a little bit more endurance work whether it's a steady-state stuff, maybe a science of the higher intensity stuff. Certainly, if you're starting a training phase it's a pretty good idea to do that and there's a number of physiological reasons of why that's potentially occurring, but the lowest hanging fruit here is we sort of joke that you know like if you're so unfit that you're tying your shoes and your warm up and you're already breaking a sweat.
You probably don't have enough physical fitness to do enough training to Get Enough by perjury. So that is in fact, your limiting factor you're not recovering your super fatigued and damaged and sore because you're so unfit. So get fit first. And then you can actually get more gains week later. So you have to kind of Kick the Can down the road for a few weeks, but 10 weeks later, you'll be in a better spot than you were by investing a little bit in your
conditioning. So, as you point out before and I can only assume you're referring to me, hypertrophy training is idiot.
Meaning, there's a lot of leeway in the variables, but not so much leeway that people can do anything. It's bounded by these general principles. So with your permission, I'm going to do a brief overview of my notes based on your description of the modifiable variables that will direct somebody towards hypertrophy. Keeping in mind. This backdrop of exercise Choice, exercise order selecting appropriate volume that sets and Reps.
Training frequency and needing some Metric, or way to have progression either by adding more weight or by more tension or more metabolic stress. And so on, in terms of exercise Choice, it sounds like the choice of exercise is is not super critical in terms of specificity. Yeah. But that the ideal circumstances that people are targeting all the major and frankly secondary and minor muscle groups if you can even call them that. Yeah.
Cross their exercise choices that they're picking exercises, that they can perform safely, and that they can generate enough intensity. So that they're getting close to failure without placing themselves into danger, right? So for some people that might mean, including large compound, free weight exercises, like squats and deadlifts and bent over barbell rows, as well as isolation exercises. And for some people, there might be a bias toward more isolation exercises and machines. But of course, machines don't necessarily mean that you can't use heavy loads.
And in fact plate, loaded machines like Hammer Strength machines and allow for quite substantial loads. So picking two or three or more movements per muscle group can be valuable, but that overall consistency is going to outshine variation in the sense that you don't need to hit muscles with a different exercise. Every workout coming back to the same, things has a benefit and we heard about this in our discussion around strength and power as well.
Well, okay, in terms of order of exercises there too, it sounds like there's a lot of flexibility. One could do the large compound exercise for let's say, quadriceps and hamstrings and glutes, first like a squat, or a front squat.
We're could deadlift for that matter. But then if one deadlifted, in primarily, hit the glutes and hamstrings, then you might want to Target the quadriceps more directly with leg extensions, or if one squatted and was loading. The squat bar, carrying the squat bar in a way that was predominantly quadricep. Yeah. And less so glute and hamstring. Then leg curls would be a good choice etcetera. Okay and train your calves folks, very important unless you're a genetic freak. Of course is actually a good opportunity to say unless you're a genetic freak or you.
Have a genetic predisposition? Yeah. Or you've done Sports and and you have a genetic predisposition that gives you, you know, very large calves. They don't require any training at all. I know people like this. There's somewhat rare, but they're out there. Yeah. And those folks sometimes want to stay away from or minimize their training. You told me that even if you have a muscle group, that's a hyper responder in terms of hypertrophy getting, at least one or two, good hard sets per week is good because you want to keep functionality in that neuromuscular system. Love it. Okay.
Is a volume. Again, we have a large amount of variation is what I'm hearing that the total number of sets per week is a strong driving force of program design and selection that ideally, you're performing 10 to 20 and probably more like 15 to 20 sets per week. And that could be divided up across multiple workouts or done in one workout, but that's 10 to 20 sets per week per muscle group, not really taking into account.
In direct Activation. So that would be 10 to 20 sets for biceps your back work is going to hit your biceps a little bit. Maybe a bit more depending on the exercise selection, but it's really 10 to 20 and given that hypertrophy can still occur and maybe even occurs better with more volume. Yeah, then don't include the indirect work. Unless something about the architecture of your body and the inability to engage certain muscle groups, like, makes the pull up really an arm exercise for you, you
have that, right? The way
That I would maybe Define it is typically with movements, we consider to be there to be primary movers, secondary movers. And then tertiary - right if it is a primary or secondary, I'm probably counting it if it's tertiary or less. I'm probably not counting,
got it. So going back to our example of a
pull-up. So, an example of a pull-up I probably wouldn't count the biceps in a pull-up, but I would probably count the biceps during a chin-up.
Would you count the rear deltoid in a pull up?
My probably not. Maybe like it just depends.
Probably,
not though, okay, train the rear delts. All said
that's only the honesty. The reason I answer that is because most people don't do anything to the real dirt else anyways but they should right. Absolutely, that's why I didn't want to count it. I wanted you to go out of your way, to make sure you did something specifically for the real. It rear
delts for aesthetic center, functionality, and for health and balance across the shoulder,
totally, neck, shoulder. All of
it. I'm so happy to hear you say this. I'm a huge fan of people doing rear deltoid, work for all the reasons, you described and neck work for that matter. People forget that the neck is the upper part.
To your spine. Yeah and for postural reasons and for stabilization safety reasons. It's really critical but I think most people aren't familiar with how best to train the rear deltoids and neck. And I know a number of people are afraid of getting a big neck, which for reasons that are still unclear to me is referred to as no neck. But let's leave out that no neck. Comment for the moment, what are some good exercises for targeting, the rear deltoids and neck safely that people can perform
For stabilization and for hypertrophy.
Yeah I wouldn't recommend people check out Eric cressey, he's a wonderful strengthening coach. He actually is I think the director of pitching for the New York Yankees. Now is that
spelled c-- ress?
IE. CR esse why I believe and he's got facility in. I believe Boston as well as in Florida. So he's very very involved in pitching as well as Hawking and things like that. So,
Um, he has so many free videos and resources on a on so much of the shoulder girdle, mostly because he's dealt with overhead and throwing out these. So the Precision required, there is tremendous. So you want to be very careful when you start playing in this area because the wrong positioning of your scapula can cause a whole bunch of problems in your neck and low back. And so he would be a great resource to go. Take a look of that, depending on how your scapula is are gliding and sliding and the way that you want your rotator.
Because firing your rhomboids. There's there's it's very complicated very quickly. So you want to learn more go there as a very, very quick couple of answers. One of my favorite exercises is lying on a bench or a putting some bananas and then just doing a reverse fly. Basically, the reason I like stabilizing the rest of the body so you can make sure you can focus on just using those rear deltoids and putting your scapula is in the right position. Now there's, there's a specific set of queueing that you want the scapula to move down and back for again check out.
Eric or any number of folks in that area to do it. But that's a very simple way. The reverse fly to get their
great and then terms of neck exercises it was told to avoid Bridges because they can cause damage to the disks
would probably never do a prank ever the rest of my life. So isometrics are a great exercise for that because if you think about what what you're asking muscle groups to do and the neck, you mostly want it to be able to do a certain type of rotation, a little bit of flexion extension. And
Some some other movements but in general it should be being stable. So you want to walk through these joints asking kind of what they do. Are they moving joint? Or they stability joint and this case you want to be there. So I so metrics are going to put you in a much better position. There's some actually pretty cool devices that you can wear and you can put them on your head, you can do all kinds of movement and get some great training there. Those are great starts. But if you don't have any of that, just basic, isometrics are a great way to go about it. That Bridges would not be on that list for
me. No, neck, Bridges folks.
In terms of sets and repetitions, we briefly touched on this. But anywhere from I believe, six repetitions all the way up to 30 repetitions, but probably more in the
Eight to Fifteen repetition range for hypertrophy. Most of the time. Yeah and I'll just throw in there because I love this idea that if you want to get a relatively balanced adaptation related to strength and hypertrophy that 729 range, that the No Man's or Nano woman's land of training, repetitions, I
always joking class, I'm like, okay we go to the whole thing, right? You like 125, strength, 11:52, you know, I perch really like her.
And then I'm like, okay so 69 means nothing will happen at all because you're just like writing it down,
right? Good way to for everybody, to remember that there are adaptations triggered in the 69 rep range and it's a balance of strength and height.
You just get thrown out of any gym that I'm apart of just he do that.
So but the important point is to get close to failure and occasionally hit failure. Maybe occasionally throw in a forest repetition or a rest-pause where you rest and then do a few more something like that. But those in
Intensity increasing Maneuvers will require a little bit more attention to recovery, either time or attention and some other
way and here's a little bit of care and I'll throw up people.
Because people generally don't like to be told to not go to failure that often, right? So there's a handful of like, half the folks are like sweet. I don't have to train that hard to get there and those folks is like, well, yes, but also said you just can't like do a half work out. You have to get pretty darn close to failure and most people don't really know if failure means. So for that group it's actually it's still probably harder than you think you want to train the other group, The like wants to completely blow themselves out every single time. Dragging them back is more the key. Now, for those folks,
Here's what I can say. If you make sure that your hidden stressors, invisible stressors are completely taken care of. You can go to failure a lot more often and so, you need to dial those things in. And then now you can go hammer yourself because you'll recover so much quicker. And we see this very commonly in all of our programs with our athletes and our non-athletes that when we get the rest of the Hidden is invisible transfers taken care of their training volume goes up so much because they'll just start coming back. And then it's like, oh my God. I'm not so anymore.
Oh my God, I'm not nearly as or my by you did this exact work out, countless times before and now I'm doing it and I'm not sore at all in. What the hell. Like, we didn't do anything different with the programming or really the nutrition, but we got the rest of that allostatic load under control and Bone things. Take off. Mmm.
It's a lot like drivers. So many people seem to be riding the brake and so many people seem to be heavy
on the accelerator. Yeah, that's actually one of the ways we describe it is like, you want to go faster. People's inclination, step one is to hit the gas. Our step number one is making sure your left.
It's not on the break, you'll go faster with less resistance which means you'll actually wear down the system. A lot slower by just taking your foot off the brake first. If you're not going fast enough now we can push the accelerator but I'm not pushing the accelerator while your foot still on the break, you're going to go a little bit faster, but not as fast as you should be going with that much work and you're going to start wearing down, brake pedals and things like that. So I like that
analogy. So hitting that 10 to 20 sets per week. Repetition range is pretty broad provided. You get close
Failure, hit failure. Every once in awhile could be the final set of each exercise or maybe do one work out where you hid failure on everything but then you don't do it for a few more. Again, there's sounds like there's a lot of play in the system here. Rest ranges anywhere from 30 seconds, all the way up to three or four minutes, depending on how heavy your training and how close to failure or to failure, maybe even quote, unquote, Beyond failure. If there is such a thing, your training throwing in negatives and things like that, we didn't get into really high-intensity techniques but people.
Again, vary in the extent to which they're pushing the system, but there does seem to be some value to mixing up the rest between set ranges across exercises and across workouts, but you could combine them all in the same workout is what I heard. Yep. And then, in terms of progression, it sounds to me like, the goal when hypertrophy training is not necessarily to add more weight to the bar, although, that's one way. One could do it, but that the progression actually,
Arrive through this really extensive kit of changing the speed of movement changing, the number of sets, adding some volume, maybe changing the split. So that you go from a three day week, full body workout to more of a body parts. One or two body parts per day every other day or two on one off at any number of different variations that are out there. Sounds like all of these can and will work provided that people are obeying the general principles of this hypertrophy.
Adaptation inducing protocol that you described and that they are meeting the necessary, but not sufficient variables as well. Such as sleep nutrition and managing the stress in the rest of their life.
Do I have that
correctly? Yeah that's really really good. One more thing I'd like to add is this is a situation for hypertrophy in which there are some exercises that actually don't think are good ideas so I want to make sure we included those in the conversation. That's not necessarily the case for strength. You can really do kind of whatever one you want and that is specifically you Plyometrics although in fact if you look at there's a recent review paper came out showing the Plyometrics are effective as well
for I purchase like one can do
Almost anything as long as it falls within this parameter, set the
concepts are few. In the methods are many and the methods for aperture V are many many in general, though. Plyometrics are not my first second or even like hundredth choice for hypertrophy. They, if they're a part of a total training program and you get some are portrayed as a result, cool? You're lucky, not the first place, I'm going the other major category are weightlifting variations, so that when I'm saying weightlifting, I mean, specifically Olympic weightlifting as in Snatch, clean and jerk and
Are variations. Those are just not a good exercise Choice. It's not that they don't work. It's just the risk to benefit ratio starts to fall pretty fast in an in the - favor. And so this is not worth doing sets of 10 of a snatch unless you're in a sport where that's like the competition or whatever. But if the goal is simply a trophy, choose different exercises than
that. Great. Now I realize that we are going to do entire episodes related to nutrition, supplementation recovery, Etc. But I'd like to just touch on two or three
Specific topics and questions that come up a lot around the question of hypertrophy specifically and that probably also relate to strength training and training for Speed. So I'm going to ask these in not rapid-fire. Sure. I'll give you a shorter answers to prayer that way. So I'll ask these questions now but with the caveat that we will get into these topics in much more depth. Yeah. Very soon the first question is about the use of cold showers and Ice baths and
And cold water exposure. Which I know many people use for resilience training to increase their dopamine, which it does and for recovery. But there's also this issue of when one should use cold. That is deliberate cold exposure, relative to hypertrophy training specifically. And that's because I've heard that if deliberate cold exposure is done too soon. After I have purchaser feet and adaptation inducing work,
Out. Yeah. Right. All the sorts of things we've been talking about that, the hypertrophy response can be blunted reduced or eliminated is that true? And if so, when could people do deliberate called exposure while still also including hypertrophy training in their program and still get hypertrophy
great. So, you know, I'm a lover of the cold. I still have a deep freezer in my house. That is filled with water at all times that I was plugged in and is a frozen chamber. I still do the old school style of
it, please unplug it before you get in.
Oh, yes. Absolutely. And then don't do it by yourself, so that the lid closed on top of you, and then we don't see you sort of ever,
again, hannes the Han Solo effect. It's time for me to upgrade me
one of these new fancy ones, but I've been using this for so many years, so I love it. Obviously, I've been involved with xpt and Gabby and Laird, and Brian, Mackenzie, and these folks. So, I've been doing this stuff for a long time. I've put, I don't even know how many hundreds of folks into the ice and that of lotteries. And so there are a lot of benefits and we could talk about those later. However, that that being said,
It is very, very true. You do not want to get in the ice post of hypertrophy training. You wouldn't want to do that. Immediately after the workout, you probably don't want to do it before the workout, and you probably don't even want to do it that same day, it's just not worth it. It will blunt hypertrophy in specifically we've talked earlier about what's driving muscle growth. Is that signaling Cascade, through that gene expression through that muscle protein synthesis, cold exposure, blocks that signal
Remember adaptation comes from stress, you've put in a stressor in now you've blocked that stress you've literally blocked the signal. That tells your body, come back and grow larger size. So not a good idea to do it. If you're training for some other purposes, maybe strength, maybe there's an argument there although maybe not for Speed and power. Maybe get away with the endurance, may be a separate conversation. If you're in season, I have no problem using it immediately after a game, the goal is entirely.
Different. Even if we did a hypertrophy type of training program, we're not doing it to hurt a time at try to maximize growth and that particular case, our priority for Recovery is higher than our priority for muscle growth. So, we choose optimization in that category, you can only make those choices that when you truly understand what is the goal for the day, the week, the month, the phase of training, and really, what part of the Year urine, we have that all plotted out for all the people we work with. So I know when we want to choose one over the other, it's not a, this is the choice. You always make such a
That's just not how we operate. We need more Precision than that. So that being said, we're generally not going to do it if we want to do a lot of icing during a phase in which we're using a lot of hypertrophy we're going to do a couple of things. Number one, we may just not use it. So there are phases in our training where I don't want to maximize recovery. I'm not going to give you any tricks here. I'm not going to do ice or any of the other methods were going to talk about. Why? Because the whole point is to cause overload, that's what's going to be the stimuli to
Has adaptation. If all I'm doing is blocking that stuff attenuating, it smashing it back down, I'm undercutting myself. I'm choosing to feel a little bit better to have a little bit better performance right now. Knowing that's going to compromise the results. I'm going to get six. Eight, ten. Twelve weeks from now. All right. So I'm not going to choose at all in reality of it is if I really am trying to maximize hypertrophy, I'm probably not doing any ice work from that whole phase maybe like my off day I know that's similar to a setup. You have like one day a week when I'm not training will jump into some ice.
Maybe even do some hot coal contrast. I love the xpt protocol. It's you know, you've probably talked about it before. That's a great setup or does not do it at. All right? It's just not something we need. When we move into another phase of training where we're trying to maximize adaptation a or maximize the result and get the benefit of that training. Now we're going to head to more towards recovery and we're going to bring in some of these strategies and techniques and not worry about causing the most stimuli there because we're trying to add 10, you are who are trying to
To actualize the work. We did six eight ten twelve weeks
before. What about cold showers? Do those have the same hypertrophy blunting effect in
general? No, in general, you can do cold showers. That's not gonna be a problem. You're not going to be there very long and you're not going to get nearly as cold as you will submerge in 30-degree ice water for like that. The way that we do it nonetheless. So I have no problem standing in the shower for a couple of minutes using it. For other reasons. If you want to, that's no
issue. I'd like to talk a little bit about nutrition and
Lamentation as it relates to hypertrophy.
Dr. Lane Norton, who's been a guest on the human Lab podcast and we both know throughout number range related to protein intake on the backdrop of how much protein synthesis can occur by meal across the day etcetera. Out of a lot of research done there and some important work by him in particular and then the value that he threw out was 1.6 grams
Per kilogram of body weight being the lower end of the range up to I believe is it was as high as two point four. Maybe even as high as two point seven. Yep, grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day. That's a pretty broad range but it's on the higher end of what I think, most people think of, in terms of protein intake. And then again, some people might already be right there or maybe even above that value. Of course, this all depends on whether or not people are omnivore vegan meat based
Era, we won't even go there, but assuming people are getting enough protein per day, so somewhere in that range and they are spreading out that protein intake to accommodate the fact that the body can only assimilate a certain amount of protein in any given sitting, what do you like to see people in jest at some point? Post hypertrophy inducing work out in order to get the protein synthesis
If you will yeah that is stimulated by that work out earlier you mentioned the you know, the post training feeding window that you know, in the 90s and probably earlier people trying to do, you know, within the first 90 minutes, you have to get it started amount per 100, was it? Yeah, three minutes of excuse me, a certain number of grams of carbohydrate and protein, Etc. I think now, the understanding is that, that window is much broader and how broad, and Etc is still a matter of debate. But when somebody is training, specifically for her hypertension,
Rafi. Assuming they are getting enough protein from quality sources in their other meals, and assuming that their overall macronutrient intake and caloric intake is high enough. That is they have enough of a caloric Surplus that they have the, the raw materials for for hypertrophy.
What do you like to see people in jest at some point post workout in order to facilitate muscle protein synthesis and recovery. And this could include nutrition and supplementation or if you want to divide those answers out, feel free to do so, of course.
Okay, great. So ton of work came out of Don, Lemons lab was actually at Lanes Mentor, as well as to Phillips at McMaster. So a ton of work there and we can answer a number of things here. So Lanes numbers that he recommended also known as about a gram of protein per pound of
Away. It's a great start. Now, once you slide
below per pound, right? One gram per pound, right? And earlier which is
also make sure because we're changing
units here, it was 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight. All the way up to, I think it was two point four but maybe as high as 2.7, yeah, grams of protein per kilogram of body weight.
So 2.2 in that unit would be the same thing. So 200 grams per kg the same as 1 gram per pound, right? So depending on which or you're listening at to this at one of those may be easier,
Than the other for you. If you start getting below that number. Now, you do start running into questions of protein quality protein type and protein timing. This is one of the reasons why I actually fully agree with Lane is just get that number higher than you think. And then all those other variables don't matter if that number is low, then you need to start paying attention to a bunch of other stuff. You've added now complexity or to your program things, you got to pay attention to just stay high and it doesn't matter and so you can just leave a lot of those things off the table. That's
To be very clear in the work of some of these gentlemen. I just mentioned that is long as you get to that total number, the question about timing and types and quality. It seems to matter a lot less. In fact, stews recent work in non animal-based proteins, really shown that to be fairly clear that those are quite effective. Assuming total protein intake is high enough. The amount of leucine and other amino acids in those extra proteins matter less. If the total threshold is just super high, so just do that in your fine. Now, the other caveat we have to say
here is timing of macronutrients is seems to be somewhat Irrelevant for protein, but that is not the case for carbohydrates. So that timing does matter replenishment of muscle glycogen is very specific and you want to make sure that that is around a lot. If you're doing, either maintaining training quality, or you're sliding into endurance type of work. And so nutrient timing does matter with carbohydrates may be less. So the protein is certainly less. So, with protein, if the total protein ingestion is high enough. So
It depends on what we're going after in terms of a training goal and where we want to get with all these things in general. The way that we like to think about. This is if you're doing a strength type of work, where you're truly targeting that, then a one-to-one post-exercise protein to carbohydrate ratio is generally, we're going to go after, so this would be something like 35 grams of protein, 35, grams of carbohydrate. It doesn't have to be post. It can be pre or my favorite is actually mid or post, but somewhere in that range, especially if you're training the
Morning and you have not consumed, anything, prior to your workout
and that's not in silly eating in the middle of the workout. That's drinking at galleries. Yeah, it's going to be a yes to see someone eating a sandwich on in the gym although I'm sure it's happened. Yeah,
so 121, is that, like sort of standard number here? If you're going to do sort of more of a really hard conditioning workout that number slides up to something like 3 or even 4 to 1, which would be carbohydrate to protein ratio. So if we want to stay at 35 grams of protein, we're going to go, maybe is
Is like 100 or 140 grams of carbohydrate getting depending on what type of training. We're sort of doing, if you're going to do a little bit of a combination, then you like a little bit of strength, a little bit of conditioning and kind of a standard work out, which is probably something that a lot of people will do then you maybe want to go to something like 2 to 1. So, you know, 35 grams of protein 60, 70 grams of carbohydrate, and those are kind of just like rough numbers that you can go by
and for Pure hypertrophy training. Would you like to see people? Ingest some
hydrate post training for
Pure hypertrophy training. I want to see that. As many of those nutrients around the training is generally possible. Now again I might change my mind when our fasting study comes out. But as it stands, now there is no advantage to not feeling around the training and there are some known and some other potential advantages to fueling. So I just see no reason to not do it. In fact, most people are generally going to do better now. This is not science.
This is just my coaching experience and this is with our athletes and all of our non-athletes that we've worked with and do work with, they're just going to be better spreading those meals out generally throughout the day and they're going to be better if they have those nutrients, either pre-made or post and so they're going to get even for hypertrophy. They're going to get something like that. One, 3 to 1 ratio of carbs to protein personal preference. Some people don't like to eat before they train, some people have to eat before they train some people can't, you know, put in food in their belly immediately after
Work around that. You can you can play based on personal preference but we want that feeling in there because we want to maximize the potential growth and we want to just get a jumpstart on recovery because we're going to be training again pretty soon.
Supplementation is a huge topic and one that we will go into it in Great depth and soon to occur episode. But if you had to pick one supplement that can benefit most everybody if not everybody for their training directed,
Strength, power and hypertrophy. What would that supplement be? And how would you like to see people use it? Meaning how much should they take? And when should they take it?
Sure. If you don't count protein and carbohydrates, supplements, they technically are but we'll just walk out,
right? Sorry, I should be more specific. I'm not referring to non-food form. My protein and carbohydrates. So, powdered protein and part of powdered carbohydrate Etc. It technically are supplements their highly processed. But there
R, but I'm not including that, I'm referring to non macronutrient type
supplement this testosterone
count. Well, in the context of this discussion, it's testosterone that people are manufacturing themselves.
Okay, the cheating kind, the endogenous guy. No, I mean creatine is the answer here without question. It is the most, well, studied, it is the most effective and its benefits are robust meaning. They're going to kind of fur.
Positive adaptations across multiple physiological domains. And we can certainly have a very long chat about some of the interesting things that people. In fact, we just had during handle on barbell, shrug podcast and he went into extensive detail about all the benefits of creating that people have no idea about including things like bone mineral density. You asked about that earlier creatine is actually fairly effective for that, let alone, the thing, the benefit and things, like cognitive function, decision-making memory, the work that there's being done there.
For neurological, disorders, depression, a whole, host of things that that creatine is being studied. For some of those studies show a lot of benefits. Some of it show, maybe a little bit, some none but there's just a lot of things creatine can do. So when we could talk about Muscle Recovery and muscle hypertrophy, that's where the bulk of the research is and is very effective. In terms of type creatine. Monohydrate is still the best one, and that's just because as a largest ever,
Space. You can maybe make some arguments for some other types, but you're really going to reach saturation, pretty quickly within a matter of weeks. And they're at a dosage of anywhere between like three to six grams per day. Now, five grams is the very standard number. We give reality is, I change that number based on size, that's just the honest truth. If your 225 pounds, you're not going to get the same dosage of creatine as 125-pound girl, that's just as like, this is not what we're going to do. So we may slide that number down a little bit closer to 3.
For the smaller and girl wouldn't matter to female physical size. If you're one of our 275 or 330-pound offensive, right? Tackles and the NFL, you're not going to get the same dosage as everybody else. So that number is going to go up to seven, eight, nine, maybe even 10 grams a day there so that's this kind of scale in general. If you want an easy answer, 5 G is the
standard taken after training,
the timing doesn't matter, totally irrelevant taken the morning breakfast, take it at night, take it. Anytime you want to get pre, we tend to put it in a lot of people's work out.
Shakes just to make sure they get it in throughout the day, but the timing is
irrelevant great. Well, thank you for that very informative answer and I look forward to much more discussion about nutrition and supplementation and recovery, and all the rest in the episodes to come. This was incredibly informative. Thank you so, very much. I
appreciate the opportunity. I had a great time doing that. I love talking about these things. I also really like talking about what we're gonna get into our next conversation which is the physiology of endurance.
Since metabolism and fat loss.
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