027 Are 4 reps optimal?! New study: stimulating reps vs volume load

Welcome back to another episode. Thank you everyone for joining us. I'm joined by my co host, professional full time podcaster, Chris Beersley. How are you doing this week? I'm doing well, thanks Jake. Not quite so many podcasts this week. I actually do that many. It's just I had a I think last week I had three in one weekend, so it was a bit bit crazy, but only two this weekend. So normal normal levels of podcasting behaviour. So today we have a

totally, wholly different approach for you guys. Something I've never talked about on this podcast series before. And we're more than six months in. This is episode 27. So thank you to anyone who's been with us for the journey so far. Now obviously you guys know that I normally start a show with a Silver era plan, so a bodybuilding plan from before anabolic steroids were being used in bodybuilding. And today.

I'm doing something a little bit differently. Now, I am still talking about someone that you will know. So last week we talked about Bill Pearl. Now, for you guys who did listen to last week's episode, I mentioned that Bill Pearl is an interesting figure because he Well he was active actually for quite a long time so he won Mr. Universes in the fifties, the sixties and even in the early seventies.

And he transitioned in this period where uh anabolics were being introduced. So when he first won his his first Mr. Universe, he was natural and anabolics were not widely being used. And then shortly after winning, he started using anabolics. And if you do look up his physique transformation, you'll see that obviously he had a very impressive physique when he was natural, but then you fast forward a few years and he kinda looks completely different.

But it's an interesting case study, not just to see how his physique has changed or or did change over that time, but to see how his training methods changed over that time as well. So last week.

We covered a plan that he discussed when he was still natural. And this week we are covering a plan from 1967, and he started using anabolics. Most likely around 1958. So this is about a decade obviously after that. And I'm gonna do my best to communicate this plan to you because you'll see or you'll hear in a moment that there's quite a bit to it.

So it's a two two way split, okay. And he he was doing six days a week. So we've got uh a Monday, Wednesday, Friday workout and we've got a Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday workout. So I'll start with the the workout A, the Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And we have uh we start with an alternating twisting sit-up into an incline leg tuck.

and then into an inclined dumbbell sit-up. And actually also a dumbbell bend to opposite foot. So we've got this kind of core work there. He's doing a single set of each of these exercises, doing a hundred repetitions. So, you know, obviously very high volume there with this uh sort of core and ab work. Then we go into an incline lateral raise, four sets, into a close grip chin-up for four sets, a bent arm lateral raise for another four sets, a medium grip chin-up.

for another four sets. A decline lateral raise for another four sets. A wide grip chin up for another four sets. And then a military press for another four sets. So that's what's that, like four, eight, what do we got here? Like twelve s uh sixteen sets of pull ups, I think it is in in that sort of little middle series. Then we're not done yet. We then go into wait to dip.

Four sets of eight. Press behind the neck. So actually we've got a little bit more delts happening. Another four sets. And then incline barbell biceps curls. Four sets. Standing dumbbell later rays, a little bit more delts, another four sets. And then finally finishing off exercise number 16, we've got decline dumbbell bicep curls and for another four sets. So that is our workout A. Now if you're s if you wanna jump in and make a comment on that.

I wasn't going to make a comment so much as just ask for clarification. of what, you know, what do we think this what parts of the body is is he targeting with this exercise? And obviously we've you've described, you know, pull ups and battle raises and all kinds of stuff in there. But can you summarise for us 'Cause I'm just hearing this information, I'm going, you know, how do I pause this? It's so much Data, but what muscle groups are we training here?

It's difficult to fully identify this split because obviously we had a lot of bicep work here, but we will have bicep work again on the following day. Okay. So we we had bicep. We had a a stack of of deltoid work. We had obviously a a stack of of back work as well and then we had a had our core work. Now that's predominantly, I guess, what we see there. So there's not really much peck work in there as such, it's

A dip in there and that's about it. Yeah. So it's it's I guess triceps, shoulders, biceps, core. And back. Yeah. So then our Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday workout. So here this is where we've got legs, but we've got biceps again. We've still got some delts, but it's more rear delts.

And then we still got our core work in there as well and calves as well. So basically all the lower body stuff and then some some upper body stuff. So this workout again we're starting with core and abs. So we've got a a sit up. one set of a hundred reps, an alternating leg raise, a dumb dumbbell side bend, and then a lying leg crossover. So one set at each of those for a hundred repetitions. And then we go to a standing dumbbell curl for four sets.

Incline rear delt raise for four sets, incline dumbbell curl for four sets. We've got so much bicep work. A lying rear delt raise for four sets, bent over delt cable raise four sets. Leg extension four sets. This is four sets of ten. Everything else was four sets of eight. And then standing this is interesting. Standing car fairies, we've got five sets of fifteen, so we have moved up a little bit in the repetitions there. A had score for four set.

A seated calf raise now for five sets, a hamstring curl for four sets, and then finally a calf raise or I guess more like a toe press, a calf raise done in a leg press machine.

And that was five sets. And you know what, you you were talking about chess before and that there wasn't really any in the first workout and we've got none in this workout. So we're very much Much missing apart from I guess what it is getting in the dips and and a little bit of upper chest and some of the overhead work, there's not any significant chest work. From memory though, there was in his previous programme, I'm just trying to recall what we talked about.

Yeah, so that was a that was obviously one that he'd written for people to follow. But yeah, I believe there was a there was a wide grip bench in that one. And an incline. And a fly. Man, he he what he did is he put all of his chess work ten years prior And then apparently excluded all of it ten years later.

Yeah, that's really, really interesting. It's I mean, obviously the first thing that anybody is gonna think when they when they kinda hear this is that it's just an absolutely incredibly high uh degree of workout volume. But also, you know, this is happening six days a week. Yes. You know, got Monday, Wednesday, Friday workouts and Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday workouts. It's just a colossal amount of of volume being done, you know, not just single sessions, but uh, you know, constantly. So

um obviously it doesn't fit into the recovery date that we've got for strength trained people. Um so, you know, there's kind of two perspectives that we can we can bring to that. Um

you know, obviously historically people have argued that anabolics do accelerate recovery. Um they we do know that and and w and whether they do or not is actually really difficult to track because essentially if you imagine you're in the post workout recovery period and you're trying to track whether someone's strength is recovering faster because they're using an anabolic versus when they're not using an anabolic, the problem is that the anabolic is going to cause hypertrophy in that

in that recovery period. So the fibers are going to grow faster due to the anabolic usage and they're going to get stronger in that post workout period, whether or not the fibers that you damaged are recovering faster or not. So it's a really, really difficult sort sort of thing to track. So what you have to do is go and look at the non exercise muscle injury and people hate it when I do this, but it's the easiest way of just seeing whether something happens and go

Do the data in anabolics suggest that non exercise muscle injury recovers faster and some data do and some data don't? So I think, you know, on balance. I mean I used to say that I don't think it does make a difference. I think it probably does make a little bit of a difference. But at the end of the day, it is a very, very difficult problem to solve because you can't actually control for the repairing effects of anabolics at the same time as, you know, you can't exclude the

you know, hyper the hypertrophic effects of anabolics while you're trying to investigate the repairing effects of anabolics in an exercise situation. So you actually have to use non exercise muscle injury to give you informative data. Do I think that anabolics accelerate recovery to the point where you could do a workout plan like this and recover from it? No, I don't. I don't think the bit the effect is anywhere near that big.

Yeah, I mean essentially like just on that first workout we're looking at just from a Delt perspective, we've got four, eight, twelve, sixteen, twenty we've got twenty four sets of Delt perspective. And then that's going to be repeated again two days later with even potentially a little bit of crossover from the following day. So even with the the assistance of anabolic twenty-four sets in forty eight hours, it's just not gonna happen.

Is it? No, not at all. And I think, you know, this is a really good opportunity to repeat what I've said before, which is that one of the central points that we're trying to make in this podcast series is that

the high volume approach to strength training only appeared at the point when anabolics became popular. So the people who argue that high volume works for everybody, you know, whether they're using anabolics or not are requiring us to believe that simultaneously at the point when people start using anabolic

a group of people who are using anabolics simultaneously, magically discovered that high volumes are with the answer to maximum hypertrophy. They're asking us to believe that that is a a likely possibility. The far more likely possibility is that, you know, people started using anabolics and at that point it didn't really make any difference what kind of strength training you do'cause you're gonna grow due to the anabolic.

You don't need the strength training now to provide growth'cause the anabolic can do that. And just to be clear, what I'm saying here is that anabolics provide a completely separate parallel stimulus for muscle growth at the same time as the strength training is doing for people who are taking anabolics are gonna grow no matter what they do. They could sit on the sofa and they'll go and we've

studies showing that you can literally sit on the sofa and grow. So ultimately it's really, really hard to see the effects of the strength training programme that you're doing. What's interesting is trying to get to the bottom of why did they decide to start doing higher volumes? at the same time as they started introducing other works. What was it that made them think

that that was useful. And my and the standard response is, Well, I'm not sure there's anything. It's just that, you know, they're growing like a weed no matter what they do. So it they lose the connection between the empirical observation of what's happening when they're doing a strength training workout. It's like You know, before the before animals were introduced, if you did something that didn't work, you got feedback from that. You know? Once you start using Analytics, that

that that feedback loop is broken, you know. So you could literally go to the gym and stand on one leg for half an hour and believe that that was somehow doing something for you because you were going to grow anyway. Now, I don't think that necessarily training in a way that is, you know, suboptimal is going to be completely compensated for by anabolics. What I'm saying is that you are breaking the feedback loop.

Um and you can therefore do stuff that doesn't work and you're not necessarily gonna know that it's not working because you're gonna be growing. So it's like do I think that somebody with uh who's taking animals can literally do whatever they want?

Well, yes and no. Yes, they're still gonna grow, but no, they would probably grow slightly faster if they trained in a in a more appropriate way. So I still think that people who are using anabolics for bodybuilding would benefit from training in a way that is, you know, kind of similar to what we described before in silver area bodybuilding, but they aren't going to necessarily know that that is a better way just by observing their own training over

sh shortish periods of time. Maybe if they look at it over a year they might start to notice a difference. If they do one year training in this way and the next year training in the silver era way, I think they might notice that the way training in a silver era is going to be better. But It's gonna be very dependent on them using the exact same kind of pharmaceutical assistance as they were using it a previous year. Talked about this on a on on the webinar that I did with Asia.

And we said, you know, one of the things that really are gonna notice is just how miserable the process of competition prep is gonna be. You know, I think Somebody who's training in a in this kind of way is gonna have a very miserable experience, whereas somebody who's training in a more silver era type way is gonna have a much more enjoyable experience prepping for competition because they're not gonna be going to the gym doing, you know, two and a half hours worth of work.

you know, to get to essentially a worse output than they would have done if they'd trained And of course the conditioning and and that kind of side of things is going to be more easier to obtain when you're not doing a ton of unnecessary stuff on these kind of crazy volumes. So I think there are going to be discernible differences, but I don't

think that feedback loop i I think ultimately the breaking of that feedback loop is the is the reason why we've seen all of this crazy stuff starting to happen at this particular point in time. Yeah.

Yeah, I I concur entirely. Like I often and you know, actually I I wanna make a point here. A big issue I see when I do see people talking about Silver Era or talking about i not even a silver era, talking about old school bodybuilding. Yeah. What I see is

I almost every time I see it being talked about, people lump it all together and they lump in silver era with golden era. And so they they look at plans like what we've talked about for the last six months and then they look at plans like this.

And there's no distinction of, hey, this is a post anabolic plan compared to, you know, a pre anabolic plan and there's sort of this whole mentality of, Hey, these guys sort of knew something that we don't and you know, there's like this intuition that they had and this, that and the other And this is a perfect example of actually know what you've identified there without that that feedback loop working, they we start to see some some pretty nuts stuff happening.

But what I love about this example here with Bill Pearl is we can get a first hand experience of what did it look like before he started taking anabolics, what did it look like afterwards. And literally he more than doubled everything he was doing. You know, I've I've just pulled up another plan of his I have, which was a plan that he personally followed, and very similar exercise selection, but it's literally thirty to fifty percent as much volume.

So he's just gone ahead and taken almost exactly what he was doing and doubled or more and also doubled the amount of days that he's training. And you know, this is this is Such a good example of hey, even within this one individual who is getting amazing results doing kind of the classic stuff we've been talking about in the episodes up until now.

he still, I guess, kind of was unable to identify what training approach worked best once he has this interfering factor of anabolics that were causing an additional type of ground. Totally. I think it really strains, you know, um, our ability to believe people when they say that.

high volume training is gonna work in everybody, you know, no matter whether they're using anabolics or not. And yet the only time or the point in history where high volume training became popular was exactly the point at which you know, anabolics start to becoming used popularly. It just it's it's such an obvious inflection point in in the trajectory of training practices. You know, we just look at the the graph of training practices over time.

suddenly it like, you know, the late fifties, early sixties, people started doing double the amount of volume they were doing before. And we're supposed to believe that that's just, you know, suddenly people discovered that that was a good way of training. Despite the fact that people have been lifting heavy objects since the ancient Greek.

You know, now suddenly at this precise moment in history everyone starts doing double the amount of volume they were doing before. And oh look, that's exactly the point in time when anabolics become popular. Nobody who has any degree of, you know, cognitive capacity is gonna, you know, look at that and go, Oh, those two events are unrelated.

Tot totally unrelinked. I mean come on, be serious. You know, everyone everyone who thinks about this stuff seriously has got to look at that and go, Oh, those two things are linked. And if we accept that those two things are linked, we suddenly now just completely un

undercut all of the nonsense in the industry about people running around going, Oh, you've got to do super high volumes and look, you know, there's no muscle swelling going on and all of that nonsense that we see being talked about all the time. It's clearly that people started using anabolics to feedback loop broke. Now we don't know what works and what doesn't work and so people start chasing all kinds of silly ideas.

And maybe maybe I mean I'm not a I'm not um uh a student of steroid biochemistry. I don't know about this stuff anywhere near as much as some there's some very good commentators out there on the internet. Um, you know, but I'd be surprised if they don't change, you know, your mood, your approach to workouts, how you feel, all the kind of thing. And, you know, if people feel like they want to do more and they're feeling great, you know

they're gonna do more. So, you know, maybe there's a behavioural kind of driver there just because of the way that the the steroid hormone makes you feel. Um but ultimately, you know None of that really matters. What matters is that, you know, if you just look at the prevalence of different training programmes over time, the only point in history where high volume programs became popular was exactly the point at which steroids became popular as well. So anybody who's got any kind of

you know, analytical capacity is going to look at that and go, Well those two events are related. It's not one of those situations where you can kinda go, Oh well no correlation doesn't mean causation I'm like, Okay, come on, be serious. This is clearly what's dri one thing is clearly driving the other here. So this plan was obviously completely different to anything else we've covered so far and and going forwards

I want to present a few more plans like this. I still want to show you guys examples of silver aerial plans and what they did and why we think it makes sense or, you know, what maybe could have been done better. But for you guys who've been joining us for this long, you'll see that, you know what, there's actually

so much consistency in what they were doing, it's a little bit monotonous. It's like, okay, we kinda get it now. And now what I want to do going forward is is contrast a little bit to well, what did we see develop when that feedback loop was broken and how did it differ?

So it's not always gonna be a a golden era plan like this. I I will still introduce you guys to some silver era plans in future episodes, but we will do a little bit more of this contrasting going forwards. Is there any other points I wanted to make on this plan before we jump into the topic for today?

No, I just uh I guess wanted to say that yeah, commenting on what you just mentioned there, it'll be really interesting to see if there are any trends. Like we've observed trends in the silver era, some of them which are clearly in alignment with physiology and some of them are like, Well why were they doing like I just keep saying, Why are there no pull ups in this program? Why are there no

you know, frontal plane, um, you know, kind of pulling exercises in this program. You know, I keep saying why are there no hamstrings exercises in these programmes? Why aren't they doing any deadlift variations? Or do they just not talk about them? Is there some sort of secret

I I've joked before, there's some kind of secret agreement that they don't comment on deadlift exercises. Like they're doing them but they're just not talking about them. So we've got this kind of weird kind of uh trends that we've noticed having gone through all of those programmes week week in, week out.

Are we gonna see the same kind of thing? Like you know, looking at this programme that we talked about today, are we gonna find that everyone's doing a billion delt exercises and no chest exercises? Is that gonna be I doubt that, but you know, is that something that we're going to start to see coming through as a trend?

Down that as well. I think it I don't know, my bill power knows. I have a suspicion that there's gonna be a lot of delt and biceps exercises in most people's programs. You think? Okay. Well see the interesting thing here actually is because Bill's natural plan was super light on with chess and actually really heavy on with delts as well. So I I wonder if it was

Might just be a uh a feature of his personal uh kind of weak points and preferences and that kind of thing. Yeah, no y no, I I agree with you. Come on out. It's is interesting to try these things. suspicion to what we're gonna see and I'm not gonna say I'll tell you when we finish recording, but but I think yeah, there's something I think that'll that will appear which I think will be quite interesting for us to note on. But it'll it'll come up. Cool. Let's see what happens.

Yeah. So um basically today I just want to introduce um a potential new development, which is not something that I do very often because I think that physiologically we've we've kind of been in a relatively stable place as regards strength training and how it works for a number of years. I don't think there's been anything really new to get our teeth into. We do have a a new study. I think it was probably published ahead of print uh maybe even as long ago as it

six to twelve months. But it came out in a printed version in August, but I was kind of on vacation in August as most Europeans tend to be. So I didn't uh spot it and I only picked it up recently and and worked my way through it. Basically it's a long term training study and it's the first long term training study we've got which

compared the hypertrophy after heavy loads and light loads. Depending on your terminology you might listen to that and go, What are you talking about? We've got a whole kind of load of studies that have compared heavy and light loads and hypertrophy and that's not actually true if you use the uh strict definitions of heavy and light. Heavy basically is one to five.

uh rep max as moderate is six to fifteen and light is kind of sixteen to maybe thirty or whatever. So pretty much every study that has been done prior to this point was done in moderate and light loads. Now the researchers who are writing up those studies don't think in S and C terms, they think in like, you know, hypertrophy terms. So they're they think that anything that's like

eight to ten rat max is heavy and of course it's not. Um but from an S point of view and a physiology point of view, we divide it into heavy being one to five, you know, and and moderate being six to fifteen. So pretty much every study prior to this one that's just come out.

uh has compared moderate loads around the eight to twelve rep max zone and light loads usually around the sort of twenty to thirty rep max zone. Um physiologically, as long as you're using a load that's heavier than about thirty percent of one rep max,

you are kind of doing more or less the same thing because you are occluding blood flow. And if you occlude blood flow, then you can have metabolite related fatigue, which allows you to slow down muscle fibre shortening velocity without impairing muscle fibre force.

And that allows you to have high mechanical tension at muscular failure when you're reaching high levels of motino accruement. If you go lighter than thirty percent of one max, then even in a concentric phase, blood flow is not occluded and so you end up with blood just leaving the muscle in the concentric phase and of course that takes all the metabolites with it. So you can't um build up metabolite accumulation and therefore you can't reach muscular failure with the same

you know, kind of degree of mechanical tension'cause you're relying on calcium angulated D mechanisms to create your local uh you know, kind of peripheral fatigues. So basically anything up to kind of thirty-five ish, maybe even higher than that, rep maxes are gonna give you that. Full occlusion and they're going to allow you to kind of stimulate hypertrophy irrespective of rep range.

Usually just'cause that is probably a little bit confusing for some people, that's kind of what BFR is doing. Yeah, that's why BFR You could create yeah, so you could literally, you know, kind of create the same effect with B F R and a and a tin of baked beans. You know, you could literally lift almost no load whatsoever.

and mimic the effect of a heavy load or a or a moderate or a light load. And we tend to talk about very light loads when you go off the upper end of that rep range and you start using something that's lighter than thirty, twenty five to thirty percent of market max. And that w in normal situations without BFR, if you use twenty percent for example of of uh like there's a famous study which used four different rep ranges. I think it's twenty, forty, sixty and eighty, something like that.

And they found that basically the the anything above thirty, so the forty, sixteen, eighty produce the same hypertrophy as long as you're using the same number of sets to failure ish. Whereas the twenty percent doesn't. And it's because you don't have metabolite uh fatigue in the in the twenty percent because you just got haven't got that occlusion of blood flow. If you applied um in and there's lots of BFR studies using ten or twenty percent of all at max,

Um if you apply BFR in that situation you imm immediately occlude blood flow and you create the same scenario as you would do with a heavier load than thirty percent. So either a light, moderate or a heavy load, you're mimicking that with what we classify as a very light load, which is that that not.

below in terms of um you know the uh force production of the whole muscle. So yeah, BFR gets you around that issues. For people who have I mean I've talked about this before in context of BFR, but people who have some kind of, you know, sort of specific restriction on how much weight they can actually lift because of maybe some joint issue or tendon issue or something like that, you can use BFR in those scenarios and you will get

a muscular response even though you are below that kind of critical threshold for for occluding the flow of blood naturally with the muscular contraction. So yeah, it's really that ret brain's issue is just about whether or not we're creating metabolite relative fatigue. So

This study basically um looked at three to five rep maxes as one of the training groups. So this is really interesting. Now there's a number of things I want to talk about here, but just to start off, what I'm pointing out is that I think this is the first study that said we're going to compare

two groups, one which is actually heavy, three to five uh you know, reps per set, and one which is light, twenty to twenty five reps per set. And they're gonna use the same number of sets to failure in both groups, and they're gonna use the same rest periods in both groups. Now I think we have got a study prior to that which used heavy loads and long rest periods comparing with lighter loads and shorter rest periods.

And of course it was like, was it the rest period that was creating the issue or was it the rep brains that was creating the issue? And they ended up with about the same hypothetical in both groups more or less.

Um so well it was like it fits with what we're gonna talk about today, but it's not as uh kind of uh controlled if you like in comparison with the one that we've got at the moment. Having said that, I just want to make the point that Um if you want to physiologically control for the effective rest period, then you would have longer rest periods in the in the higher rep group.

So there's not a perfect scenario by any means. If you have, say, in this context, two minute rests between sets and you're using a three to five rate max and a twenty to twenty five rate max, you are not going to find that you've got a full CNS fatigue recovery in light load group because you are still going to be out of breath when you come to do the next set in the context of this uh, you know, kind of uh type of programme. Now, having said that again, no to qualify my qualification

We are talking about single leg training here, so it isn't as big a deal as it would be if you were doing like squats or something. If you're doing squats then you would basically expect that your light load group would or light load condition would be just completely destroyed by trying to do two minute rest periods. But you know, we're talking about leg press and knee extension in this context and it's single leg versions of the two.

So I don't think it's quite as horrible. I would be pretty miserable in that scenario, trying to do, you know, twenty five uh reps of a single leg leg press, I would be extremely unhappy. especially taking two minute rest periods. But that's by the by, I'm an old man. Basically uh the study used these two training groups, compared the hypertrophy, uh single leg within subject design, which is awesome for hypertrophy, pretty useless for strength gains.

Um but really, really interesting from a hypertrophy point of view'cause you've got your every subject is their own control. So you've got you know, one group, one sorry, one condition, uh one leg doing, you know, kind of um three sets of leg presses, three sets of knee extensions um twice a week. Now six sets

especially light loads is probably not going to be, you know, recoverable really. But the on the heavy load side it probably is. So, you know, they're doing one leg three to five rope maxes sor sorry, three to five ropes per set. to failure six exerci six sets across two exercises, so like pressing knee extension.

Probably is recoverable actually. So there's a bit of a a recovery difference again. So again we've got a little bit of a problem there in terms of um you know comparing these two situations because we're probably not seeing full recovery in the case of the light load group compared to the heavy load group.

Instructed is and again instructed as two four week blocks with a a week off in the middle. The week off in the middle basically had a single workout with one set of each exercise. Now this is one of those great examples where I'm just going to be a little bit rude because

Ultimately, if you have read the literature and you know and it's not difficult to read the maintenance literature, there's only like four or five studies. If you know that literature you would know that you need three sets once a week to create a stable maintenance situation, or you want to do single sets twice a week. You wouldn't program a single set once a week uh for each exercise and expect to be to be able to maintain the state of muscle mass that you've sort of

started that week off in. So I don't understand why they structured the training programme the way they did, but it doesn't really matter. It's there's a there will have been a small amount of atrophy that week. Um so I don't agree with the way that they design that, but you know, no training program is perfect. We've basically got a a kind of a four week plus a detraining week or a delay week and then another four week um uh period. So there would have been a little bit of a a

kind of a benefit for the light leg group in the middle where they would have recovered some of that accumulated fatigue with, you know, kind of um six set workouts for the single joint quadriceps. But ultimately, you know, it was not a horrible kind of training programme for our purposes'cause it would have been nearly, nearly recoverable and it's not uh, you know, four weeks plus four weeks is not a huge amount of time to be

kind of worrying about the accumulation of of post workout fatigue. And essentially, after all that, we end up in a place where both training groups pretty much produce the same muscle group m muscle growth. So if you've got a um

Uh you know, kind of s sort of situation where we're seeing, you know, three to five reps per set producing the same hypertrophy as twenty to twenty five reps per set. Notwithstanding the issues around rest periods or intra workout fatigue, notwithstanding the issues around post workout fatigue accumulation, what we're saying here is that broadly speaking, we're getting um, you know, the same

hypertrophic stimulus from a set of twenty to twenty five reps as a set of three to five reps. Now, this has two really big implications for two battles that you know, the fitness industry or the science based fitness industry has been fighting for the last year or two. And the easier battle to resolve, really, and I think it was resolved a long time ago, but this is the one that still perpetuates in a number of places.

is that volume load is still believed in some places in the industry to have something to do with hypertrophy. Volume load is the number of sets times the number of reps times the actual weight on the bar. So Well you can see in this study, and they did the analysis, is that essentially the light load group is doing s anywhere between two and a half and four times as much volume load as the heavy load group. So it's just like it should produce

way more hypertrophy if volume load has anything to do with hypothermic stimulus. Now of course it doesn't because stimulating reps model is probably true. So anybody's running around going, Oh volume, volume load they're the same thing. Volume is the number of sets to failure, volume load is sets times rats time weight. No, and so people are going, Oh no, it's just the total

force time integral or it's the total, you know, kind of volume load that the or work that the muscle is doing that determines hypertrophy. This study absolutely stamps on the hypothesis. It actually stamps on it and does a little dance on top. I mean it's just destroying this idea completely. If you've got a scenario where one group is doing four times the volume load as the other group and they're getting the same hypertrophy.

That tells you that your volume load hypothesis is garbage. I mean it it really does. There's there's there's no possible way for people to, you know, state that volume load has anything to do with hypertrophy with a straight face.

after this study came out, you know, it really is is done. The argument is over. But of course people are going to still argue that because, you know, not everybody, you know, does the reading. Secondly, we've then got this idea of and this is the really interesting bit from my perspective You know, yeah. How are we having a scenario where we think there's probably about five stimulating reps in a set?

안녕. We're seeing the same hypertrophy with three to five reps per set as we are with twenty twenty five reps per set. No, now within that conversation there's of course the people who are running around going, Well, we think you can get hypertrophy with eight reps from failure. No, eight reps in reserve or seven reps in reserve, we think you can get hypertrophy with that. Well, clearly that isn't gonna stack with this study very well at all because

if that were true then your light load set will be getting an extra kind of three or four, you know, kind of stimulating rates per set compared with your your heavy load group, you know. So straight away it's it's starting to come back in the other direction and go, maybe there aren't as many stimulating reps per set as certainly these people are arguing.

You know,'cause if you've got a situation where you can create hypertrophy with, you know, sort of seven, eight reps in reserve, then that implies that your, you know, moderate load sets should be producing a bigger stimulus or even light load sets should be producing a bigger stimulus than a heavy load set. So straight away there's kind of that difference going on there. It's pulling us in the opposite direction from what those guys have been saying. But also it kind of goes well, you know

Genuinely, are there even fewer than five stimulating reps per set? Because if we can create the same hypertrophy with three to five reps per set as we can with twenty to twenty-five.

You know, is it that maybe there's only four stimulating reps per set and actually five is an overestimate in that in that scenario? So I think this is this is starting to get really interesting because certainly before this study came out a lot of the literature in the stimulating reps zone, the the the reps in reserve literature, was starting to pull us towards thinking maybe there are more than five stimulating reps per set. I've been on

you know, this podcast and other places saying maybe there's even six but this is now pulling us back in the other direction and going, you know, actually maybe it's not and the interesting thing is that these people did have two years of strength training experience. So You know, one of the things that, you know, many people have noticed is that uh or inferred from the physiology literature

is that when you first start out strength training, basically anything any muscle fibre that you've got that's above the low threshold zone, so low threshold is kind of the bottom thirty to thirty five percent of the muscle, varies between muscles, as I've said before, postural muscles probably go higher than that, but You know, like carved muscles probably uh up at like fifty percent or something like that.

you know, generally speaking, you know, muscles are going to kind of below threshold up to about thirty, thirty five percent uh by volume. Above that you're in the high threshold zone. Pretty much any of that zone unless you've been active in high force physical activities like you do manual labour or you work in the garden a lot.

or you do something else that requires lifting and carrying, you know, then generally speaking, those fibers of that zone above thirty, thirty five percent are literally just gonna be relatively untrained. You're gonna have very low levels of

uh kind of development. You start doing strength training and pretty much all of that entire zone starts growing. As you progress through your strength training career, you start capping out those muscle fibers at the bottom end of the high threshold unit pool relatively quickly because they are

you know, kind of limited to smaller sizes because they're more oxidative. Size principal astriotive muscle tells us that they're going to cap out and stop growing. So you end up with a situation where pretty much only the top end of the motin at pool is capable of growth, which means that you've got to get to higher levels of recruitment before you start seeing any kind of

meaningful hypertrophy. So I think most strength trained peop most strength trained people are in a zone where they have to kinda get to a pretty high level of effort before any fibre starts receiving a stimulus that makes it grow. Yes, you can create Growth in fibers lower down.

Yes, you can create a stimulus in fibers lower down, but they're not going to grow in response to that stimulus because they're already fully grown. Interestingly, somebody asked me a question recently about why um you know kind of the magnitude of the electromaghy signal is not related to the hypertrophy that results.

This is one of the reasons why. Because you can have a whole bunch of fibers that are fully grown already and they're gonna display a high level of activation. You've got high action potential, you know, kind of propagation in that area and they're not gonna grow. Because they're already maxed out. So you've got this inherent problem there, especially in strength trained people, where your magnitude of the electrical signal is not going to reflect the magnitude of the hypertery because you're

stimulating stuff that isn't capable of growing. So straight away you've got that inherent problem with that relationship. Anyway.

When we're looking at strength training people, they are gonna have to get to much higher levels of recruitment, which means that your number of stimulating reps by definition is gonna be smaller. I think that if you've got y an untrained person, completely untrained, never done any kind of physical activity, and I guess That's worth sort of dwelling on as well because I've often pointed out that when I started strength training, you know, my generation was very physically active.

you know, before we even start our strength training. I mean I could do like, I don't know, you know, I don't know, six t t to eight pull ups before I even touched uh weight. You know, so you know, it was like our generation was always being physically active, climbing trees, running around doing stuff, you know, kind of getting into trouble in the classic Gen X kind of childhood.

Um, so the first time I picked up a barbell, I think I deadlifted double body weight. Um, you know, it was just like walked in the gym and did that. So it was a very, very different kind of starting point from people who, you know, are starting from sedentary behaviour.

So I think again, it's like I'm not necessarily saying starting from zero strength training, I'm saying starting from zero development, whether that's been done from calisthenics, gymnastics, whatever else sport you've been doing that requires those kind of you know, physical uh kind of activities that produce high levels of recruitment, high levels of force production.

working with a client once who had spent about a year gaming. Like he basically hadn't left his bed and had just spent the whole year sedentary. And he had lost so much muscle mass, like even walking was difficult for him. And he decided, you know what, I need to stop this and he got into the gym. And the the amount of muscle that he was able to gain in in a fairly short period of time was tremendous.

Exactly. That's the opposite end of the spectrum, isn't it? I mean, it's like from the sublime to the ridiculous. You take someone who's been doing a l lot of gymnastics, a lot of calisthenics, you know. Um, a lot of other kind of different physical activities, maybe doing some grappling, you know, arm wrestling, that kind of stuff, but it's never lifted a weight. And they start going to the gym and they expect these wonderful results and nothing happens. It's like

I mean that was really kind of my experience. I kinda started strength training and very little happened, you know, because I'd already kind of got most of the way I was gonna get anyway. From a coaching perspective, coaches don't do as much of like the transformation stuff anymore. But when I started out, that was what everyone did. Twelve week transformations and you passed it up on social media.

I mean, we all knew as coaches, the best client you could have who would walk in the door would be someone who had no background whatsoever for any kind of physical activity, sport. They'd just been sedentary. Perfect. Like the what you can achieve in twelve weeks is gonna be amazing. Exactly. And I think that's the difference. I think somebody with only a sedentary uh background is gonna probably have up to

ten stimulating reps per set. I think that's probably the kind of territory that we could be expecting to see, maybe even twelve, eh? I don't know. But that's that's kind of what what they would experience. With somebody who's

done two years of strength training or similar physical activities, they're probably gonna find that they're limited to that sort of classic number that I've been, you know, kind of had stapled to my forehead, which is five. You know? I mean Yeah, everyone's like, Oh yeah, he's the guy who says there's only five stimulating it per set and I'm like

ballpark wrong, but that's not what I'm saying. So yeah, I think um I I think this is just such a fascinating study to kind of start to to look at and say, well, does this pull us down in terms of estimates of stimulating number per set in strength trained individuals? So let me just

add some of my thoughts on what's going through my head when I look at this study and and the results of this study and what I think is is is going on. So firstly, what I've always said is that when we look at two different groups, now within subject is great because we're removing the sort of inter individual difference effects that we can get with between group kind of study designs. But we still are going to have the problem of it being a statistical

kind of calculation with measurement error and all of that stuff. So one of the issues with volume is that when you compare volumes, different volumes between groups, you aren't gonna detect small differences in volume. So if you look at the literature You often we're going to find the classic uh steady design one set versus three sets versus five sets.

Per workout. One set versus five sets almost always produces a difference. One set versus three sets and three sets versus five sets often doesn't. So people are like, Oh yeah, volume always makes a difference. I'm like, well Go and look at the literature and you'll see for yourself that often small differences in volume, even one or two sets per workout.

you know, don't make a difference. And it's not because they don't make a difference. They do make a difference. It's just that you can't see the difference because our measurement error is disguising the real difference that's underpinning the physiological effects. So again, when people look at the proximity to failure literature. They go, you know, one reserve is exactly the same as failure. No. One ripping reserve is statistically similar to failure.

But if you look at three reps in reserve versus failure, there's always a difference. So people are like, Oh no, no, no, you can literally just miss the last rep off and it doesn't matter. When I hear people say that, I'm like, this person doesn't understand the difference between evidence and science. It's like for them, evidence is like

you know, the results of the study are the law. It's like that's what happens. No, no, no, no. That's the statistical, you know, result of the study. To understand what happens you have to go below that and go, what do I think is mechanistically, physiologically occurring, you know, and do I think that I can just continue extrapolating and that this is just I'm not noticing the effect because it's not big enough.

Or do I think there's something actually going on? If from a from a science point of view, if somebody goes there is no difference between a one weapon reserve and failure in terms of hypertrophy, my question to them is going to be Tell me physiologically how that happens. And they're gonna be what do you mean? The studies show that is no difference. The studies are telling you that they can't find the difference between those two things. Now it's either because it's too small

Or it's because there's something else going on that changes the direction that you've been going in. If you look at all the other

reps in reserve studies. Fewer reps in reserve you take, the closer to failure you get, the more hypertrophy you stimulate. Okay, so what's magical then? What are you saying is changing about going from one rep in reserve to zero?

Because you're telling me the trajectory changes. So what physiologically is changing? And again they look at me as if I've grown an extra head and they're like, What are you saying?'Cause they're thinking in evidence based terms, not science based terms. And I'm saying

Tell me what's changing. Because the trajectory up to that point has been telling me that I'm expecting to see a continu a continued amount of hypertrophy occurring with continued proximity to failure, closer to failure. So when I think about it, if they if they want to make that case, they've got to explain to me

Why am I getting no mechanical tension stimulus on the muscle fibers to the high-face remoting, it's in that final repetition? That makes no sense. This is one of those situations where you have to go scientifically, I'm expecting there to be a difference, even though even though evidence based

data driven kind of long term trials based, I'm not actually seeing one. I'm just inferring by drawing a line between the two things and going scientifically, physiologically, I think that this overall trend is going in that direction and I'm just filling in the gap.

So someone could say, Well, I think it you know, it's it's maybe not having a beneficial effect because it's taking away from that next set by causing extra fatigue and whatever. Like they could come up with a physiological explanation But they don't do that, that's the point I'm making. So what they're doing is that they're framing the question in an evidence based point of view, which is to say, if I can't find a statistical difference between these two things, then they are, you know

Ontologically they are the same. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, that's not what your data is showing you. Your data is showing you that the difference is too small to detect, or it doesn't exist. So if you want to tell me that it definitively doesn't exist, you're picking one of the two possible possible answers there. You've decided to pick one of those two. You didn't realise you were doing that. But your evidence framework

requires you to do that. You've decided that they're actually the same. Okay, tell me why they are the same. Tell me why it's not just a difference that's too small to detect, you know? So my position is to look at the physiology and go, do I think it's one or the other? Do I think it's that there is no difference or do I think that there is just a difference that's too small to detect? So often when I'm looking at these volume studies or looking at this proximity to failure studies, I'm going

physiologically, I'm just going to draw a line and go, I actually think that this is just a spectrum and that the differences you are measuring are just too small. So I do think there's a difference between one set and two sets and one set and three sets.

And to be honest, I think most other people do as well. It's just that when I look at the church and I don't see a difference, I'm not picking the answer automatically that says there isn't a difference, I'm picking the answer that says there is a difference, it's just too small. And I think that because physiologically underpinning all of that

mechanistically, my model says that there should be one. And I'm looking at this load uh this load study now and going three to five reps versus twenty to twenty five reps, do I think there should be a difference

you know, as a result of maybe missing one or two reps off my heavy load set, I think there probably should be. I think that if you're doing a three especially if there were lots of three reps in there, I think that you probably would be missing some stimulating reps as a result of doing that. You know, because um ultimately a five rep set is gonna give you a stimulus on every single rep of the set. If it's a five rep max, so does a three rep max. But

A three rep max has two fewer repetitions. So I'm expecting there to be a smaller hyper hypertrophy stimulus in that particular

situation, that comparison. But again, coming back to what I said earlier, the light load group would definitively have been suffering both intra workout fatigue mechanisms that were greater and post workout fatigue mechanisms that were greater. You know, really if If there is a a hypertero researcher listening to this who hasn't pulled out all their hair already listening to me, you know, they could control better for rest periods by letting the resting heart rate.

or heart rate get close to a specific threshold relative to resting heart rate between sets. So they could decide, you know, um, resting heart rate plus whatever. ten beats per minute or whatever, uh twenty or whatever they want to do. And they could go, We're gonna let heart rate come back to this level and then we're gonna do the next set and it's gonna be an individual rest period basis and then you would physiologically control for the CNS fatiguing effect

of your rest period. You wouldn't control necessarily so much for the you know, peripheral stuff, certainly on the calcium amulet side you can't control for that. You're going to get more of that with the light load than you are with the heavy load. But that's intrinsic to the rest to the rep range, not intrinsic to the rest period. But you should control for both the metabolite and the CNFT because the two are linked.

So if you actually wanted to control for rest period in a better way than we're doing at the moment, you would use rest periods uh what's rest periods. You would use resting heart rate basis and come down to a certain level relative to that. Obviously if you you can't really come back all the way down to resting heart rate levels'cause you'd be there all day. But you could come down to some threshold above that, percentage above that or

number of beats above that. And if you did that you'd probably be much more controlled for the behaviour of light loads in terms of the cardiovascular system. So again, I think you know there's

You could potentially say, well, you know, is it that the measurement difference is too s measurement is are not accurate enough to detect the difference between the heavy loads and the lighter loads? Or is it because we're losing a little bit in terms of the heavy loads because we're losing a stimulat? Um

You know, but on the in the light loads we're we're accumulating fatigue and we're also suffering intra workout by having a higher degree of superspinal CNST because we're not actually cardiovascularly recovering from set to set. And you could say, Well, maybe those two things are equaling each other out.

But this is a physiological analysis of a study, you know, and we're always going to be kind of having those things going in opposite directions when we're comparing different training programs.

I mean, again, this is one of the things that people don't realise when they start comparing rep range sorry, rep ranges is what we're doing today. When they start comparing ranges of motion. So if you've got a study that has multiple set protocols and one's got a high uh large range of motion, one's got a smaller range of motion, people don't realise that the larger range of motion is going to give you more calcium amulet T.

It's like we you know, so are you controlling for that in the context of what you're investigating? Are you really investigating a single thing or are you investigating a cluster of things?'Cause if I use a large range of motion in a quad exercise, I'm expecting to get some stretch mediated hypertrophy from doing that.

But at the same time I'm getting more calcium related fatigue, which is going to impair the effects of future or the stimulus of future sets in that workout, but potentially also impact on a subsequent workout as well. So you're not actually measuring a single variable. You're actually measuring the impact of multiple things that are happening as a result of changing one variable.

Yeah. How much do you think so in this in this study, obviously they were doing six sets per workout. So even if they were, say the heavy load group is averaging four repetitions per set, we're talking twenty-four. ish maximum stimulating repetitions. Uh at a certain point we would expect that there's not really gonna be much additional stimulus within a single workout. How much do you think that

That's the other issue, isn't it? It's like if they were doing single sets we'd have probably seen a much bigger potential for difference. And the single test would then obviously control for for the intra workout fatigue and also the post workout recovery.

Yeah. I mean really to sort of detect

meaningful differences between training variables, it makes much more sense to limit volume. You're gonna see a much bigger difference between, you know, single set protocols. If you're interested in range of motion or if you're interested in rep range, it's much better to do single sets. We do a whole bunch of sets This enabled us to really see a diff I mean to be honest though, I think you probably still would have seen meaningful differences in volume and load.

No, but you see, what do you say this was like four times higher? Two uh it's two and a half in the knee extension and and four times in the in the leg press. I mean it's it's just n it it really does I mean if if nothing else, it makes that whole idea nonsense. I mean anybody who's running around going volume load is related to hypertrophy, you know, they're just They're not paying attention, you know. This this I mean I've I've I've had uh I've been showing data on this for for

five or six years. Uh but never to this extreme extent. I mean I think the previous data that I've shown maybe has the light group. producing one and a half to two times as much volume load. And I think people kinda saw those numbers and just were like, I'm just gonna ignore that. Four times as much volume load, it's like, no, conversation's over.

Anybody running around now saying volume load has anything to do with hypertrophy is just as I say not really paying attention. It's it's not a valid hypothesis. It's gone. So you know, it's got to it's got to be rejected really. So yeah, I mean that at least as you say is is something that was definitively demonstrated by this study. Really the stimulating reps discussion is more

difficult to get to'cause there's so many things going in different directions. I just think overall it pulls the feeling of the data back in the opposite direction from where it was creeping beforehand. As I say

You know, the last couple of years people have been pulling out studies that show reps in reserve of larger and larger magnitudes producing hypertrophy and they're saying, Oh, you know, come on, we've got, you know, five, six, seven reps in reserve potentially producing a little bit of hypertrophy here and there.

You know, and now this study is coming back and pushing us in the opposite direction, going, you know, maybe that's that's, you know, kind of not really valid. Now, if somebody wants to consider the alternative hypothesis that the stimulating reps hypothesis is not valid, then they've got to come up with an explanation of

you know, how do you end up with in many studies identical hypertrophy with different rep ranges, so moderate and light loads and now here heavy versus, you know, light loads. How do you end up with, you know, the same hypertrophy occurring with the same number of sets of each rep range? And yet balance that with situations where potentially you you think these studies showing high degrees of rips in reserve like

five, six, seven reps in reserve. How do you balance that with those still producing hypertery? Have you got a model that will explain that to a better extent than stimulating reps? And as I've said a number of times, if you think you can solve that problem

that phenomenon, that upset of observations in a better way than my stimulating model does, please write it up and send it to me because, you know, I'd love to see a better explanation than the one that I've got and there isn't one at the moment, you know.

be cool to, you know, actually have some degree of competition for the model. Anyway, so I really I'm just kind of bringing people's attention to this very cool study, which is um, you know, showing us uh that this gap in the literature that we've had for a long time now, you know, where everyone's just been measuring moderate eight to twelve versus light twenty to twenty five.

Now suddenly we've got this, you know, definitive study constructed in exactly the same way. Now as I pointed out in this podcast, there are limitations with structuring studies in that way, with rest periods and post work apt accumulation or that kind of thing. But fundamentally at least it is comparable with the prior studies which have done the same thing with moderate versus heavy, where they've done three sets

A couple of times a week, whatever, three to five sets, a couple of times a week. And they've done, you know, uh the uh the same rest periods between set uh for both groups and that now transposes that model into a new territory where we've now got heavy versus light as well and it gives the same answers. People have been, you know, kind of quoting this idea interestingly, people have been quoting for a long time the idea that

Any rep range between five and thirty gives you the same hypertrophy as long as you do the same number of sets to failure per workout. That five at the bottom end of that range was always a little bit dubious because if you went trying to find studies that would show that you couldn't find them. They kind of start around

You can argue maybe around the six to eight zone, but more reasonably it's around the eight to twelve zone. So if you were being realistic, you would have said that three that five to thirty isn't really true. It's more like eight to twenty five.

Um, but people have always said kind of a uh five to thirty'cause it's round numbers. But you know, eight eight to twenty five is probably a fairer description of the literature up to this point. Now this pulls that eight all the way down to, you know, maybe four. No. So now we're kind of

fairly in that original territory where people have said five to thirty, well now it's probably four to twenty five is probably a better zone. I mean th there are the occasional study that drifts higher than twenty five and I'm not saying that I don't think that would happen. I think probably thirty five would probably do it but

I'm just saying in terms of what data there exists to support that kind of claim. But yeah, really such an important study. you know, that is is well worth having a read of. So I guess I should read the title so that people know what it is. The title is Divergent Strength Gains but similar hypertrophy after low load and high load resistance exercise training in trained individuals. So if people wanna look that up, it was published in August um twenty twenty five.

So from a application standpoint, y like you said, this kind of fills in some gaps. It doesn't necessarily change a whole lot of kinda grounds what maybe, you know, we've been talking about for a little while.

But you would say that, say you've got a total beginner. Obviously, as you've identified earlier, they could actually achieve more stimulated repetitions in a set. So Total Beginner doesn't necessarily like may not get the same growth from doing these low repetition sets, these heavy sets that we're talking about here, a total beginner could be getting away, you know, could actually get ultimately better results with say sets of, you know, eight, ten, there bound.

And then as someone becomes more experienced over time, obviously those repetitions are gonna drop down. Uh the the in terms of how many stimulating repetitions per set are gonna drop down. And so in this study, obviously these people with two years trained, we would say that someone who has, you know, a couple of years of training experience, this is where potentially those, you know, maybe four, five rep sets could potentially make sense for them, yeah?

Yeah, totally. And again, it's gonna depend on um, you know, the exercise and um the you know, training history and and and that kind of thing of the person. Uh I think that you know, from my perspective and again and whether or not the person is using anabolics. Um one of the one of the issues that has come up over, you know, time when I've been talking to people, coaches who work with um with with with athletes who use anabolics

is that they can get so ridiculously strong that heavy loads start to become an issue. Practically in terms of just going around and stealing every single plate in the gym, uh, which makes you very unpopular. And also in terms of, you know, just the joints are the st the same size as anybody else's joints and they start to, you know, kinda creak if you're using insane amounts of weight. So there are gonna be scenarios when that is an issue. If you have a history as well of

some specific strength sport. Like for example, I've often talked about how when I do lat exercises it's a different experience from me for doing pressing exercises. So when I did a little lot of one arm chin training Uh now when I do let exercises I have a different it's for me if I were to try and train in that heavier load zone I'd have a

s not not the same problem as somebody using anabolics, but I'm drifting in that direction. If I start to use heavy loads in that exercises, I'm starting to basically max the machines out and I start to creak. In contrast, pressing exercises, no problems at all'cause I never got to the same degree of strength that I got to.

in those pulling excises, in my pressing exercises. So I I think even as a natural author you can kinda push in that direction where you start to find that heavier load zones become practically, you know, less attractive from from the kind of the this this but yeah for from everything else that I do I can I can drift into heavier zone territory and it isn't going to cause me an issue. I think a lot of people

point. Let's let's just hammer that home for a second because I do see that a lot where when stuff like this comes out, then the narrative becomes okay for only ever do sets of four to six.

And you should never do anything anything outside of it. Never do more, never do eight, never do ten. It's a bad idea. And obviously, you know, we've talked about in this episode that yes, it can be some additional fatigue that comes along with those moderator high repetition sets. But as you've just said there, you know what, there's times where that could make a little bit more sense. And, you know, in my own programming and and with my clients, my groups, I do use actually quite a lot of low

repetition sets of stuff, you know, going uh sometimes even singles. And you know, I'll do that a lot with clusters, but I'll often use doubles, triples. sub five repetitions. And I find especially if we're keeping reps in reserve, because we need to identify that if we're saying, hey, potentially an advanced athlete might only have let's say four maximum stimulating repetitions in a set.

Well, that's a set to failure. And that's assuming they're taking each set to failure. If they're not, say we're keeping repetition or two repetitions in reserve, well, you know, we could actually be doing fewer repetitions in a set for that essentially same purpose. So we need to identify, you know, how obviously how many repetitions can that person be achieving in in a set of failure.

And then like you said there, there's gonna be times where simply it's just not gonna be feasible to do those heavy sets and you know, it might be that they're injured. It might be like you said, machines might just simply not go heavy enough.

And okay, you might be able to load a million plates or get a gym pin or whatever, but then you're stuck in a situation where it might take you ten or fifteen minutes just to ultimately set up that exercise, do your warm-up set so you don't break apart when you do the set.

And it's like, well, is that actually gonna be is that gonna lead to a better outcome if you're spending all that time actually carrying plates from all over the gym and loading the machine? It might be better for you just to do that set of ten. You don't need to be scared of doing that set of ten. So while we're saying, hey, you might only be able to get four ish maximally stimulating repetitions, that does not mean that that's all you should ever do, yeah?

Well this is this is an interesting observation from a psychological point of view because one thing that I've noticed in in talking about how strength training works on social media over the last decade is that A lot of the people on social media cannot differentiate between what's happening physiologically and what's happening practically. They can't draw a line between those two things. So what we're describing here is that physiologically this is how something works.

Practically you might need to modify that in one direction or another in order to get the best outcome for you in the gym context. And people don't seem to be able to draw a line between those two things. Physiologically this is what is happening, you know, and you can't argue with that. It is what it is. And so when I go

You know, yeah, four to six reps per set probably is the optimal scenario from the muscles point of view. If you can't do that because the gym machinery doesn't give you the ability to go that heavy, or because it hurts, or because you know whatever reason there is, then obviously we move away from the physiological

kind of principles driving the decision making process and we go, we now have additional practical concerns that mean that that isn't ideal. What I see all the time on social media is people being unable to like, take that two step process. I used to joke when I did the podcast with Paul that people couldn't hold more than one thought in their mind at one time and that's why

we have this scenario where, you know, uh you say to people, hypertrophy is driven by the combination of high motin equipment and high mechanical tension per fibre and it's like people can't understand that. It's like, no, no, no, give me an answer that only has one variable. I'm like

Because it actually fundamentally is a two variable system. You know, and I think we're seeing the same kind of issue here where people go, you know, tell me what the perfect thing to do in a workout is and I'm like, well, physiologically is this. But, you know, practically you might have to modify it for these reasons. And they just like you see the kind of the smoke rising from the brain as it explodes. You've just given me a two-part answer and I can't process it.

No, seriously, come on. It's like physiologically this would be perfect, but if that isn't possible for these practical reasons, then you have to modify it in these directions, you're gonna end up in a slightly different place. I mean, honestly, sometimes I just despair, you know, about the human race, you know, I'm like

Come on guys, it's not difficult to start with one set of parameters and then have to modify that because of some other scenario that is changing that. You know, it doesn't mean that the physiology is wrong. It means the physiology is

And then practically you have to change it because there are other factors. It's just like saying to somebody, Oh, well, this is the perfect exercise for the goal that you pay uh that you have and they're like, Oh, when I do that that hurts and like, Okay, fine, we'll find a different one. You know, which is modified

the perfect scenario for your personal situation because you have this limitation. Or somebody might say to me, you know I wanna develop my uh hammerstrings to the best extent, but I o I don't have any leg kill machines in my gym. I'm like, Okay, well we'll we'll we'll figure out something that gets you. You're not gonna say, Well, just do the Lego. Well, I don't have a Lego.

Exactly. It's like we're we're starting with what what, you know, the perfect answer would be and then we modify it accordingly depending on the other, you know, factors that modify your existing scenario. You know, and I think instinctively people can do that, but for some reason when they go on social media, part of their brain falls out. And they can't do that in that particular situation. They feel like they need one one answer to drive everything. It's like that's not how this works.

a c a couple of suspicions about that. And I think one of them is I think sometimes people always need permission to believe or think a certain thing or do a certain thing.

And so I think when when the narrative repeatedly is, No, you can only do this. You can only work in the four to six or four to eighth reference or whatever that particular topic is, I think at that point people think they're not allowed to think outside that box and they're not allowed to trouble solve in the way that, you know, intuitively makes sense.

So I think sometimes actually just giving p people permission, hey, you can actually take, you know, these physiological principles you're talking about and you can think outside the box and think how is this going to work best for you and how can you apply it, that's okay.

If it looks a little bit differently to how your favorite influencer does it, that's okay if that makes sense for you. I I honestly think sometimes people just need to be told you can you can do that. I I don't know why that's the state of things, but I think that's that's what we see a little bit online. And one other point I want to make there is

Sometimes what sometimes that ad adjustment I guess that people make may not even be less optimal. So you've given the example, hey, I don't have a leg curl, how do I maximally develop my my hamstrings? Well, okay, maybe the solution there is in fact going to be a little bit less optimal. But sometimes What's less optimal physiologically may in fact still be again the optimal option to do because of these these other factors that we're

I guess we weren't necessarily accounting for initially. So what I mean by that is again, that example where let's say you're using so much load on an exercise that you in fact do need to walk around the entire gym and collect every single weight plate in the gym. Well, that's actually Most likely not going to be the optimal option.

It's going to be very demotivating when everyone is staring at you with hate filled glares because your motivation is going to drop as a result and you're going to find that your recruitment isn't as high. The same thing would happen if it hurts. I mean, if you're doing an exercise and it causes pain, then the pain is going to cause you

obviously to reach maximal tolerable perception of effort a lot earlier, therefore you're not going to have as high levels of recruitment in the target muscle. So You know, there are going to be scenarios where you're absolutely right, there are specific, you know, kind of other things happening which is going to impair your ability to maximise the perfect scenario.

So you have to then find an alternative that is going to give you a better result. No, I mean but that doesn't change how the physiologies work. And I think that's the bit that people's you know, brains don't seem to be able to process. It's like, you know, you tell them that how this is how the physiology works and they kind of hear it as, you know, the law of the universe. And I'm like, no, it's like

Really what we're saying there, there could be like another physiological factor, I guess, that you have to consider in that scenario. Exactly. Exactly. Because we're not we're not able to kind of go through and say, you know, here's how the physiology works, you know, except you know, and here are ten exceptions to that if I'm not going to start listing all those out every time I give, you know, kind of broad brush

kind of descriptions of how something works. But incidentally you could figure those out if you actually know the underlying physiology. So if like the example we just gave about pain or lacking or low motivation, because you've got a whole bunch of people staring at you waiting for you to finish using all your

or the plates in the gym. Those things you could actually have deduced that if you understood how Markora's psychobiological model of fatigue works in the context of strength training. If you understand that, you would understand how those two things can make a difference.

So this really just comes back to having a proper understanding of the physiological principles underpinning these issues, rather than just going, they said this exercise is best, so therefore I'm going to do that exercise, or they said this rep range is best, so therefore I'm going to do that exercise.

those rep ranges. But why did we say that? I mean, incidentally, I mean obviously there's a lot of fuss about there's always fuss about things in in the science based lifting community. I mean people are always whining about something. But you know, uh you know, there's a fuss at the moment about various bits and pieces. And some of the people making a fuss and arguing about things are not actually giving a physiological explanation of their point of view. They're just going

you know, I'm saying this is true and then they stop talking or they make a, you know, sort of emotional appeal. But that isn't moving anything forward. Tell me, you know, why you think that and what it is you think is happening. So if you think you know, for example, if you think an exercise reaches a hundred percent motivated recruitment, then, you know, tell me why you think that's possible.

And tell me what you think the mechanism of muscular failure is going to be if that's happening. Because if you're hitting maximum recruitment then what is it actually limitting us in reaching muscular failure? Because it's not the maximum tolerable sexual effort anymore, is it? So you know, again it's lots of the situations people aren't taking the extra step and going, well okay, well what needs to be true for that statement to be true?

That's an interesting point. That's an interesting question to ask oneself when one makes a statement like that. Hey. Because sometimes what you'll what you'll find is the implication is actually major. And that if one what seems like a small statement is in fact true, we'll actually essentially, you know, an entire model falls apart.

Yeah, I mean literally as soon as you start running around saying there's no th no such thing as a voluntary activation deficit, then your entire model of muscular failure has to change. You know, you can't use the psychobiological model of fatigue anymore because you've already hit maximum recruitment and therefore you can't limit recruitment by having an extra tolerable perception of effort going on in there.

So, you know, what is it that's causing muscular failure? Are you saying that it's a local fatigue mechanism? Uh in which case we've got some very interesting implications going on there because you're gonna have, you know, some serious problems down the line in terms of what the muscle fibers are experiencing.

So, you know, again, asking the question of what has to be true for that statement to be true I think is a really useful exercise. Okay. That was it's great that there's something new that filled in a few gaps. That is true. It's been a very long time since I saw something something genuinely new. I mean, I come up with new stuff from time to time simply'cause I go away and I spend, you know, two or three weeks working through an area that is tangential to what I already know.

People know that I've been talking a little bit more about preserving muscle mass in the deficit recently. It's not something I've ever looked at, but it's now something that I'm working on a lot more. And so I bring that physiology that's already been, you know, kind of in place for usually decades into the uh kind of science based lifting community.

Um, this is actually genuinely, genuinely new. It's totally different. You know, this rarely happens. I mean, even like you could argue that there's been some new stuff on the stretch media's typery front. It hasn't really, because All that's happening is that the studies are coming out confirming what the psychomeragenesis research has already told us years ago, or decades ago.

You know. So like when people go, Oh, we now know that, you know, stretch media hypertrophy doesn't happen in strength trained lifters'cause the only two studies that have ever measured it in strength trained lifters show there's no benefit to training to a more stretched position. I'm like, well Yeah, but the psychomerogenesis literature told you that decades and decades ago and the fascistal length literature has told you that pretty much every day since that point onwards.

It's like it's not telling us anything new, it's just confirming something that we already knew. Um whereas this actually this is genuinely new territory and as I say it does tilt my kind of um sort of expectations of what that exact stimulating rep number might look like in trained people. To be fair, I feel like I've heard you say that for quite a while that you thought for experienced lifters there was potentially fewer than

I actually wrote that in my very first article that I wrote about stimulating reps, like about seven or eight years ago. Nobody read it. So um you know, it is there from the beginning. Because, you know, the size principle of stride to muscle tells you that it must be there. So You know, the thing is, again, just kind of everything that I say th there's pretty much nothing that I say that isn't just a basic physiological principle applied to strength training. I mean

I've said this a number of times and people just don't believe me. You know, all I'm doing is saying, Look, here is a physiological observation like, I don't know, bilateral force deficit. Bilateral force deficit shows you that you know, you've got a higher level of recruitment when you use a single limb versus when you use two limbs. I mean, incidentally the bilateral force deficit would be impossible to have.

if you had, you know, kind of the ability to maximally activate every single muscle in a uh in exercise. I mean if you're saying you've got a hundred percent activation I done motivated current in every muscle um, you know, to his trained by any exercise, then you would never have the bilateral force deficit'cause it would be impossible to have.

You know,'cause I wouldn't be able to go from a two arm bicyclecur to a single arm bicycle and increase recruitment. It just wouldn't exist. So where does that twenty percent increase in strength of motor unit recruitment come from? Is it magical? So again, it's like You know, people are saying things without reference to the observations that exist in the literature. So ultimately, um I lost where I was going with that.

I was saying that you you've been sort of for a while saying that advanced lifts has probably had fewer than five repetitions, maximum single n repetitions anyway, and you said you wrote about that seven years. Yeah, no, yeah, no, no. It was it was it was right at the very beginning. Um no, I was thinking about I was I was going in a different direction, I was thinking about something else. But um yeah, so essentially we've got

for the first time in this particular study, something that is actually taking us in a an interesting direction that gives us some new information. Um, you know, most of the stuff that we've been looking at prior to that point, I think, or I've been looking at prior to that point is just you know, developing, padding out, you know, areas or moving into areas that I haven't previously talked about quite so much.

Um so it's a genuinely interesting, cool um development and it's really exciting to see. You know, and I as I say I have criticisms of the exact study design, but they're not criticisms that make it a flawed study. They're just Criticisms that could have made it slightly better if they'd just done, you know, two workouts instead of one in the in the D load period and single sets, that'd have been fantastic.

Um and really everything else is just kind of a compromise. It's like would we have been better, like you say, doing single set protocols to see the differences genuinely between rep ranges without rest period being a problem, without post workout fatigue accumulation being a problem?

You know, that is definitely a possibility, but would we have needed like a twelve week study to see that then from a statistically significant point of view? Would we have benefited from seeing the big differences in volume load in that scenario? So again, it's like what compromises do you want to make? What specific things are you trying to extract from that from that study design? Well

Well, thank you guys for joining us. Hopefully you found that interesting. Do you want to just read out the name of that study once more for anyone that wants to go and have a bit of a look? Yeah, sure. So it's divergent strength gains but similar hypertrophy after low load and high load resistance exercise training in trained individuals. As I say it was published nineteenth of August twenty five. So um Very, very cool. Um to have a look at that few at the moment. Cool.

Thanks for joining us. Hopefully you'll join us again next week.