Barbell Shrugged - Practical Differences in Weight Training for Strength or Hypertrophy w/ Dr. Allan Bacon, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Coach Travis Mash #769

Episode Date: October 16, 2024

Dr. Allan Bacon holds a Doctorate in Dental Surgery from the University of Maryland. He is a certified personal trainer through the National Academy of Sports Medicine, a certified nutritionist & physique/bodybuilding coach, a certified coach for USA Powerlifting, and has formulated professionally for industry-leading dietary supplement companies for over 15 years. You can find Allan’s written works in Muscle & Fitness, Sci-Fit, the Alan Aragon Research Review, The Personal Trainer Development Center, and more. His practice focuses on helping working adults master their physique, performance, mindset, and habits for lifelong, sustainable results. Work with RAPID Health Optimization Links: Work with Dr. Allan Bacon MauiAthletics.com Dr. Allan Bacon on Instagram Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram  

Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrug, Dr. Alan Bacon is coming into the show. We're going to be talking about our favorite thing ever, lifting weights, getting strong, hypertrophy, some of the practical differences and how you can implement them into your training. And as always, friends, make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That is where you can find a free case study. What's nice about this case study? Men's health did it for us. That's really friendly of them on TJ's journey through

rapid health optimization, getting totally shredded, cutting his cholesterol in half, all the good things. You can access that free case study over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash, Dr. Alan Bacon, all the way from Hawaii today. Thanks for having me on, guys. Always a pleasure. Do that exciting stuff. Today on Barbell Shrugged, we're going to be talking about strength, hypertrophy, the practical application of all those things.

Before the show, you started laying out this big framework, why you think this is important, so we had to tell you to stop talking so you could actually dig into it. Right off the top here, I'd love to understand kind of what is the framework that you kind of operate through and how you see strength training as it lends itself to the application of strength, hypertrophy, specific goals. Just a little bit of what does that framework look like? I mean, the first thing to really understand is that these two goals aren't mutually exclusive. And I think that anybody that's trained long enough in this kind of realizes that, you know,

you cannot build strength over time without eventually building lean muscle. You cannot build lean muscle over time without eventually building strength. And people will always talk about, oh, well, I just want to get stronger and not build any size. And it just doesn't work that way because you have those neural adaptations that kind of peak in six, eight, 12 weeks. You have formability that can be modified to make yourself more efficient. But beyond that, it really takes building some lean muscle to maximize those results. And the same thing on the hypertrophy coin. You're not going to continually build lean muscle if you're not also getting stronger at some point. So the real difference between these training modalities is the relative ratio of time that

you spend leaning one way or the other. And there are certainly similarities and differences to how you set up these programs to get the most out of them. And I think that the nuance of this is something that is lost on a lot of newer trainees and even intermediate trainees. And it's a little bit of a bland thing to set them down. But at least once you set these numbers down as, hey, look, these are the ranges that you should be looking in. Here are some of the minimums.

Here are some of the maximums. Here's how you can check if you're in the right intensity levels. It's a way to set up your programming that's effective and allows you to monitor whether or not you're moving in the right direction. Yeah. I, I almost operate through the framework or I, when I, when I owned my gems and was doing more like in-person coaching um, strength is in my opinion, a lot of the neurological side of being able to lift a specific amount of weight or hypertrophy kind of is like layering the muscle on top of that neurological function.

Um, would you agree with a lot of that? I think that the neurological component certainly has a greater influence in the strength side of things. But like I said, the neurological adaptations, you know, bringing in more motor units, being able to fire them more quickly, all those types of things, motor learning, it tends to happen a bit faster than what one would expect. I mean, if you look at the research, it literally is within, you know, 12 weeks or so that you're really maximizing it for whatever lift that you're doing.

And so then you really need to push building some strength and then progressive overload to continue that progress because that neurological component is pretty close to maximum at that point. And so getting into some of these training modalities with using things like progressive overload to get there can be very helpful. But I think that that neurological component and motor learning is certainly a major part of it. And that also goes back to the whole, you know, if you have a more efficient way of movement for whatever that movement is that you're trying to become strong in, that can certainly help too. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that you're getting stronger in the muscular sense, but because you're becoming more efficient in the way that you move, you're demonstrating more strength on the back end. Yeah.

I think a lot of that comes from kind of what I laid out is when I look at, when I go to like Lifetime Fitness, I see the high school kids in there. They're awesome, right? Some of them are super jacked these days, by the way. They're a lot stronger than what we were when we were in high school. A lot of them wear Crocs, and they're way stronger than we used to be. The Crocs thing drives me insane. We had better haircuts. We had better haircuts, though.

They all rocked mullets, which is why I gave my son one, because I wanted him to be cool like them. But you see a lot of kids, call them in their first five ish years of training. And they just don't have essentially enough reps to be able to move well, to be able to lift a lot of weight. And it's kind of like when you, when you, when you ask somebody about their, their golf swing and they're like, Oh, I hit the ball a million miles, but it never goes straight. And I just go, yeah,

you don't hit the ball that far because it has to go straight. You have to hit it perfectly for it to actually go really far. It's the same as lifting weights. You have to move the weights really well in order to lift a lot of them. Yeah, that's that motor learning aspect. And then if you play it to the other end, I don't think that like Phil Heath is that worried about his one rm like those guys are just trying to pack all of the meat onto their body that's possible they're not worried about like the top end strength because they've already spent so much time in that in that strength realm but some of

them do those things like that always baffles me because you know you do have the guys like ronnie coleman or ronnie was different what is the guy i'm definitely playing up but we got ronnie who really cared about getting strong and then you have people you know uh sean what was his name uh african-american oh anyway sean ray sean ray all right and he never went happy. He was always, you know, just, he was always worried about higher reps, moderate to low intensity. Both of them seem to add muscle. Dorian Yates went super heavy. You know, there was always a yin and yang.

They all saw results. So I'm always curious, the whole, so that's plasmic versus the myofibular hypertrophy. Like, is that a thing? I don't know. It is a thing, but what you're actually getting at is a really interesting research study that they've actually looked at. And as long as sets are taken close to failure

and proximity to failure, from a hypertrophy perspective, anywhere between four and 30 reps will grow muscle in the exact same way as long as workload is equated. So that's why you see these variances in bodybuilders. Like you're pointing out, you'll say, hey, look, this one guy used to lift really, really heavy. And he had a great physique.

And this other guy lifts really, really light. And he had a great physique. The reality is you can do it with both. But it's within that 4 to 30 rep range where we tend to see this in the research. Sure. The problem with that is practically, is this the greatest recommendation? This is one of the things that I was going to get into in a little bit of a later section, but it's a good point that you bring up. You probably should, if your hypertrophy is your goal, you should probably sit in the six to 15 rep range for the majority of your time. I mean, 6, 15, 8 to 12,

those more moderate rep ranges, as long as you're working to failure, are probably the best bang for your buck. The reason being, when you're lifting those really heavy weights, you're going to have to do more sets to be able to reach that volume load. You're going to have to rest longer in between sets to be able to recover, to be able to lift that heavy ass set. And so you can reach the same hypertrophy potential. It's not going to be efficient. You're going to be spending a lot of time doing it. On the flip side of that coin, you can do the same thing with 30 reps.

The problem with 30 reps is you're going to be spending a lot of time in the middle of those working sets hitting 30 reps. And fatigue hits more significantly for higher reps than it does for lower reps. I mean, if you ever looked at CNS fatigue data, CNS fatigue, to the surprise of most people, is not extremely significant for lifting very heavy for low reps. It tends to be very significant for lifting high reps or for extended work. And so these people that lift these very high reps, this is where they start to get really sore. They start to get really fatigued very quickly. And so you have this balance of where can I get the most stimulation for the least amount of time for the best recovery. Totally. And so that's where we tend to fall in that 6 to 15, 8 to 12 rep range. And obviously, there's going to be some genetic variation in there for what's best for you.

But I usually will say 6 to 15. Because when you're in that range, that covers pretty much everybody. That is a great way to hit hypertrophy with taking all of these things into account. But to your point, yes, it's amazing when you point these things out, like Ronnie Coleman versus Sean Ray. You're going to have these very different philosophies about how to do this. And the reason is that both work and what is a person more motivated to do? Because even if we see this on paper where I tell you, and that's what what's going to be, whenever I give some of these recommendations that we're going to talk about to really maximize one or the other, no matter what I say, if you're like, I don't do that, we'll say, fuck you,

Alan. I'm not going to do that. I can do something else because something that's perfect on paper doesn't necessarily mean it's perfect for you. If you're more motivated to do something else that also works, even if it's not necessarily optimized because wouldn't it take like let's say you have to do do say you take that whole i want to do 30 rep thing it's like what you're really talking about for it to equate to me doing 10 reps it's all about eventually you got to look at the relationship between force and velocity is because like until it slows down you're not going to get enough of the mice and acting coming cross bridges for hypertrophy to happen. So I'm going to, if I'm doing 30 reps, the total volume I'm going to have to do compared to someone doing tens is

astronomical because until it slows down, it doesn't matter. Correct. Well, it's, it's workload. And so, you know, you can do the volume might be slightly different. So if you're lifting very heavy for less reps, you're going to add up more weight more quickly to catch up to that with lighter weights. You're going to have to lift a lot more reps right now. Exactly what you said is 100% on point. I love the way that you put that because that shows that you are that you're very knowledgeable about this. And this is very different than the way that a lot of other people look at this. So you'll often hear, and this is usually from the hypertrophy crowd. And both the hypertrophy crowd and the strength crowd have these very weird idiosyncrasies where they're like,

it's a general thing that they say. It's wrong, but it's a general thing that they say. And it's just missing the nuance. You're getting into the nuance. So we talk about time under tension, right? And you will hear the hypertrophy crowd constantly parrot more time under tension is better. And that is not the case. It is a misunderstanding of the force velocity curve.

Because what we want is we want to be working, if hypertrophy is your goal, we want to be working within proximity to failure. Right. Zero, one, two reps for more advanced athletes, maybe up to three or four, even five in newbie trainees. We'll still see growth. But the reason that we confuse time under tension

is because as you start to get in proximity to failure, that actin myosin cross-linking slows down. Naturally, though. Naturally slows down. Not because I'm making it slow. Yes. If you are intentionally doing this, you are actually lowering mechanical tension on the muscle. Totally. You are hurting your progress by doing that.

And that's the problem with this message of time under tension is that people will say time under tension and then everyone will be like, well, then I'll just make the eccentric like five seconds. That's bullshit. You are just making it harder. You're fatiguing yourself more and not achieving the mechanical tension that you could be achieving. And so what you pointed out is exactly the right way to look at it. If you are actually getting near failure, your rep tempo will naturally slow down despite the fact that you are trying to go as fast as possible. It can slow down because you're getting towards that moment of failure. And that's where the time under tension kind of makes sense. But we're misconstruing what the force velocity curve

is showing us. And we are actively trying to slow down that eccentric. And what it's doing is it's actually, it's impairing people's gains. Because if you look at the research on this, anywhere, an entire rep range, not just the eccentric, an entire rep range between two and eight seconds will yield the same benefits for hypertrophy as far as we currently know in the research. If you hit 10 seconds or above, you actually start to impair your benefits really badly. So in general, my recommendation if we're looking at hypertrophy is make that concentric part of the phase, that contraction part of the phase as quick as possible, and then lower the eccentric controlled one to two seconds. And that's all you need to do. You don't need to dive bomb it, but as long as you're controlling it at least one second,

we seem to see in the research the exact same benefits to hypertrophy. And that's why we see these rep tempos of a total rep times of just up to two seconds, even yielding the same benefits. Totally. So what I think that you brought up there was, was beautiful because this is something that people really don't understand. And it's why it's so confusing when someone comes out and they say, okay, well, time under tension is really the way that you want to go. And it's not, it's not that you're spending more time lifting the weight. It's that you're spending more time in that proximity to failure, which means you're making your working sets actual working sets.

And the reality of the situation is if you take a client or a new trainee or even an intermediate trainee and you say, okay, I want you to choose the weight that you think that you can do for 10 reps, 10 rep set, 10 rep max, and you have them do it. They're typically off by about five reps. So we're not very good at gauging this intensity or proximity to failure until you start to do this more. And I think this is one of the situations where the strength crowd really has a leg up because they test maxes more often than the hypertrophy crowd. And these testing maxes is not necessary for progress. It's not necessary for progress and strength. It's not necessary progress for progress and

hypertrophy. It is necessary in strength if you're going to compete and you need to know mentally where your your your max is where you're where you really need to push yourself to be able to feel what that feels like and strategically you need to kind of know you know yes louis simmons get really mad at you when he's testing one rms just on different things on a like twice a week would he get mad at me about that or yeah saying that you don't need to be testing uh one rms for for strength i mean that's what the sport is so like i mean the principal specificity i'm not going to argue he just is his death birthday was yesterday so i'm not going to argue louis simmons right now i you know i do have a question do you know chris beardsley is um you heard he's you know-time hypertrophy. I would say hypertrophy and strength. He's kind of in both those crowds. But he's mentioned, and I'm sure he's not the first, but he's the first person that I saw talk about the way you look at volume? Should it only be, if hypertrophy is the goal, should you only look at the reps

that are close to failure versus like, say if I do 30 reps, the only reps that I should count towards hypertrophy are the ones who start to slow down, not because I'm intentionally, but because I'm getting fatigued, but a proximity to failure. So what are your thoughts? No. And there's enough evidence out there that suggests that the idea of effective reps is wrong. However, we can shift that slightly to actually make this make sense. So rather than thinking, okay, well, I need to count. First off, why are you counting reps?

You know, unless you're trying to do this equate thing. Because anytime we look at research and we try to say, okay, well, what's the best way to quantify volume for hypertrophy? We look at number of working sets per muscle group per week. We never really look at reps itself. And so when you say, should we only count those last reps? My answer is no, because effective reps doesn't seem to be a thing. Because those earlier reps do cause adaptation as long as it's above 30% of one rep max and as long as we're within those rep ranges. However, if you want to optimize it, that's what we're talking about getting towards this proximity to failure.

So rather than looking at it like that, which I don't think is either practical or really overly helpful, and this isn't to get either practical or really overly helpful. And this isn't to get down on that question, but this is to reframe it in a way that I think is probably much more beneficial for people. Rather than looking at it like that, can we look at it as, if I know that beyond the beginner stage, if I'm going to be shooting for zero to two reps in reserve as my goal, as my idea of proper proximity to failure, where I'll get the most stimulation out of this set. How can we then start to view how many working sets of reaching that level I've hit? That's much more valuable to me than looking at number of reps within that

proximity to failure. How many working sets did I do to get that close to the right intensity? And then you can start to set up programs based off of that. I was thinking because for that to be true, the amount of volume someone doing 30s would have to do compared to someone doing, say, sets of five. It would be like six times the amount of total volume, which would be absurd, I think. It is, but we have a little bit of a scarcity in the research in these super high volume things. And so when we're looking at the number of working sets per muscle group per week, we typically don't have a lot of long-term volume of people that are doing 30 rep sets. And it's probably not practically relevant. And so again, this is where we're really working within that 5 to 15, 5 to 12, 8 to 12 range. Totally agree with you, yeah.

And so you're, I don't want to say misgiving. I think that everything that you've said here is, I agree with. And I think that it's a wonderful way to point this out. I think that the answer is we don't have an exact answer for that when you go that high. We know that when you test these rep ranges, when the workload is equated, that they seem to work just fine. Now, if we're going to try to be using working sets as our guide for building a program, you're right. You're going to drill somebody into the ground doing 30 reps every time. But the reality is we just don't have that data to show where that cutoff is for those very high rep sets because nobody would do it. Right. And so the answer there is, I don't know. But if a person tries to do that off of the general recommendations for hypertrophy, they're going to kill themselves. That's what

I'm saying. Totally agree. And so we can give these general hypertrophy recommendations, and we'll get into that in a little bit. But understand for the people that are listening to this, Travis brings up a very two sets of 20 plus could be very beneficial at the end of a workout. Or maybe you didn't feel like you really hit yourself really hard. Or maybe you want to work on some more strength endurance. Or whatever reason that you're doing it, you can do that. But I would strategically bring these in in moderation. bring in sets below maybe three or four if you don't have a real reason to do it for a power lifting weight lifting competition you know like i was talking about earlier and and maybe counter

to louis recommendations but louis recommendations are for competitors and so and so i there's a difference between optimizing your progress purely from a building strength and hypertrophy perspective and adding in those game day necessities, such as learning to grind through a one rep max. The reality is one rep maxes are not the best way to build strength. They're not. And that's not why you do them in those programs. You do them in those programs because specificity of training, like you mentioned, but mostly that mental benefit of learning to power through the suck. That's not what's going to really guide your strength progression. Three to eight rep sets maximize strength progression with the minimal hits to the recovery, as minimal as you can get.

And so you get diminishing returns outside of those ranges, just like you get the diminishing returns outside of those ranges in hypertrophy, the 6 to 15 that I mentioned. And so there's a different way that you handle maybe how you would do this if you're not competing versus how you are competing. And there's a very real reason that programs like conjugate would take more time below three reps because you're doing something different than hyper focusing on just maximizing strength progression does that make sense not heavy how do how do moderate weight kind of singles doubles and triples from a velocity perspective play into this if you're hitting singles with 70 a little bit of band tension

and it's a fast rep you're going 0.8 meters per second or whatever it is how does that play into strength with this with this model here travis do you do conjugate i mean i think you got to define what is conjugate so i would i would say i do forms of it but you know periodization the reason that i bring this up is this could be the most controversial topic of the entire podcast oh you're okay i'm not gonna i'm not a diehard anything and so science guy so here's the thing here's the thing was that basically what you said what'd you say i said was that him basically like wondering how much he can he can destroy he can go as far as he wants man i'm like i'm just a science guy we're not emotionally connected any of it i'd love to hear yeah so so here's the deal when you look at when you look at the research of this speed work

and everything like that yeah conjugate it's set up is typically four days with strength days and speed days right and you're essentially asking about the speed days and how does that fit in speed days don't appear to help maximal strength progression i would agree with the context of his weight for the record not not power lifting but weight lifting but yes go ahead weight lifting would make a lot more sense because weight lifting is a power sport right and so when you're when you're doing that power that would make a lot more sense so the reason that i always i have to tread on you know, like tiptoes when I talk with conjugate people about this type of thing, because they're like, what Louie said. And it's like, Louie also injected strychnine. So like there, there are parts of Louie's process that work

really, really well. And there are parts of Louie's process that we should probably, Louie also did a lot of things where like he tested stuff out for like three months and then he discarded it, but then people will, will but Louis did this. And you're like, Louis gave up on this. And so, so the speed work, what is the speed work doing within conjugate? I mean, in my opinion, speed work is literally just allowing the person to recover from the super heavy work that they're doing in the other parts of the day. It's a way to continue to, to challenge yourself in a way. And it's actually probably where they're getting some of their hypertrophy from. And so if you look at, what's that? He would, Louis said he would, he would have done two days a week heavy if his guys could have recovered from it, but the speed day just to fucking work the movement pattern and keep it all familiar, still pushing

on a bar very hard, but he would have done two heavy days if it was possible. He tried it and it didn't work. And so he moved to dynamic effort dynamic effort i think what happened here's the truth about what happened with them is like i wrote two really cool articles where i wrote down the dynamic effort truth what i did is i took science i took what he said and i i took what i saw and then i did it for both uh that you know max effort and dynamic effort but the thing is is that in his very gym dynamic effort was very different depending on the individual like if you look at chug vogelpool it was incredibly fast one of the you know as far as like his ability to accelerate the barbell was second to none so i never saw him do or and I guarantee anybody ever worked out with him, I never saw him do a true speed day.

He might use bands, but don't mistake bands for speed day. Because when you've got like 800 pounds of bar weight plus 400 or 500 pounds of bands, guess what? You're max effort, man. Call what you want. The purpose of that is not for speed. Anyways, what you're doing is you're loading more of a, of a certain range of that lift. Right. So, you know, that's why you use those bands or chains or whatever it is, because you're intentionally loading a specific side of that lift itself. And so, um, you know,

when people get diehard about this dynamic effort, I always point out that it's, it's not, it's not there to increase maximal strength because it doesn't. And so when you look at people that are very highly placing and powerlifting these days, they don't tend to use dynamic effort a lot anymore. And this is where, like you said, that those really heavy days can become really problematic from a recovery standpoint. And so what they're doing is they're starting to incorporate more hypertrophy days or moderate rep days into those, that other part of the week, because it allows them to build more muscle and it allows them to, um, to recover a little bit better and allows them to work the movement patterns a little bit better under loads that are below like 90%. Totally. You're watching more and more of them to use velocity. Like you watch, Norton. I was watching, he's using velocity almost every time he trains now,

which keeps him from going too far because we all lie to ourselves. No matter what we think is like, we think, oh, that's a, that's a seven RPE. I'm at man that took you 10 seconds. There's no chance that was a seven RB. That was a dang 10.5. And so, but by using, but using velocity helps us, you know, make sure that we're getting more frequency, more, you know, more of the volume without necessarily breaking down or going too far. Now that the whole idea that you brought up here brings up some, some interesting points.

When you take, there have been multiple studies that show this. If you take the neurological component out of play, and I'm not, so I'm saying, you don't compare like a high level power lifter to a high level bodybuilder because there's going to be certain differences. The neurological component in the high level power lifter

is going to be much higher than the bodybuilder. The bodybuilder is going to be much higher on muscle mass. So make that equated. If you look at competitive power lifters and you, before the competition, put them in a body scanner, an accurate body scanner, and look at total muscle mass for that person, you can almost without fail predict where they are going to place in the competition off of muscle mass alone. Totally agree. And that is why starting to incorporate these days that cause some more hypertrophy probably make a lot more sense and why these guys are winning. The ones that are moving away from some of these more dynamic efforts and are putting in hypertrophy days, because it allows what that dynamic effort was allowing that recovery, but then it's also giving you this benefit that they're starting to

see is really important for all of these strength athletes. Now, the flip side of that coin is that when Louis was originally designing this program, he was designing it for geared lifters. He was designing it for people wearing suits. And so coming out of the hole, whether it's a squat or whether it's bench, you're going to have some elastic potential, right? It's going to shoot off of you. So there's the possibility that when I'm looking at this data that says that the dynamic days do not add to maximal strength, this could be more appropriate for raw lifters.

And it's funny because I always see raw lifters doing conjugate, but conjugate may be uniquely beneficial for geared lifters and not raw lifters, which is why we're starting to see conjugate kind of creep down in the rankings whenever you see raw lifting, but it tends to be very good for suited lifting. And so, you know, maybe that this dynamic effort is really giving you that ability to take advantage of that elastic power off of a chest. Maybe it's taking advantage of that elastic power out of the hole in a squat. And so as long as people understand the way that you can program for these things, you can take advantage of these, you know, different tools to give you the best results possible. And it's a really cool nuanced discussion that we've gotten into here, because I think this is the type of thing that people

never really talk about. I totally agree. You know, you know, I would say that when you're talking about muscle mass equating to who's going to win, I would totally agree. You know, like there's a, one of my athletes who's really good, but I think he needs to, like, trim down the body fat and really focus on, you know, true hypertrophy. But you look at Elaine Norton, and he probably doesn't. He's going to be your outlier there because he's tall. He's in that 93-kilo class, I think it is nowadays.

But he's not going to have the most muscle mass because he's obviously taller and so he's going to have a lot of skeleton but you know he's he's the one who's going to have to rely more on the neurological or i guess you could say elasticity gains too because there are tendons due to uh they're going to be a big part of you know strength that's something probably a lot of maybe powerlifters overlook, but they shouldn't. But he would be your only outlier. But if you look at past Ed Cohn,

all the best of the best in that 220s, they were all super muscular. And you tell me Ed Cohn's only 5'5", weighing 220. That's a lot of muscle mass at 100 kilograms. I mean, even these guys that are super heavyweight that have significant amounts of body fat, underneath is a lot of muscle mass at you know at 100 kilograms i mean even these guys that are super heavyweight that you have significant amounts of body fat underneath is a lot of muscle mass oh totally yeah yeah and again you can take these same guys and once that neurological component is equated and we're going to assume that at the top levels these competitive body

builder or competitive power lifters have similarly streamlined their form and they've similarly trained their neurological systems. That's why it's really cool. And I can think of two studies off of the top of my head that specifically looked at this and they found almost exactly it's based on muscle mass. Totally. And so we talk about this conversation of how do I train for strength versus how do I train for building muscle? The reality is whether or not you want to be really strong or whether or not you want to have really big muscles, you probably need to do both, but maybe you, uh, you periodize this and you have, you know, uh, one block of hypertrophy

or two blocks of hypertrophy in your year. If you're, if you're a power lifting athlete, or maybe you have a block of strength in your year, if you're a bodybuilding athlete, and this is how you get the best of both worlds. I would even say, if you look at weightlifting, it's, you know,

at the end of the day, it's going to be the person who's going to put, put on as much muscle mass. Cause look at like Lou, or Pirosiros Dimas. I mean, those dudes were jacked out of their minds. Every ounce. Say what?

Klokoff was always walking around super shredded and big. I mean, all those guys. Yeah. Even in America, like Ryan Grimsland. He's a guy I coach. Totally jacked. And it's super impressive that these guys are all natural athletes. Totally.

In America, don't say cloak office. Cloak office. Yeah, don't sit there and say cloak office. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But. We need at least a five-minute gap. In America. In America.

Yes. They are. So even like the little Hampton Morris, you know, kid who just got a bronze medal for america that kid has got a lot of muscle mass that man standing on the podium parents i'm not gonna say it got real dusty when i saw that for the first time but may have may have uh 100 i cried a little bit man that was like 100 most like he looked at his parents like holy crap yeah like we did it no parents like, Holy crap. Yeah. We did it.

No way. That was, that was weightlifting's version of the miracle on ice. Essentially. Especially I was, I was there. I roomed with his dad, his dad's his coach. Shout out to, yes. You know, shout out, shout out to trip Morris, the riled chemist. We call him.

He's a chemist. He's a PhD in chemistry, but I was in a room in a room with him at Hampton's very first international meet. We were in Columbia together. And to see that little bitty boy grow up into this, you know, well, he's still a boy because he's still a junior athlete. And, like, to podium, it was amazing. And so both of them, both of them, like, and they're so humble and so nice to be around

you know we always i cheered on anton always he's you know he's always cheered on ryan and it was amazing moment for us that way the thing yeah anyway not still uh you know dr bacon's thunder here but yeah yeah yeah back to i like these tangents because it's good conversation i mean the point being is what you're talking about anyway, is that they really do use, they have their opportunity moments, even Hampton, even my athletes. They have their moments where we're really focused on, you know, packing on as much muscle mass as we can at whatever frame they have. Up until you run out of space, then it's time to consider bumping up, you know.

Well, there's a really smart reason to do that. Go ahead. I don't want to cut you off. No, I was just, I was, uh, do you have any opinions on where kind of like a place to start for your average 16, 18 year old that's getting into weight, lifting weights? Do you feel like their focus should be on getting as strong as possible or as big as possible? Strength. Yeah. Strength.

Yeah. Strength. My, my personal opinion is strength. Um, and, and this is one of those opinions that's not based on anything scientific. This is an opinion that when I look at people that are starting out,

let's get fucking strong. We can always translate. First off, you're going to gain your isn't as a newbie, you're going to gain muscle no matter what you do. So let us, when I say strength, we're learning movements and we're learning movement patterns and we're getting that neuromotor control down, right? So we're obviously not running out there and doing one, two, three rep sets.

So we're going to probably be doing a more moderate rep range, but we're going to be pushing strength and potentially lowering those rep ranges as you become more competent in the movements. And usually three or four months out, we can really start to go with strength movements. So I'm not saying take a person and be like, throw them into 5-3-1 as they first start out. There's nuance to this, yes, but I would focus more on setting that mindset of let's get really fucking strong. Because if I focus on this during my newbie gains time, I'm going to be just fine from a muscle growth perspective because the muscle growth is going

to come no matter what during that time period. You can do anything and muscle growth is going to come then. But building that base of strength is going to make you more injury resistant. It's going to make you have a higher muscle building potential later. So even if you want to switch over to things later, that's fine. But you're learning the meat and potatoes anyways. You're going to be learning squad. You're going to be learning deadlift. You're going to be learning bench.

You're going to be learning these things that are going to bring you benefits for the rest of your life. So master the basics. And I think that mastering the basics is, I mean, that's what even the advanced people do. I mean, everybody that's on Instagram wants to do the backflip bullshit extraordinaire movement because it's new and it's amazing. But the really successful people are doing a pull, a horizontal push, a vertical push.

They're just doing the standard movements because mastering those is what's most important. And I think that by starting out in a strength training type of atmosphere, you're kind of solidifying that. Let's get down these barbell movements. Let's get down these basic dumbbell movements and some basic cable movements and go from there. And I think that that's probably the right way to go. And even if the person's goal is physique, I think that you're going to see very distinct gains in that at the same time., I think that you're going to see very distinct

gains in that at the same time. So I think that you're going to set them up for more success by looking at strength. I have two of my former athletes are both, you know, where I started out, like you're saying strength, you know, most people who work out with me are going to, they're going to be strength focused, whether it's weightlifting, powerlifting, but two of them now are got their, what is it pro the physique you know now what is it this is the big one the high vb pro pro card yeah yeah so they both have their pro cars in physique but yet they started with me and and you know what you're saying strength so but the key would be learning the movement patterns properly make sure you like you said can you squat can you hinge

yeah can you press can you pull vertically horizontally you, can you squat? Can you hinge? Can you press? Can you pull vertically, horizontally? Can you do some rotation? If you can do all that stuff, get strong. And then do whatever you want. And if you're a client that's looking to do things right from the beginning, I would always say look for somebody that knows how to program strength to begin with because those people are going to put you into less bullshit while you're starting to learn. And so that's anecdotal and that's kind of a dick thing for me to say, but I, I, as a general recommendation and I'm a hypertrophy guy at heart as a general recommendation, I think that the strength focus during that period is probably going to do the large majority of people better than going into something with, you know, an IG

fitness model that is really super focused on, on hypertrophy. Do these things play together? Kind of, if you were to like look at a somebody that's training really hard to be big and strong, um, the majority, and this is maybe just hoping I was doing it right for my whole life. Um, the idea that we're going to be spending, you know, two to five reps at the beginning and your big compound back squat, deadlift, bench press, et cetera. Um, for your first exercise, if you're an Olympic lifting,

typically going to be doing your speed and power work. Then you go into some sort of strength thing. And then everything after that is just accumulating as much volume as you can, where you're still at, where you still have an ability to recover and be ready for tomorrow or the next training session. Are you, when you, when you're focused on strength or you're focused on hypertrophy, if you're actually building out a, a, a day of training or a block of training, aren't, aren't you kind of doing all of it at once? Or do you really feel like they need to be kind of segmented, um, as different blocks focused on strength or focused on hypertrophy? You can do both of them at once. You're probably not going to progress as fast.

And so, and so my question, my question that what you're probably not going to progress as fast. And so my question, what you're getting at could have a couple different answers. And what I'm saying is that doesn't mean that when you're focusing on strength, that you only sit in that three to eight rep range that I said is likely optimal for progress. It doesn't mean you can't go above that. That is where your meat and potatoes are going to be, whereas six to 15 is likely your meat and potatoes for hypertrophy, right? But you're going to likely have a much lower volume and have more of your work

between that three to six range for strength than you would in the other one. So the ratios kind of shift a little bit. And just as an example, with strength training, I would recommend that people do no more than 15 total working sets in a workout, in an entire workout. Because if you are really hitting the weights hard, particularly in your one or two main movements for that day, and then the rest are kind of accessory work, which yes, the rep range is going to be a little

bit higher, you're not going to be able to sustain a whole lot of volume in those days. Whereas with hypertrophy training, you can go up to like 25 sets in a day. 15 sets versus about 25 sets in a day is a very big difference. And you're going to set these up differently because you're going to have less time spent at these really low, you're not going to be doing an eight by three in a hypertrophy training block. Not generally, no. Not unless you're going to be doing a power building type of routine, but we're talking about getting away from the power building type of routine to be able to maximize both. Now, if you're a general trainee and you want to do power building, sure, do that. We're simply talking about maximizing progress over time. And that's where this periodization makes a little bit more sense. So when I say doing 25 sets or less for hypertrophy, there's a caveat to that that I really want to put into play here.

Do not do more than 10 to 12 sets in any single muscle group in that day. If you do that, you're literally going to be doing what's essentially junk volume. You're either not lifting with enough intensity for that muscle group to make those 10 to 12 sets really, really intense. So you're either making up for a lack of intensity or the returns after that point just seem to be very minimal because the amount of effort that you put into play there is beyond what is going to really benefit you. I mean, it's diminishing returns essentially kick in. I'm sorry. Go ahead. At that point, if you're trying to increase volume, then you're trying to just stack more volume throughout the course of a week with just more frequency.

So the volume debate, did you see that new systemic review that just came out on volume for hypertrophy? Literally like- Where it was like five sets could get your strengths. And then it was like up to like 40 sets for hypertrophy, that one? Yes. Literally within the past month that came out. So this is being passed around. It's being misinterpreted a lot as it's being passed around. And so that's one of the ones that I really wanted to talk about. For maximizing hypertrophy, the bread and butter is 10 to 20 working sets per muscle group per week. That's it.

If you look at the systemic review, it doesn't tell us anything different than what we've known for the past five years. It just kind of consolidated it all into one place. Now, these people that are looking at this and saying, look, you have more gains up until about 40 sets, they're not lying, but they're missing a little bit of the nuance that's inherent in there. They're missing the nuance because of a couple things. There's nothing wrong with the study. It's how we're interpreting it that's the real issue here. The study, unfortunately, includes untrained trainees as well. So that kind of skews us up a little bit. That's not the big issue that we're having here. They're also counting

fractional reps in that working set. And I've got nothing against counting fractional reps, but it's kind of being pushed under the rug that it's showing fractional reps. It's up to 40 fractional reps. So what that means is if I do a bench press, they're counting that as one chest set and half a tricep set, maybe even half a delt set. Right. And so we're getting a lot of volume from that. But what people are taking home from this is, oh, I can go to 40 sets. And so they'll do 40 sets of chest and then 40 sets of triceps and then 40 sets of delts. Like you're literally just going to completely destroy your recovery capability. And even if you look at the study itself, there's some interesting diagrams within it. And they show, based on the previous information that we had, 10 to 20 sets is likely where you will start to see an optimal rate of

gain. There's variance in there, and that's why there's a range. An optimal rate of gain before you start to hit significant diminishing returns. And I'm not saying you're getting to 80% of your potential at 20, and then going from 20 to 40, you gain another 20%, it's you gain a minuscule amount of percent after 20. But if you look at this study, when they did the systemic review, it actually cuts it off at 18. So we were previously saying 10 to 20, it might actually be a little bit lower than that. So everybody that's coming out and they're saying, hey, look, you can go up super, super high in volume and not mentioning that it's fractional reps and not mentioning that this diminishing return starts to kick in really hardcore at about 18 working sets per muscle group per week. I think that we're sending the wrong message out to people. And so what we're going to end up seeing

is people that are programming these super high volume training programs. And are they going to be getting the returns that they think that they're going to be getting? No, probably not. You're probably going to be spending a shit ton of time working out that you could be spending meal prepping, that you could be spending sleeping, that you could be spending doing other things that are probably much more beneficial for your overall progress than spending four hours in the gym. Does that make any sense with how that was broken down? Yeah. I couldn't even imagine at this stage of my life doing a training program

with that much volume in it. No chance. No, it's, it's too much. Yeah. And so, you know,

what is the day when that was possible? Like, can we, so you think, you think 10 to 12 sets, 10 to 20 sets for the week, but not in a day. Yes. 10 to 12 in a day.

Well, so 10 to 12 is not necessarily optimal in a day. That's what I would use as my maximal cutoff. Maximal cutoff. If you want to, if you want to have higher frequency and you want to hit those 10 to 20 sets over multiple days and you're just doing like six sets per day, that's perfectly fine. That's what would have to happen. Yeah. I'm not going to do that. Yeah. But I wouldn't, I wouldn't do more than 12 sets in a day because your fatigue is kicking in and then, you know, it probably makes more sense to increase frequency rather than to try to grind out more reps in a single day, more, more sets in a single day. That, that would be my recommendation

based off of the current research. Totally. So the reps don't really matter. It's the working sets that are within one to two reps in reserve type thing or whatever. As long as we're within that sweet spot range that I was talking about, that six to 15 reps for hypertrophy, that three to eight reps for strength, whenever we're talking about these optimal sets, as long as we're within roughly those. Now, obviously there's some room to move outside those, but it's going to be outlier work rather than something else. Maybe you put in two sets of 18 to do a burnout at the end of a muscle group, just because maybe you didn't feel like you

hit it at everything as well as you thought when you were going to do the 10 reps. And you're like, you know what? I just want to finish this off. Okay. That's fine. Because just like the systemic that just came out showed going higher, isn't necessarily going to hurt you. And it's possible that we saw some of these higher volumes, particularly in the untrained people that were included in this study, because they were nowhere fucking near failure when they were doing these sets. And so we're skewing it slightly higher on top of the fact that we have the fractional reps in play. And I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with the study.

It's a perfectly good study. It's the way that it is being disseminated to people without the nuance in play that I think is really going to confuse people because when you make the title of a slide on Instagram, up to 40 sets shows increased gains. Well, what are people supposed to think? They're going to take up to, you know, they're going to be like, okay, well, I'll do 30 sets. And they're going to be killing themselves.

They're going to be doing so much junk volume. And it's not that these higher levels of volume don't return minute increases in percentage. So maybe if you're an IFBB pro, yeah, maybe taking some of the 30 might make sense. You're doing a two-a-day training. Your whole life is getting in there into the gym, and you might want to eke out that extra couple percent to be able to step on stage and win an Olympia. Okay, I can see that. As long as we're understanding, too, that fractional sets are in play there and that the return that you're going to get for this is very, very minuscule. You can do that as long as you're monitoring your recovery at the same time. That's the thing there. How are you going to recover? And like, you know, the fatigue is

going to be so high. You mean without HGH? Yeah, exactly. Or testosterone and all the other stuff. Like you would, it would take two weeks to recover from something like that. If you went 30 sets all out, like the amount of time it would take for you to recover, it would be so high. Well, that's the other thing that's not really talked about in the way that we're interpreting these studies is that you're going to see these studies and they're typically four to 12 weeks in duration.

Can you imagine taking 30 sets per muscle group per week over a year? Like these, these people, I would, I would be willing to bet that the people that are doing the 10 to 20 are probably progressing better long-term than these people that are in like what's essentially a permanent overreaching phase. And I think that you guys probably understand that overreaching phases can be used effectively,

but there's a timeframe with which we can use these overreaching phases before they really start to cause some negative health effects. Right. Without that, you know, without that period of down, you know, like, or you don't ever get the bounce back. Yeah. And so this, this kind of brings, this kind of brings up a, another point that, that was alluded to a little bit earlier, do you take this volume and then take it out as far as you can to your ability to recover? And I'm hesitant to say yes to that. Maximal recoverable volume isn't a little above where you're going to hit that maximal stimulation before diminishing returns start to really kick in.

And I think that we see that in this research, which is why we have that soft cutoff of about 18 to 20 sets per week. Because when you go beyond that, I mean, especially with things like leg work, you can start to see some increased gains in like 20, 22, 24 sets. But is this really going to be something that's going to fit within people's lifestyles? Are they going to be recovering from this? I mean, we're going to keep going back to this thing because it's an integral part of programming. And is this worth the extra 1% that a person's going to get from it? And that's going to be person-specific and situation-specific. Yeah, you would have to be wanting to win a bodybuilding show. You know, but like how many people are doing that. And so that's where this, the practical recommendations that we're getting here

don't necessarily align directly with, uh, with what people should actually be doing. When you look at this, this, you know, these studies that are just coming out and I'm glad that you brought that up because I was specifically thinking about, this is probably something that we should address in this episode, because when people hear 10 to 20 working sets per muscle group per week, they're going to be like, well, wait, last week I just saw 40 sets. And without realizing the nuance inherent there, it can be very, very confusing for people. Dr. Bacon, it's been fantastic, sir. We need to have you back on again. We've got to do this again. That's probably one of the quickest ways to an ending of a podcast because there's so much to talk about in this type of stuff. I feel like we all need to go to Maui and hang out with you on

the island and get jacked. It's a good excuse to take a vacation. Totally. Hanging out with meatheads. It's our favorite excuse to take a vacation. Totally. Hanging out with meatheads. It's our favorite thing to do. Well, I want to thank you guys for having me on. It was great to be able to shoot the shit with you, and hopefully people get some practical takeaways from that. Can you give us the link to that systematic review?

I would like to look at it sometime. I'd have to look that up here. I don't have it on hand. Let me see here. Just shoot it over to Casey. She'll get it all set up. And she'll send it to, will you tell her to send it to all of us? Yeah.

I'd like to see it. There you go. Let me see. Dr. Baker, where can people find, oh, go ahead. Sorry.

We can edit this part out real quick in the end. Yeah, right. The people need to know about our thinking on the spot. Tell the people. I got the study. Hold on. Oh,

sweet. This is how effective I study. Hold on. Oh, sweet. This is how effective I am. Highly. It is Pelland, P-E-L-L-A-N-D, and colleagues, the name of the study is the Resistance Training Dose Response,

Meta-Regressions Exploring the Effects of Weakly Volume and Frequency on Muscle Hypertrophy and Strength Gain. Sweet. I blacked out before you even finished that title. Will you send the link in the little chat right there?

Yeah, let me see if I can do that. So you want me to lift the weights? Okay. I got it. I love hypertrophy. I love it when we have hypertrophy guys on the show. I know. They just go all day.

I know. Sean, Phil, we need to have an episode where we just get them all on and let them battle a little bit. That'd be fun. Have them fight? Yeah. Big round table. Yeah, him, Sean Philp, all the dudes. Andy. I don't know if there would be a whole lot of fighting in that. Galpin would just agree

with everybody and go, yeah, you're all kind of right. Just depends upon the person. Yeah. It just really depends. Andy would be like, I'm too busy making a bunch of money i don't know yeah you guys are all right that's why i have more time to argue yeah i'm not making enough money man that's right um mash tell the people where they can find you man mashley.com you can go to barbell barbell shrug yeah you can go to barbell shrug nail me i'll go to rapid health and i can be. Yeah, you can go to Barbell Shrug. Go to Rapid Health. I can be your coach.

You can read my articles at JimMoyer.com. I'm coming back to you. Just a heads up, you've got the study in the chat right now. That should be a good way for people to be able to look that up. If you guys are interested in

looking at some of my work, following me on Instagram, reaching out with any questions you have, you can go to mauiathletics.com, M-A-U-I, or look me up on Instagram at Dr. Alan Bacon, D-R-A-L-L-A-N. I spell my name funky, so make sure you get that right. And I'm happy to help wherever I can. There you go. Doug Larson. You bet. Always enjoy learning about strength and hypertrophy. These are the easiest shows to do. Appreciate you. Douglas C. Larson. There you go.

I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner, and we are barbellstrog to barbell underscore strog to make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That's where Coach Travis Mast is hanging out. So if you want to learn more, get over to rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.