Barbell Shrugged - Should You Train To Failure for Muscle Growth w/ Dr. Brad Schoefeld, Dr. Andy Galpin, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Coach Travis Mash Barbell Shrugged #574

Episode Date: May 5, 2021

Brad Schoenfeld, PhD, CSCS, CSPS, FNSCA, is an internationally renowned fitness expert and widely regarded as one of the leading authorities on body composition training (muscle development and fat loss). He is a lifetime drug-free bodybuilder, and has won numerous natural bodybuilding titles.   Brad earned his masters degree in kinesiology/exercise science from the University of Texas at Permian Basin and his PhD at Rocky Mountain University where his dissertation focused on elucidating the mechanisms of muscle hypertrophy and their application to resistance training. He has published over 200 peer-reviewed research articles on exercise and sports nutrition, as well as editing multiple textbooks and authoring several textbook chapters.    He acts as the Assistant Editor-in-Chief for the NSCA's Strength and Conditioning Journal, as well as serving on the editorial advisory board for several peer-reviewed exercise- and nutrition-related journals.   In this Episode of Barbell Shrugged:   Should you train to failure RPE vs. RIR Mechanisms of hypertrophy and building a training program The Role of mTOR for muscle growth Sarcoplasmic hypertrophy for muscle growth   Dr. Brad Schoenfeld  on Instagram   Dr. Andy Galpin on Instagram   Anders Varner on Instagram   Doug Larson on Instagram   Coach Travis Mash on Instagram   ————————————————   Diesel Dad Training Programs: http://barbellshrugged.com/dieseldad   Training Programs to Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/34zcGVw   Nutrition Programs to Lose Fat and Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/3eiW8FF   Nutrition and Training Bundles to Save 67%: https://bit.ly/2yaxQxa   Please Support Our Sponsors   U.S. Air Force. Find out if you do at airforce.com.   Organifi - Save 20% using code: “Shrugged” at organifi.com/shrugged   BiOptimizers Probitotics - Save 10% at bioptimizers.com/shrugged   Garage Gym Equipment and Accessories: https://prxperformance.com/discount/BBS5OFF Save 5% using the coupon code “BBS5OFF”

Shrugged family, today on Barbell Shrugged, one of the most special treats anyone could have. The keys to building muscle. We're talking to Dr. Andy Galpin, Dr. Brad Schoenfeld, and we're discussing some of the latest research in muscle building. And what's super cool about that is these two dudes are about as at the top of the game as you can possibly be. Of course, Dr. Andy Galpin, good friend of the show. Dr. Brad Schoenfeld, this is the second time we have had him on. So if you want to get over to YouTube, scroll through, just type in Dr. Brad Schoenfeld. You can see we interviewed him over at the NSCA conference back in Vegas,

back when people are allowed to travel and do things. Make sure you get over there. But before we get into the show, I want to thank our friends over at BuyOptimizers. I'm excited to tell you about the product I recently discovered. Most gut health supplements include all the same old ingredients packed in the capsules. But what if there was a breakthrough gut repair supplement that had new patented ingredient, tasted great, and came in powder form so you could add it to water, coffee, or your favorite smoothie. Well, guess what?

That gut repair supplement exists, and it's called Leaky Gut Guardian. Not only does it include powerful probiotics and prebiotics, it also includes a patented, one-of-a-kind ingredient called IGY Max. IGY Max is an egg-based protein that enhances gut health, reverses damage caused by antibiotics, and even helps with immunity threats. I don't think I'm overstating the case when I say IGY Max is one of the most powerful gut nutrients ever discovered, and it's in every serving of Leaky Gut Guardian. By taking Leaky Gut Guardian daily, you'll eliminate bad bacteria, feed the good bacteria, repair your gut lining, and build up your immunity all at the same time. Now, here's the fun part. Leaky Gut Guardian comes in two delicious flavors, vegetarian vanilla and chocolate

carnivore. Just like it sounds, our vegetarian vanilla flavor is our vegetarian formula or chocolate carnivore flavor on the other hand is an enhanced formula that includes collagen bone broth for additional gut healing and anti-aging benefits leaky gut guardian is easy to add to your daily routine and it could completely transform your both your gut health and your immunity so experience fewer gut problems less gas bloating and even less sickness simply add one scoop of vegetarian vanilla chocolate carnivore to your favorite beverage coffee smoothie or even just a simple glass of water it makes as well taste delicious and you'll be

helping your gut repair with our powerful prebiotics probiotics and patented igy max protein so what are you waiting for repair yourair your gut health, power up your immunity today by trying Leaky Gut Guardian risk-free at leakygutguardian.com forward slash shrugged. Use the code shrugged, save 10% off any order. You have a 365-day money-back guarantee. Leakygutguardian.com forward slash shrugged. L-E-A-K-Y-G-U-T-G-U-A-R-D-I-A-N.com forward slash shrugged.

And of course, our friends over at Organifi. The green, the red, and the gold juices. The most delicious tasting green drink you can ever have in your entire life. The greatest of all time. Check it out. Four years in a row. You are not getting the micronutrients that you need. You are not getting the organ meat.

That's where all the micronutrients really are. It's not even all in the salads. That's like next. Right now, it's where all the micronutrients really are. It's not even all in the salads. That's like next. Right now, it's organ meat. That's the number one source of getting the most delicious micronutrients in your life. Vitamins and minerals that make all of the enzymes, all of the chemical and hormonal reactions fire appropriately in your body. And if you're not getting them, you are not working optimally. Improves your health, improves your gut. And really, the best part is that you don't have to worry about

making sure you have a gigantic salad at every single meal because we're supplementing with the highest quality superfoods that exist on this planet. And you can head over to Organifi.com forward slash shrug to save 20% on the green, red, and gold juices. Organifi.com forward slash shrug to save 20% on the green, red, and gold juices. Organifi.com forward slash shrug to save 20% on the green, red, and gold juices. That's Organifi.com forward slash shrug. Friends, let's get into the show.

Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mesh, Dr. Andy Galpin, Dr. Brad Schoenfeld. This is like, this is legit Christmas in February right now. Getting to hang out, talking hypertrophy. Welcome back to the show, Dr. Brad Schoenfeld. The last time you were on, I have, is episode 289. I believe all the dudes were out at NSCA conference in Vegas, and you guys were getting kicked out of conference rooms. I imagine we have a lot to talk about from episode 289 to almost 500. We're in the 500s now. So if people for some reason don't know your history and why your name is attached to every single piece of research that has come out on hypertrophy, Can we give just a brief background on why your name is everywhere?

Well, I'm not quite sure that's the case, but I am prolific in research and I'm the associate professor at Lehman College in the Bronx. My research focus is on primarily muscle hypertrophy, strength, muscular adaptations from resistance training. I delve into some other areas as well. But I'm a researcher educator primarily. And I, in a former life, I was for many years a practitioner. And I think one of the reasons that my research has resonated so much with the public is that really my focus on carrying out research stems from my years as a practitioner. So I'm basically a kid in the candy store researching all the topics that I had always wanted to know about when I was a practitioner.

Yeah. We're going to get into everything kind of coming out of lab. You were just talking pre-show about a new meta-analysis you guys came out with on failure. Can we dig into that? I know we're going to have a ton of questions, so if you can just give us the high level and we'll dig in. Yeah. So the short course is that we looked at studies comparing going to muscle failure versus not going to failure. And on a global perspective, when we looked at all the studies pooled, so meta-analysis is the pooling of all studies on a topic with given inclusion-exclusion criteria, which actually is an important point that I'll touch on, the inclusion-exclusion.

And the results were that there was basically nothing on an overall level that it didn't matter. Now, the caveat that for strength, when volume was not equated, when volume was equated, there was a benefit to not going to failure for strength. And on the hypertrophy, so we do what's called a sub-analysis. And in the hypertrophy, the resistance, when we parceled out resistance-trained versus non-resistance-trained subjects, the resistance-trained subjects showed greater benefit hypertrophy-wise to failure training. And it was modest. It was not certainly a big advantage.

A lot of caveats to this that I do want to point out if we can get into that. Yeah. Number one, we had one of our exclusion criteria was we excluded studies that had, that used combined, what's called concurrent training. We do aerobic training combined with resistance training. One of the studies was done by Mike Stone's lab, very well done study. And they included a sprint training component in it. So we decided a priori before the analysis, before we actually did the search that this was going to be our criteria, we had to exclude that study. It was a well done study. We do know that concurrent training potentially can have negative effects on hypertrophy with trained subjects. And by the way, it potentially can have negative effects on hypertrophy with trained subjects. And by the way,

it potentially can have positive effects on hypertrophy in untrained subjects. So basically, it could confound results. Whether it did in this study or not is not clear, but that study showed actually a negative effect of hypertrophy. So if we had have included that study, there would have been no benefit to the resistance-trained subjects. And there was a study that was published after our study was published, which in resistance-trained subjects, again, showing no benefit. So I really don't see much there. But- What was the rationale there in your mind between the untrained subjects benefiting from concurrent training and the trained subjects regarding hypertrophy not benefiting from the concurrent training? Well, first of all, it wasn't a rationale.

We did a sub-analysis that showed that. So if you're asking me why that might be the case, I can give you the rationale, which I think is probably relevant in that once you start to get close to your genetic ceiling, so as you keep training, everyone has a hypothetical limit to how much muscle they can grow. Personally, I don't think anyone ever achieves their genetic potential. And there's no way to research that. How do you know that if you didn't do something else, you might not get results? The term genetic ceiling has been thrown around and technically, I guess everyone has one, but really no one ever achieves it because there's always other ways you can go. But anyway, as you get closer and closer to your genetic ceiling, I can surmise theoretically that you need to challenge your muscles consistently beyond its present capacity. That's a basic tenet of exercise from the overload principle. And that's one way that perhaps

if you're taxing your muscles through heightened failure, conceivably that might challenge it beyond your present capacity in a way that with untrained subjects, it's not necessary. Now, again, if you had included those two studies, it really would have negated those results.

Wasn't it Stone's studies that said that, you know, with going to failure, that the hypertrophy came mainly from slow twitch fibers, that as well? I saw him at a lecture, and he presented one of his studies, and that was the problem, is that going to failure, the circumference of the slower twitch fibers was what was growing. I believe that that was the study that the Carroll study from Stone's lab, because they looked at fiber type specific effects, and I'm struggling. It's been a while since I actually read the study. But as I recall that it did show attenuated response that the,

because they did an ultrasound, so they looked at whole muscle hypertrophy and then they did biopsies to look at fiber type specific. And I think the explanation for the whole muscle hypertrophy being lower was that it was more specific to the type two fibers. And I'm struggling to find a rationale for that because conceivably training to failure, you're going to make sure your highest threshold motor units would be involved. So anyway, again, we can only speculate, but here's some things I want to just point out. Some of the limitations, I actually wrote a blog post about this because we think of meta-analyses as like the be-all end-all is the highest form of evidence-based practice. And in some ways it is, certainly you're getting much greater precision in your ability to draw inferences because of the greater pooling of studies.

You're basically making one big study out of little studies. But remember that number one, there's a lot of heterogeneity within studies that are going to somewhat confound results. But even more importantly, you have to look at what has been done in the research. So when failure versus non-failure studies, every study to date has looked at either all sets, so they're all, I think everyone is a multi-set protocol. There might've been one that was a one single set, I don't recall. But anyway, virtually every study is a multi-set protocol. They look at all sets to failure versus no sets to failure. You don't have to do that. Where is it written that every set has to be taken to failure?

And I can make a case that you end up over a period of weeks that may be shorter periods, you get a heightened effect through planned overreaching, if you will, but that perhaps you start becoming more overtrained with failure training as you keep doing it with a lot of sets. Can I jump in here real fast? Because I need to clarify something. Don't lose where you're going with this. This is incredibly important. When I hear people talk about, and they specifically cite your research, because you've put out so much on this, about whether you need to train to failure or not. It is grossly over-assumed that they are saying every single set, I always go to failure, or I never go to failure. That is light years different than doing some sets to failure on some days. It could be within a workout, or it could be within different days of the week.

That is completely different. I don't want people to interpret your stuff as saying, oh, see, you never, ever have to go to failure ever that's not that's ridiculous why are there so many absolutes in our industry what it's got to be one way or the other it can't be like a little bit of this a little bit of that they're trying to be evidence-based and they're trying to pay attention but they don't take the time to read the whole blog they just look at the tweet you put out of the title or look at the conclusion and and they extrapolate from there and they want to have this thing so just we need to make sure that that is clear that doesn't mean you can't or every set ever has to go to failure or the opposite because if you read Beardsley anything Beardsley puts out it's like you got to go to failure like that's all you know there for a

long time that's all he said failure and I'm like all right I'm gonna take this as a failure I have a quick non-hypertrophy question related to that. Versus failure versus not failure. Is there any difference as far as joint stress or potential risk for injury with training to failure versus not training to failure? Assuming even though you're going to failure, your technique is still staying high quality? If you're asking from the evidence, there's been no study that's looked at injury risk with failure, certainly that I'm aware of. And I don't think anything's been looked at that way. And I would just say anecdotally, as long as you are training in good form, I think breathing can be an issue if you really hold your breath through your valsalva and don't let go and then go to failure. Could you pop a blood vessel, I guess, maybe, and that's possible. But no, I think the breakdown in form would be the issue with failure, which certainly can happen.

Those are, I think, issues that are difficult to study research-wise. It's tough to get, if you're looking to try to push someone in that context, I think you have difficulty with the IRB getting approval on something like that. The one question I have about- I don't even have any retrospective studies looking at saying, are those people who tend to train to failure more often? Do they have more soft tissue injuries, et cetera? I don't think we have any evidence to suggest that happens. I don't think so either. And I think it also might depend upon the rep range that you're training in. Perhaps if you're training with like in a powerlifting type rep range to failure,

you're doing singles, doubles to failure, maybe that would heighten the risk of injury. When you're looking at actually going to failure and you're basing things off of like untrained individuals or well-trained individuals kind of on just the spectrum of training age. Is there a benefit for untrained athletes to take things to failure more often than say trained individuals just because it's so much more stress on the body for someone that's been lifting for a long time. The weights or the loads are just so heavy. Is there a benefit or a drawback on the frequency of going to failure? So again, this is an excellent question. I'm not sure that the untrained subject really, based upon the evidence I've seen, I would argue that you

probably don't need to go to failure because, and here's the, this is just the logical rationale, but basically why does your, why do your muscles grow? Because you're pushing them beyond their present capacity. You're going to be pushing them if you're not going to failure beyond the present capacity, because it's doing something versus nothing. Now, again, I do think one of the other issues that we need to talk about is how close to failure, if not failure, then how close to failure do you need to go? Because that's not qualified in the paper. And it really is something that is still, really, it's more anecdotal. We can't, there's no hard evidence pointing to this. I would just say my own opinion on it is that you're going to need to be within a rep or two, or RIR of a rep or two.

So a failure that, and I think that becomes increasingly important as you get to, let me just finish this and then you can ask your follow-up because I see you have them. But I think that as you go on. It's tough on here. We have to jump all over each other to get a word in. But I think that as you go on, that becomes increasingly important. I do think though, as you become really well-trained, let's say high-level bodybuilders. Try getting a group of high-level bodybuilders to participate in this study and good luck with that. So I mean, I'm sure with Andy as well, when you get a group of resistance trained subjects, they've been training three, four years, but every time I get them in my study and we push

them to failure, they're training harder than they ever did. Their concept of going to failure training really hard was not what we do. And I think that speaks volumes. But your bodybuilders, I mean, I've trained with guys like John Meadows, who just the intensity that he can apply in a set is just off the charts. And thus that if you push yourself the way he would on multiple sets, I think the potential for overtraining would be heightened. Do you have an opinion on kind of the way that we measure submaximal lifts or like getting to failure? I've noticed that RIR reps and reserve has become almost like,

it's like trending right now. Like everybody's talking about RIR versus and reserve has become almost like it's like trending right now like everybody's talking about RIR versus percentage work or RPE do you have any opinion because kind of when you start bringing in those like subjective measures I feel like it just gets really lost and how do you measure that stuff in in the research and kind of, what does it look like? Yeah, look, I like the RIR system. And by the way, RIR basically is RPE in reverse. It's just, I think a more intuitive way of expressing your RPE, your rating of perceived exertion. So I like it now. Yes, there's subjectivity to it.

I have not used that in our research, basically because there's a learning curve towards it. And we're limited in the time that we have in a semester to get the study done and to try then to spend three or four weeks getting people most of the subjects that we have are not familiar with it. We're very limited familiarity. And to try then to have your acclimation just doesn't make sense for us. But I think it's a good system. I do think the velocity loss can be used. That's a alternative method that's been proposed. My favorite, yeah. But that requires equipment. And for a lot of people-

Expensive equipment too. Yeah, it's not even that. They now have the apps that can be used with bands. But yeah, expensive, I guess, is a relative term. Right. So you can get like the, I forgot what it's called. Gym wear. It goes on your wrist.

I have it in my gym, in my lab. I don't remember. On your wrist. Yeah, I want to hear about this. Yeah, you wear them on your wrist, like for bench. But you can wear them anywhere. I guess you could put them on your legs too. But it's for using – I'm drawing a blank.

But anyway, and it comes on an app that you can then get the feedback on. So they're viable. I think that there's going to be inherent subjectivity, obviously, in RIR. But it's been validated pretty well. And I do think that once, especially with more well-trained subjects, it becomes a viable method. I think it starts to lose utility as you get into higher repetition ranges. So when you're getting above 10 or 12 reps, RM, Let's say you're training at 15 reps, 20 reps. It becomes harder to estimate how far you are. Yeah.

How much do you place or how much value do you kind of place on top end strength? Somewhere in ones and twos when it comes to failure. I mean, it isn't necessarily hypertrophy on what most people would think about, but has a massive impact on total strength and I would imagine some sort of signaling to grow muscle. So is the question, how much of an effect does 1RM strength have on hypertrophy? It's a good question. And there's, by the way, there's a somewhat of a controversy in reverse. How much does I perch we have on acquiring strength, which we could talk about if you want, but definitely the other way around. Yeah, I do feel that if there's anything where you go, that's exactly what we want to talk about the nuance of it. I do feel that there is a benefit to optimizing

strength. So look, we know that mechanical tension is the primary driver of muscle growth through mechanotransduction and through intracellular signaling. Hypothetically, if you can increase strength, it will make you stronger in a hypertrophy type rep range. So let's say you're training in your 10 RM. If you can increase your one arm strength, that will have some transfer. Now it's not going to be a linear transfer, but that it will help you get stronger in your 10 RM, let's say. And thus at the given 10 RM, you will be able to use a heavier load theoretically, and thus create more mechanical tension at that given set, and thus, hypothetically, get greater growth. seemed to show a modest improvement in the group that did a strength block, then subsequently followed by a hypertrophy block by just training in the hypertrophy zone.

It wasn't all that great, but it was a short study. And I think it provided at least some preliminary evidence of the potential benefit that needs to be explored more. But I think it has a good rational, logical rationale, which to me, in the absence of evidence, you try then to piece together what we know through science and try to develop logical rationales. And then my philosophy has been changed quite radically over the years by emerging evidence. So I have an opinion right now, you have me back on in five years, I might have a very different opinion based upon what we find out. So what I'm telling you now is based on my own opinion on what we have is very little evidence

on the topic. How much does soreness play into hypertrophy specifically? Is it relevant or is it just kind of a natural byproduct of training, but it doesn't really influence specifically hypertrophy? I don't think soreness per se. So it's again, an interesting question. Soreness per se is not indicative of growth. I do think, so soreness generally is indicative of a novel stimulus and that can be indicative of growth. Providing a novel stimulus, why does the body grow? Well, it's adapting because there's a survival threat. And why is a survival threat?

Well, there's a novel stimulus. So we can backtrack that. I don't think the mechanistically being sore is necessarily providing a hypertrophic benefit. Now, there is some evidence that muscle damage, so there is soreness is associated with muscle damage, and there is some evidence that muscle damage may have additive effects. I mean, there's pathways, there's your prostaglandin, your Cox pathway, which is upregulated conceivably through muscle damage might have effects. And also muscle damage does enhance satellite cell activation and

proliferation. So how does that all enter into the equation? These are, I know before we were talking about some of the things that we want to study and that we don't have a good handle on. That's certainly, I think, an interesting one. And I think really the question at hand is, we have quite good evidence that muscle damage does provide factors associated with hypertrophy. The question is, are those additive to a stimulus provided by high levels of mechanical tension? And that is to be determined. And by the way, I would just, I'm sorry for interrupting, but I will also say that it's pretty clear that high levels of muscle damage have a negative effect on the hypertrophic response

because they're going to impair your recovery ability. They're going to impair your ability to train hard. So if there is a potential benefit, it would be at more moderate levels of muscle damage. Just because you can have a higher frequency in that case. If you had to wait a week before you're not brutally sore, then you missed a training session or two potentially. Correct. While we're here, maybe quickly, what do we know about frequency for maximizing hypertrophy? Is there an optimal number of times per week for the muscle? Does it matter? What's the spread look like there? Yeah, great question. All the evidence that we have today seems to show that it has little effect, at least within the context of more moderate volume routines. So really not much,

if any, difference between as long as you're hitting a muscle once a week. Some of them, we've done a meta-analysis on this topic. We've done two, actually. But the most recent one showed a slight benefit for twice a week. I'm skeptical as to the practical relevance of that. But what did seem to happen once we teased out the effects of volume, so when volume was unequated, it seems when you start getting into more higher volume routines, so more than let's say eight to 10 sets per muscle in a given session, let's say you're going to do 15 sets in a given week. It would be better to split that up into eight and seven, you know, or 16 if you want to make it a more round number. Let's say eight and eight, then 16 sets in the same session.

Now, there's certainly a lot of pro bodybuilders that are doing their bro splits and they'll bomb chest and doing 20 sets in a week and they're huge. Doesn't mean they might not get more huge if they did split it up and and perhaps uh pharmacological enhancement if you will enters into that equation those are things that we can i was going to ask about that yeah well this helps recovery here is

what the research says versus application so in this example i mean i think you're pretty clearly saying you, if you do it once a week or twice a week, as long as the volume is the same, it's not going to really matter. Having said that, if you're trying to gain more volume, sometimes you're going to have to add an additional day to get there. So practically you're not going to be able to do 20 sets one day, 20 sets the other day. That's just not going to happen. So you may have to go whatever it is, 15, 15, 15 to get the numbers. And so you have to think past just the abstract, you have to think past the conclusion statement, because both of those would be evidence-based

saying, I need to add additional day here to my week because I'm not hitting the volume I want to hit. It's also equally evidence-based to say, I'm only going to do once a week because it's not going to aid me in gaining there if the volume is greater. So both answers, more frequent or less frequent, are equally correct. Exactly, Andy. And I would just add to that my current view and the way when I consult with individuals is that I use frequency as a tool if necessary to add volume in a given week or whatever the time period that we're working at. So frequency really is more of a tool for volume. And by the way, I would say that the evidence on the other side is pretty compelling, that the very high frequency routines that had

been somewhat fashionable, if you will, that had been promoted, seem not to have panned out. There was this Norwegian frequency study that was brought up, which had never been published, by the way. And also as a side note, which I thought was, I think is kind of an interesting story, is that I had a chance to talk to one of the researchers for the Norwegian frequency project. For those who don't know, it was a study on Norwegian powerlifters in the Norwegian powerlifting team. It was a very nice design. And they had them do either six days a week of training or three days a week of training, volume equated. And the group that did six days gained muscle, and the group that did three didn't. And this was extrapolated, study never published.

In my talk with one of the researchers, again, never published, so hard to tease out what the methods were. But number one, he told me that this was a real powerlifting routine. They did squat, deadlift, and bench, which is not a bodybuilding type routine. They trained well short of failure, probably below the threshold that you're going to need in a bodybuilding type routine. And interestingly, he told me that in there, when they train their power lifters for hypertrophy phase, they use lower frequencies of training and higher volumes. So anyway, it was like, does fiber type come into how quickly or like the frequency which you're able to train? Because me just being one person anecdotally,

I can train back feels like five days a week and train really hard and never really get sore and feel like I'm still having very effective training. And I, on the other hand, cannot. Yeah. Mash does three reps and literally needs an oxygen tank. Yeah. So good for one good lift. Is there a reason, is there some sort of muscle fiber connection to how often you can train specific muscle groups or just the frequency at which you're able to train. That has never been studied. And I'm sure as Andy will tell you that the majority of people will have fairly consistent,

the difference in fiber types between muscles for the vast majority of muscles is gonna vary somewhere between 40 to 60%. So if you talk about someone that has a high fiber type, type two fiber percentage they're generally going to be more like 60 percent in the given muscle for someone with a low it's not like they're 10 versus 80 now you will find you're like kenyan uh marathon runners who are their quads are going to be 20 percent uh you know 80 slow 80% slow twitch. But those were, and Colin Jackson, they had a biopsy

of him and he had ridiculous fiber type percentage of fast twitch fibers. I don't think there's much there for the vast majority of people. And I don't, first of all, the only way you're going to ever figure that out is by doing biopsies of all your muscles, which is not practical. So I don't really see that as much of an issue. Maybe Andy wants to chime in. Yeah, we have seen like with our weightlifter study, with the national and elite international caliber folks, it was pretty common for those folks to be 75% or higher fast twitch.

And so you will see that. And the same on the opposite in that level of individuals. So you get the elite athletes, you will see a very large thing. thing but i mean i've biopsied so many damn people now that you're right the vast majority are going to be 60 40 plus or minus in that range um yeah there's no i mean i certainly have plenty of anecdotal evidence i feel like all the athletes i've worked with that i either know specifically are slow twitch dominant, because I have actually biopsied them or from other indirect metrics, they just seem to recover immediately. And the ones that are the opposite, they're crushed with soreness for two days, three days.

But we don't have any science on that, but I have certainly seen that to be the case. Let's jump into the velocity. I just want to... By all means. Number one, Andy, that would be an interesting study. And there is, just briefly, there is the hypothesis that the soleus is one muscle, one of the few muscles, certainly one of the few, or if really the only show type muscle that is very slow twitch dominant, anywhere between 80 to 90%. And there is some, there's a theory that you can train these, like in seated calf raises, do, if you're having trouble growing it,

train it more frequently. Would be an interesting study to do, but. Yeah, well, we have some, because there's a handful of muscles that are very high percentage slow twitch, 80, 90% or higher. The problem is the soleus is like the only one that we can biopsy because the rest like spinal erectors, not necessarily getting into. And then we have some of the opposite, like the gastroc, which is almost entirely fast twitch in a lot of folks,

but that one has much more heterogeneity between people. Most people are predominantly slow twitch in the soleus, but some people are really still pretty slow twitch in the gastroc and some are blazing fast. So we see a big difference there. And a lot of the work we've done with the soleus, it is a very interesting model for studying hypertrophy of slow twitch fibers for a lot of reasons. We'll get there. And I can add just a tiny bit of insight here. One thing that makes this topic, and Brad, you can speak to your recent study on fiber type specific training rep ranges. One thing that makes this topic incredibly

challenging and problematic is people don't understand the variance that you get from biopsy to biopsy. And so I can't spill the beans too much here, but there is no good evidence to suggest sort of up and down the length of the fiber, the fiber type changes. Some really old stuff that's outdated says that, but it's just wrong. Same thing with like right leg to left leg, depth, et cetera. But what we will see is huge, huge, huge variability just from one biopsy to the very next one. So it is not crazy for me to see a 20% difference in fiber type profile just from sticking you once to sticking you again, either the exact same hole or going in two inches down, doing it again. And we see the same thing with fiber size. And so we have to take, I would say, extreme caution when trying to

interpret muscle growth studies, hypertrophy studies that are looking at single fibers and not paying attention to the actual whole muscle. Did you take an MRI? Did you take a detailed ultrasound and actually figure out the muscle growth? look at studies that only looked at the fiber type size, because again, like fiber type, we can see 20, 30, 50% variance in the size of one fiber to the next from the exact same person at the exact same time point. So that research to me is extremely crude. And I think we over extrapolate way too much from that stuff. You have to be very, very, very, very very careful so as a person that this is what i do i still say like show me it in mri show me it in an ultrasound first before i buy it because this stuff is really really tricky i'll say at the kindest so you're saying mri's and ultrasounds can can tell you the the fiber type of the entire muscle versus just doing a biopsy? No, it's just the size.

Oh, just the size. Do you see any technology like that on the horizon where you want the biopsy anymore and you can actually get a global view of an entire muscle? I've seen at least three, maybe four that are doing that and they're all terrible.

So, not yet. It's coming outcomes are more important here so can you look at someone's actual cloud of imaging um what i can say is the ultrasound imaging is getting markedly better and so i used to be like not really believe too much of the ultrasound stuff for muscle hypertrophy and then it got a little better and i would accept it and now it's getting really good to where it's really pretty dialed. So that's going to be a huge advantage for people like Brad, who like that's the primary metric. They want to know, did your quad actually get bigger? Did your bicep, did this part of it get

larger? And that will enable him, I'm sure, to do more work on even things like site-specific hypertrophy. So was there more growth in the middle of the biceps brachii or the distal point of the proximal point, et cetera. And then all kinds of questions can lead off from that, but the imaging is getting there for that stuff. So with the fiber type specific stuff, I think we have to be really, really cautious. I get a, someone who's now isolated, I don't know, getting in the neighborhood of a million individual fibers, it's just, it's very difficult to get things right. And that's not

even talking about the technical side, the chemistry side of it, the processing side. So that's a big no. Well, it's just, it just highlights the point that all of us have said a thousand times, you just can't interpret too much from one paper. There's so many things can go into getting a result from one study. You really have to look at the breadth and give it time to really stack up from a lot of labs, from a lot of people to really gain extra confidence that something is happening.

So now can I ask my, yeah, I want to go back to that though, because there's so many, uh, I wouldn't mash this done talking about velocity, because I feel like that point, so many coaches right now are digging into and looking at the papers and then drawing entire programs out based on –

or their entire system off of one research paper or whatever it is. And what's actually happening is getting really lost sometimes when you start to see people. Brad can speak about this too, like what research can give us and what it can't give us. So it can give us broad recommendations for populations, but it never ever gives us specific individual programming recommendations. It shouldn't.

Yeah. I'm going to stop hijacking it. Go. You can let Brad fall off on that point first and then you can go. Yeah. I'm going to stop hijacking it. Go. You can let that fall off on that point first, and then you can go. Yeah, that was so spot on, Andy, and I couldn't have said it better, that basically if we talk about an evidence-based approach,

and one of my passions is to promote evidence-based fitness, an evidence-based approach uses research to provide guidelines, and that's all it can do. And you synthesize the body, as Andy also eloquently said, that one study is a piece in a puzzle that you never, I know people jump on when I publish studies, and I'm sure Andy the same, they'll jump on this and use it to support, usually the ones to support their confirmation bias. But I always caution them that we, it's a piece in a puzzle. You have to synthesize the body of literature, understand its limitations. We talked about failure training in terms of understanding

limitations. And then we know that there's going to be a wide variety of responses, that the inter-individual response in a study. When I do, let's say I'm doing a study on high reps versus low reps, the number of people that get 20% growth are balanced out by the number of people that are getting almost zero growth. And that's a 10% mean growth response. We're going to report the mean, but that doesn't mean that if you did this, everyone's going to get 10% and some people are going to respond better. So ultimately you need to then use the research's guidelines, understand its limitations, and then use your expertise in line with the needs and abilities of the individual to customize programs. And that's why you can never replace having an expert practitioner to guide programming.

And most coaches aren't going to be doing biopsies of muscles to actually figure out. It's a – No. You're kind of – No, yeah. That's a serial killer. That is a serial killer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That dude shouldn't be doing what he's doing unless it's Andy Galvin. So I would say when you say that, like, it's safe to say that one of the most important things that a coach,

strength coach, or whoever can do would be its own data collection and monitoring of the athletes to get the individual's responses. Instead of trying to lump everybody into one, because you read this one study, you know, getting your own individual responses, I feel like is the highest value. Yeah, that's always going to be the case that you need to, every individual is their own N equals one. So you're going to use your own knowledge based upon what we know through the literature, as well as what you've seen in practice, because there are gaps. There's a lot of gaps in the literature. Literature is always going to have limitations in terms of extrapolation. So you're

going to know what you know through synthesizing the body of literature. You're going to understand these gaps. You're going to then know what you see in the field, which is going to be different from trainer and practitioner to practitioner, and then use that to create your programs for the individual. And then it's going to be a constant experimentation. You're going to look to see how are they responding, and you're going to have to use your best judgment. Are they responding in a way that you think is optimal or close to optimal for that individual? And if not, you're going to need to make adjustments. Right. So, okay. So now the velocity question, there was a meta-analysis that I read over the

summer about hypertrophy. And one of the interesting parts of the analysis was talking about velocity of contraction. And it concluded that, you know, faster velocity contraction equaled more hypertrophy. And you, before we got started, said, you're not 100% on those studies at all. So it makes sense to hear what you have to say about the velocity of contraction. Yeah, so I'm not sure I know which one

you're talking about specifically. But when it comes to eccentric training, if in fact – Would you like to know? I have it right in front. I can read it off to you. Yeah, and specifically we're talking about the eccentric action. Yeah, this was the study. The meta-analysis was – it was by Victor Hughes Arantes,

and it was like I think 2020, and they did a meta-analysis from, I think it was like 2005 to 2019. A lot of them are yours. The majority of studies are you. So the meta-analysis was skeletal muscle hypertrophy, molecular, and applied aspects of exercise physiology by Arantes et al. Again, I don't want to talk without, as far as, Curtis, I can give you more general, since I don't know specifically

what the study, I'd have to read the specifics. I'll send it to you after we're done. It's interesting because I've only done, I've only been, when I say done, I've only been involved with

two studies on Tempo and one of them hasn't been published yet. So that one's not in there. We did a meta-analysis on top. But anyway, if the finding was that a faster eccentric contraction provides greater hypertrophy than a slower eccentric contraction, that has been promoted to some extent. The issue with that claim is that the vast majority of eccentric studies have been carried out using isokinetic training. And briefly, for those who don't know,

an isokinetic device is not the same thing. It's hard to describe in a general sense, but basically you have to push against the unit. It's a machine that's going to keep a constant speed and it's controlled by your ability to push against the unit. And you're basically, you can program it to push faster against it. Anyway, it's not the same thing as doing a standard dynamic, constant external resistance. So you're isotonic, if you will, what people generally call isotonic training. It's just kind of apples, oranges. And we do have some studies,

some of them I've been in and some of them I haven't, but I was just involved with one carried out by Eduardo D'Souza's lab in Tampa recently. And it showed that a four second eccentric actually had at least the site specific greater hypertrophy than a two second eccentric. And anyway, it's kind of all, I don't want to say all over the place, but the few studies that have really been carried out in isotonic training certainly don't show that, that a faster eccentric is beneficial. If anything, it seems somewhat slower. It's either no difference or that's somewhat slower that if you do it very quickly, do it too quickly, you're going to not keep the muscle under tension. And think about it, it just makes logical sense that if

you're letting the weight down in an isotonic contraction very quickly, you're not creating any muscular tension in the lowering phase. Basically, gravity is lowering that weight, not the muscle. So it doesn't make intuitive sense, at least to me, that that would be the case. And the limited data that we have on it, again, I'd have to read the paper that you're talking. Maybe I have, and I don't recall it. But certainly it would have been, if they did have a finding of eccentric superiority, it would have been specific to largely, there's been a couple in non-isokinetic, but the vast majority were in isokinetic, and certainly the one showing that benefit were. Well, some of them, you know, they made a hypothesis that it was because then,

you know, the faster velocities equal, they could do more volume. And so, you know, I don't think they really, you know, figured out exactly why. And so there's some people that concluded that maybe there was like some activation of the, the P 70 S six K, whatever. Well, I think an important point to point out here is that if they're just looking at the molecular aspects, you cannot necessarily translate intracellular signaling findings. It's a hypertrophy. There's a huge gap in the, in looking at an acute intracellular response. Now, it's great for hypothesis generation, and certainly I think that's not diminishing the importance of that research. But if that

particular study or meta-analysis was looking at the intracellular signaling response, then all bets are off because that you cannot necessarily extrapolate into a hypertrophic effect. All right. Brad, what does the research say about hormone production? Is there any type of training or lifting that has a higher anabolic effect hormonally than others? Well, you're talking acute-wise acute response yeah i remember like growing up

everyone always told me like do the big lifts that way you get testosterone spike etc etc but what does the actual research say about stuff like that well that's consistent with the research so the research shows that if you do your bigger lifts shorter rest periods uh higher volumes on moderate repetitions of moderate to higher repetitions. You saw a bodybuilding type of training routine with specifically using more multi-joint exercise. You're going to get greater hormonal spikes, acute hormonal spikes than you would in a more powerlifting type routine, which is lower volume, more rest periods. The question is, is there any benefit to that? And I would say that

I published a review paper on this a number of years ago now, but I think the consensus at this point would be that it has limited at best effects. Certainly certainly I don't think it's applicable to use that for programming and certainly I don't. I just don't think that the acute response has much, if it does have any effects, it's going to be modest. I can't rule it out. I mean, there's not sufficient research to say that there's no effect, but I think there's sufficient research to say that if we do show effects, that they would not be very large. So if we were to kind of overgeneralize and just summarize like one or two key points, is really time under tension, like weekly time under tension, kind of the main, main thing, like the 80% that matters? Yeah. So when we talk about

time under tension, I think that's an important point to qualify that it's not necessarily how long you're spent. There's no magical time under tension, at least that's been shown in the literature within a given set. Like I know some people have used 40 to 60 second sets as being ideal for hypertrophy. That has not been borne out. I do think there is something to the theory that creating greater time under tensions over the course of a session or over a week really over a given period of time might have more credence. When we equated the volume load, which essentially equated the TUT, there were no differences in hypertrophy. I did a follow-up study where we equated the sets, so the weekly TUT was a lot lower, and there was a greater effect for the more moderate, the bodybuilding type routine. So I would extrapolate that again, limited evidence, but that a TUT would seem to have a role on a weekly or on a given time. I don't even like to use hard cutoffs like a week week is an arbitrary number. But on some, you know, fairly succinct timeframe.

How do you feel about the rest periods in between sets? Is there any research on good, bad? Yeah. So we carried out a study on that showing that the longer rest, which again, refuted by the way I used to think, but that longer rest periods, three minute rest had greater effects on hypertrophy than a one-minute rest. The reason we hypothesized is that it compromised your volume, the amount of volume that you could do. Because when you're taking shorter rest, or at least the volume load, you're going to need to reduce the weight to keep your... You'd either do fewer reps at the given load, or you have to reduce the amount of weight to maintain the given rep range. And we carried out a subsequent

meta-analysis, or was it a systematic review? I'm forgetting now. But anyway, I think it was a meta. Once we equated, when we equated volume, it didn't seem to be much difference between the two. And I actually was involved in carrying out a study that essentially showed that, a follow-up, which was done in Brazil, where once the volume was equated, there was no difference. So there was a sharp difference, a fairly substantial difference, when three minutes versus one minute when there was no, when volume was not equated, but once they did more sets to make up for the amount of volume they missed,

if you will, through the shorter rest intervals. So the take home from that would be that if you want to do shorter rest, you're going to need to do more sets to make up the difference. So in the end, total volume is really the number one thing that kind of everything comes back to. That would be the table. Load plus volume. That's the question I wanted to ask.

When I first read your work, it was all about mechanical tension, metabolic stress, and muscle damage were the three components that you mentioned. So now, this is like several years later, of those three, like, you know, what percentage is each ranked in importance? I can't give a percentage on it. I would say that the dominant factor is mechanical tension. I would say that metabolic stress and muscle damage, really the question is, is whether they are redundant. So I do think there's evidence that they can have beneficial effects on hypertrophy. How they go about doing that is still not determined. But the question would be, are they redundant so that if you increase metabolic

stress, let's say during a given workout, is it going to add to your hypertrophy or is it redundant that it might compromise the load that you're doing? Those are questions we don't know. I would point people who are interested. I was involved in a review paper with some very excellent researchers. It was headed by Henning Lockerhage. I forget the title. It was a couple of years ago, but it was Stimuli and Sensors of Hypertrophy, something to that effect.

They could just search Henning Lockerhage and myself in the Stimuli and Sensors. It's an open access paper free for everyone to read. And we delve into really all the science on what we know and just how much we don't know at this point. I will mention that there's a lot of people on the internet, and I'm sure as everyone here knows, the internet is still kind of the wild west of fitness and just the wild west in general. People can say anything and everyone can call themselves an expert. People are making a lot of, in my opinion, unsubstantiated claims. And if you look at our paper, there's no way around that as to definitive statements of, yes, these are the mechanisms or

no, these are not, you know, this. and you just, there's not enough evidence one way or another to make that call in my humble opinion. And I would challenge anyone who reads our paper, show me the flaws in our paper. But if you read our paper and can't point out flaws, then you can't draw that conclusion one way or the other. I think that that's a real interesting area. And that I think over the next five to 10 years, we should have a lot more answers. Wow. That's good to hear. Well, going back to what we were talking about with Galpin, I think that's one of the biggest things that I noticed when I talked to you and Andy is you guys talk about all the things you still don't know or how it all plays into the system. But when people

read your papers and they go and talk about it it sounds like they actually know um how i guess in in that process what what don't you guys know i mean we talked about at the beginning of the show like what what's kind of the the two two or three biggest things that most interest you that to to move the needle forward on this that you guys have not studied yet. If you were to ask me, I feel like you guys know everything. Well, far from it. So I just mentioned mechanistically there's still so much we don't know. And also, we've come so far in terms of understanding pathways, interstellar pathways.

We're still very far from understanding how that ultimately translates into practice. We can map out various pathways, such as the, let's see, the AKT PI3K pathway and how its relevance ultimately, that's an upstream pathway, how it targets mTOR and then ultimately goes down the chain towards muscle protein synthesis, P70S6K into muscle protein synthesis. But how that ultimately translates into a hypertrophic response still is very, very hazy, in my opinion, at this point. We still have so far to go. God, there's just so much we still, I think individual responses is something that is just of real interest to me and how the genetics, how genes are turned on in certain people and not

in others and genetic responses and how they can be targeted through training. This is a real interesting one. Maybe Andy, you want to? Yeah, I'll say this a couple of ways. If you go through what we would, you know, the NSCA, we would classically call the modifiable variables. And you look at the amount of research on each of them. So let's assume the goal is to maximize hypertrophy. And you can go through exercise choice, right? So are, you know, multi-joint exercises better than single or exercise range of motion or eccentric versus concentric? There's a lot of questions still within just exercise choice we haven't fully answered. If you go through things, something like order, and there's, I think I've actually a few papers on, like, does it matter if you do the big joint muscles, the multi-joint stuff before the single joint? Or what if you do the inverse?

So there's lots of questions. Or even if you combine it with other type of things. Like, so what if you do in a single workout strength training first and then hypertrophy? Or the opposite? Or does that matter at all? If you go through exercise intensity, so how heavy does it have to be? I feel like we actually have a pretty good amount of research on that. And Brad, you've done a ton of work showing really uncovering now, you know, like it can be as low as 30% of your one rep max all the way up to maybe 80, 80, 95, you know, some percentages up there. So intensity can swing. There's a lot of research on intensity. More to go, but there's a lot there. If you go to volume, again, this is the driver. So really,

most of the work on hypertrophy has been in the volume and intensity sphere because they're so interrelated. Just recently, we started tackling rest and intervals. By we, I mean you. So you've got all those things. But then you have a whole host of factors outside of those traditional variables that are practical to people's lives. I know you've done some stuff on things like mental imagery, flexing in between sets, you know, like this is all bro of the day, if you work out in the morning, afternoon, evening. So these are all a ton of practical questions that we've been all asking each other and talking about and hearing people talk about for decades. And the research is several of these areas. It's just starting. So there is like a paper on time of day.

And there is like one or two studies on flexing in the mirror or whatever that one is so real when you watch bodybuilding like documentaries like i spend way too much time doing i always wonder how much muscle is being built when they stand in front of a mirror and just practice posing all these small little muscle groups that most people don't even train or know they're there, but they're just constantly flexing and bringing blood. Brad has an answer to that. So go ahead. Let's hear it. No, I actually don't. I mean, what am I going to think about it in the middle of the night when I'm watching bodybuilding documentaries now? We did a study on posing in between sets, not on flexing post-workout. That actually would be a quite interesting study to carry out. And

I looked, there was a study carried out at, I believe it was Jeremy Lenneke's lab, where they did basically flexing without a load and showed that it produced... now this was an untrained subjects you can use that is that relevant but it had the same uh they showed similar muscle hypertrophy to actually training with a load so what i mean well we talk about you've been talking about isotonic training concentric eccentric etc but isometric training as as I know, it doesn't typically lead to high levels of hypertrophy and flexing like a posing routine would, would mostly be an isometric thing. Well, it's not because they didn't do it. I, they did a repetition basically where you just focused on the muscle and tried

to squeeze it. So isometric would just mean a pose, whereas they were doing actual repetitions where you were squeezing the biceps i think dude i would love to walk in on someone doing that yeah right it's gonna be you tonight in your basement i'm like well yeah by myself yeah but nobody's gonna walk in on me you would rock i want to walk in on them but what are are you doing? So that's another example, though, Doug, of just another area. I mean, if you look at collectively eccentric exercises versus concentric, okay, we can isolate that on an isokinetic dynamometer,

but that's not how people train. So rarely, usually, almost every exercise has some component of eccentric, isometric, and concentric in it. So teasing out the individual things. So what if you go down slow, but then you come up fast? Is that different than going down slow and coming up slow? Or what about if you pause at the bottom like you would do in weightlifting? So there's all these questions that we don't have any answers to.

And then that doesn't even start to get into the umbrella of the molecular stuff or the mechanisms as to why, because that stuff is just a colossal wreck. Maybe we should talk about what we do know, just so our listeners, they're going to be like, well, you guys don't know anything. None of us knows anything. So what do we know? Well, I think we've talked about a bunch of stuff we do know.

Now, again, when you say what do we do know, we know a lot. It's just when you say what level of confidence do you have in what we know. So we do know a ton. If you're asking me, and Andy kind of touched on this, but if you're asking me as far as light load versus heavy load training, I can say with very high degrees of confidence that you can promote similar muscle hypertrophy across a wide spectrum of loading ranges.

If you're then asking me on the same topic, is there a, between heavy and light load training, is there a fiber type specific difference? My confidence in that goes down to maybe 50%. I would say there's a possibility that it may happen, but I am not at all confident that it does. So this is where the strength of evidence will dictate the strength of confidence you have in a given topic. One thing, and I'll say that too, Travis, if you look at all the different topics we've talked about today, I think one thing that remains really clear is Browder's consistently used this term like there may be a moderate difference or marginal decrease or marginal and so when i look at that collectively to me this stands out as showing none of these things are like magic

or none of these things are a death sentence so if you look at a program you're like oh that guy is still using 30 seconds between his sets and brad clearly showed three was better that doesn't mean it's pseudoscience that doesn't mean they're out of touch with the thing so there's different phases of training throughout the year you could go through right so one other area we have no research on is periodization or long-term progression with hypertrophy we have some of that stuff with strength and power but we have no clue like just because brad shows you know three minutes was superior to one minute in an eight-week study or 10 week whatever that that was that doesn't mean you can't ever do 30 seconds of

rest intervals in your training it doesn't mean you should even make it may even be worse we don't know those things so it's really important to keep that stuff in mind if there's a marginal difference between doing slightly eccentric or that that to me is like okay at what point does it exceed or does the marginal difference in science not matter to practical application well in a lot of the cases it's probably past that point and so what you like to do your preferences your abilities what you found in the past probably exceeds something when it's like well it was like a maybe a marginal size effect difference to me it's like all right then just use your intuition and use your other stuff because that's not a big rock to move right it's like the main

thing i like guidelines like you guys are talking about like here's what you do not do and here's what you here's some things you should but other than that it's just like the art of coaching it's really difficult to ever show i think the one concrete example we have here is brad's work with the intensity showing we would have for many years said do not go below or above this rep range. And clearly he's shown that that's just not the case. Do not go above or below this intensity. Clearly that one is open. So if you just give it enough time, you will get more definitive and more confidence in answers. But for now, the things that are marginal,

to me, they're things that you shouldn't worry too much about because those other ones are going to drive the boat. Let me ask you. Hold on, Chad. I just wanted to follow up because you just made some really great points. And I think one of the take-homes from there is that a lot of these things don't make much, you have to look at who are they going to make a difference to.

So who are you talking, what population are you talking to? A lot of these things, I can geek out on this and that's why I love doing that. I'm a former bodybuilder. But a lot of the nuances would be important potentially to a bodybuilder, but for the average person, it's just not going to make much difference if any in terms of what they get from it. So the average person, you give them a canned routine, and they're going to be able, as long as they train fairly hard, they're going to get the results they want, and it's just not going to make any difference in their lives. Whereas if you put an extra pound or two on a bodybuilder, a competitive bodybuilder,

that's the difference between winning and losing. Yeah, I don't coach average also. These nuances are important to me. mine are the best of the best yeah and i also wonder you know if you look at travis and you look at me and we're standing in the same gym there's no way that we would respond the same way to the same rep schemes and the same training programs like your history in powerlifting you can't squat a thousand pounds and then compare it to somebody that squatted 425 one time in their life like it the entire system is built in a completely different way wouldn't you say that he's talking

about like specificity you know we haven't talked about that does play a pretty big role that's the one thing i have realized you know I train like a CrossFit, I'm probably not going to be as strong as a weightlifter, pretty certain. Yeah, specificity is a guiding principle of exercise science, and I think that is pretty immutable. That's been well established. Yeah, if you're going for a 26-mile run,

you're not going to maximize your hypertrophy. If anything, you're going to have negative so now that's those are obviously extreme examples but yeah the more you want to be a bodybuilder you need to train in a fashion that's going to promote specific to promoting hypertrophy so if i'm a bodybuilder do you really believe that like if i um trained say the 40 intensity you know and did like 30 reps that would get me just as huge as like if i um trained say the 40 intensity you know and did like 30 reps that would get me just as huge as like if i did like 10 by 10 german volume training so when you're saying just as huge i think it's going to be similar now can i say we don't have the precision

of uh the tools that we have even the goal let's say gold gold standard MRI is your gold standard. And ultrasound comes pretty close to MRI, at least on cross-sectional area. There's some error, margin of error that you're going to get in terms of measurement. So can I be confident that it's exact, like that you wouldn't eke out a little bit extra with one versus the other? I mean, I think the body of evidence based upon the statistical analysis we does would suggest not, but what I don't know is, so I would say, yeah,

you pretty much will. But I, what I would say is could combining the rep ranges get you an enhanced effect. That's where I think there may be a benefit to that. And I can't say confidently it would, and I can't say it would. Now, Andy, this question is for you, you know, especially in talking about intensities. I know when you released that series on hypertrophy on YouTube, which I've listened to three times each, you talked about intensity levels, but you said probably, you know, sticking towards, you know, the heavier percentages, if you're a strength

athlete, would probably end up being, making making you stronger and that hypertrophy would be more specific to you and then you said but if you're a bodybuilder you could do 40 50 but as a let me ask this specific question if i'm a weightlifter or powerlifter and i stick in that 40 range and i get you know huge or I add a lot of hypertrophy. Is that hypertrophy going to be, am I going to be able to turn around then and do some heavy squats and that's going to end up being, I'm going to get stronger? Yeah, so at this point, because we don't know if fiber type specific hypertrophy is a real thing or not and i would say that again you have to be very careful because the ability to measure whether or not a muscle fiber grows it's i'm not calling it junk science but i'm telling you like i've been in those labs a lot and i'm just like what and you'll see some

crazy things like the people at the end of the study their fibers are smaller now than the beginning and you're just like so i don't have a tremendous amount of confidence in the technology and the people's ability to do it unless they this is same scientist for years of training when you throw grad students in and they learn it and then all of a sudden they chop them like it i just don't believe a lot of it to be honest with you so having said that since we don't know the merit of that concept i don't know if training at 40 or or training at 80% literally leads to the exact same morphology changes or not. We just, we don't know that. It could be differences throughout the muscle. So again, the proximal side versus the distal side

or something, or it could be something like the fiber types see some sort of changes. We don't know anything about that. So in lieu of that, if you both got to the exact same spot and the way that you grew was identical, you're still missing on all that opportunity when you trained light only to develop the strength side as well. And so if you're then using it to translate it into strength, I see no rationale why you would train light only. As a part of your training for other reasons, yeah, fine. But thinking that that's going to be in the same spot when you know, then you have to transfer that into strength. Yeah. And by the way, so before you go, Travis, to your point,

I took the question to mean for a given finite period, if you then extrapolate that, I'm not saying you should be training like that forever. I mentioned early on in the discussion. I was talking, that's what I'm saying. I think there's a benefit to having a strength phase. So that would preclude then you're not going to do a strength phase at 40%, you know, doing 30 reps. So I do think there is that benefit towards then being able to translate that in using the strength to then promote greater mechanical tension in. Then if you would do that strength phase, you'd use it. And here's another point of note. I also don't know, we talked about

fiber type specific differences. There's some emerging evidence, or at least preliminary evidence, that there might be a sarcoplasmic hypertrophy difference with higher repetition training versus lower repetition. That's what Andy said in his work too. Yeah, and I still think we're ways away. That's another emerging area that needs a lot more research. But it's an interesting discussion at least to have. And again, it would argue that doing both, if true, creating more myofibril hypertrophy with the lower rep training

and more sarcoplasmic with the higher rep training, would conceivably be synergistic. Let me add to that for the friends at home who just don't have any idea what just happened. So in theory, the muscle fibers, right? So you have a muscle cell, you have proteins inside of the muscle cell that cause contraction, right? And then you have a cell wall on the outside. And for years, bodybuilders have told us that there are certain types of lifting you can do that cause you to grow more of the proteins. And there are certain other ways to train that cause you to not grow more protein, but the cell wall, the diameter will increase. So the fiber can get bigger, but you didn't actually add any more contractile proteins.

That latter thing I talked about is what we call sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. So lots of things could explain it, but for example, you just added- You do a good job on YouTube with this very topic. So let me ask you guys- Let me finish this. The diameter of the fiber could be larger, but you may not be any stronger per se. And this is what explained a Travis Mash being continually increasing strength. Maybe he added more contractile proteins without adding size where somebody who could be equal size to Travis, maybe they got their gains in muscle by just adding more water.

Sarcoplasmic. Okay. Now what's interesting about that is we have in the last handful of years had research come out and Mike Roberts has just been awesome in this showing that this is probably a real thing. But the details of which we're missing on. So to finalize your actual question, because I still think it was a good question. I still do think even if that person wants to then translate it into

strength, we know that there are other potential benefits like potentially adding more capitalization, adding more mitochondria that would then enhance their muscular endurance, which could allow them to train more often, recover, et cetera. And so I don't think, I don't think the message wants to go out the other direction either, which is to say, Hey, if you're a strength athlete, you never should ever do more than five reps or whatever.

You should go through a muscular endurance phase because it may cause a different type of adaptation, may cause a different set of fibers to adapt and if anything it could allow enhanced recovery and training theoretically um so that you can go back to your strength work more so i don't think either any spectrum you kind of want to play on the spectrum it sounds like if if the goal is to be in this hypertrophy if the goal is hypertrophy having a massive top end strength is probably a huge benefit as the base to build that hypertrophy on. And if the goal is top end strength, you probably want to have a massive hypertrophy. Sure. Well, I would add a caveat to what Andy said.

If you're a strength athlete who has a weight class to make, there could be issues with, because your sarcoplasmic hypertrophy conceivably is not adding to you, contributing to strength. So you have to then keep that in mind. If you're a strength athlete without a weight class, then yeah. But that could be an issue for those in weight classes. I have data for both of you guys. It's pretty cool.

I've had my athletes do German volume. And when I say German volume here's what it was it was we did 10 by 10s but we only did it you know once a week we did undulating periodization otherwise we did 10 by 10s you know week one started 63 percent to my 10 then went to 68 then there was a deload and then it went to 70 percent at the very end and uh on the other days we went a little heavier that's the only the only program I can almost guarantee within three weeks after that workout, even my elite athletes PR'd their squat. I'm pretty sure that's the only workout that I've ever had.

So, like, what do you think played into that? Luck? I mean, there's a lot of athletes. There's a lot of data. With elite, all elite athletes, What would y'all think? Novelty? Yeah, bingo. That's what I was going to say.

Something different? Yeah, that it promoted a response they weren't used to that ultimately caused. Look, one of the things, one of the tenets that I live by is that a lot of things can work. Oh, yeah. You're good. Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. A lot of things can work, but a lot of things won't work over time. You can't just keep doing the same thing over and over. Only four weeks. Only four weeks.

Yeah. What I would say, Jeff, is I think it's highly unlikely that you induced a novel type of hypertrophy in that short time frame um it has to be simply the fact that you just got novel stimulus uh on those individuals right more blood flow in and out this is something different um that's okay so even if it was sarcoplasmic at that point it would be non-functional non-contractor right so my other question is, like, so Prilipin, you know, said, like, 1974, said, you know, to get strong, it's got to be 90% and above. So, like, how does that, if, like, if that has, how very little does that play into hypertrophy, though?

Because you guys are saying between, like, 85, 88, and all the way to 40. What happens when you go up there? Is it completely neurological, or what's happening? Why are people getting, why do you get stronger when you go up there is it completely neurological or what's happening why are people getting why do you get stronger when you go heavy of course you break down but another story well i mean the primary reason for increases or i shouldn't say the primary a primary reason for strength is neurological but there is certainly i think there has been some researchers who have challenged this recently but there's certainly a fairly strong correlation between strength and hypertrophy. Now, it depends on measurement.

We actually looked at this. A colleague of mine, Andrew Vygotsky, did an amazing job with statistically analyzing this. And what are you measuring? Are you measuring muscle thickness versus measuring a physiological cross-sectional area, so the whole muscle, which is a more relevant measurement in that respect, and also what statistical measure? And then it could be, as we've just been talking about, that there might be a specificity to contractile versus sarcoplasmic. We know it's not a linear. Certainly, it's not a linear correlation, meaning that as one goes up, the other goes up the exact same way, the exact same amount. And it could just be that there is consistent, a consistency with the type of hypertrophy, be it sarcoplasmic. And that's just pure speculation. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. So we also don't have any data that I'm aware of where we've looked at inside the fiber with as subtle of differences as 95% versus 85% versus things like that. And so we don't know if there's enhanced calcium affinity developing. So these are non neurological explanations that are also non hypertrophic. So that the fibers themselves could contract with more force or velocity independent of just growing bigger or having neurological changes outside of it. And then we know that that is something like calcium affinity is incredibly important for velocity contraction or power production in the cell. So we know that that is a real thing. We know that that is an adaptation that happens, but we don't know if

it is as different between 88% and 93%. Nobody knows. My last question is there isn't anyone on this program right now that's under 35 years old, which is kind of depressing because all of our muscle building may be over. What can we kind of expect? We've probably gotten very close to the total amount of muscle that we can grow in our lives. What can we kind of expect if we just keep training and keep this thing rolling for the next couple of decades, hopefully for the rest of our lives? Like, how does hypertrophy play out as you get older? Well, certainly there is a, it becomes harder

to gain muscle as you get older. There are hormonal issues that are chronic. So we talked earlier about the acute hormonal response. There's no question chronically that your testosterone levels, IGF-1 levels, et cetera, are involved with the maintenance and the ability to grow muscle. And those generally will decrease as you get older, making it more difficult. And look, recovery is going to slow. You do need to be more cognizant. Just there's some evidence that volume needs to be mitigated more,

managed more, the frequency that you're not, you need more recovery time between your workouts. For most people, I'm making generalizations here because different people, it's going to be very different for different people. And of course, life experience, have you been training your whole life versus someone who's just starting to train? These are all factors that enter into it. But yeah, once you're, I mean, if you get to your, hopefully your 60s, 70s and 80s, you're not going to be packing on muscle the way you did in your 20s.

It's just a fact. Is there like a density to the muscle that you are building versus pure size that is easier to put on when testosterone is pumping? Is there like a density to the muscle that you build? Maybe that's not right. I can see Andy's face completely scrunched, which really gives me a lot of confidence in myself. Yeah, me too. I'm not clear of the term density. I have, if I weighed 185. He read that in Flex Magazine.

That's exactly. No, well, no, I don't know the exact words. If I weighed 190 pounds when I was 24 years old, I probably had a much better ability to grow bigger muscles at 24. If I weigh 190 pounds now, but I'm stronger and my body fat's relatively the same, something has to be happening. And I don't know what that is. Am I – I've lost the show. Jesus.

Well, again, strength is a neurological component. So, again, I'm just not clear when you say is there a density factor. We'll get this part edited out. I'm sorry. I'm just joking. We're going to get rolling. Dr. Brad Schoenfeld, where can people find you? I'm all over the social media. Facebook,

I'm less active because their algorithms suck now. It's hard to put out. I'm an educator. I don't do that for, I don't do this to sell stuff, but Instagram and Twitter are my main social media outlets that I'm on. Just search me and you'll find me. Galpin! Instagram and Twitter. I've been on Facebook in some ages. Those are the things. YouTube, bro.

I love your YouTube. I'll say this for Brad as well. It's much easier if you're the type of folks who like to actually read the studies as well. It's much easier if you're the type of folks who like to actually read the studies and stuff, it's much easier to link on Twitter. So if you want to like say Brad publishes something newly, he will generally link to it on Instagram.

It's I'm not gonna update my bio every damn time. And he's not either. So if you're one of those, like, well, give us a link, just go to the Twitter. I'm sure you already put it up there so you can follow them there.

If you want the gist or just a summary of it, I'm sure his Instagram will be there. But that's the best places for sure to communicate. And then, yeah, of course, the YouTube videos for me are all up. Yeah, dude, if you guys are in school, you should go. If you're going to get your master's or whatever, or undergrad exercise science, you should go to Andy Galvin's YouTube. So it's really helping me, by the way.

Travis Mash. Go to mashlead.com. I just want to say what an honor it was to meet you. I know virtually, but I've read a lot of your work. Well, in school I'm forced to read a lot of your work, but I've read it on my own too, and it's really good. So you did not disappoint. I just want to say that.

Thank you. Doug Larson. You bet. My Instagram, Doug C. Larson. Brad, I appreciate you coming on the show, man. I really enjoyed this. Andy, good to see you. Andy, when are you going to move to the East Coast, bud?

We're ready for you. Literally never. Literally never. I'm Andrew Swarner. I'm not interested in anything on the East Coast. And literally knowing all three of you or four of you there, I still could not be less interested.

Good. I cannot be less interested in California, unfortunately. Ash's basement is about to get finished out to make you interested. Idaho. I could go Idaho. Yeah, that would be fun too. Idaho. I'm Anders Varner. At Anders Varner, we're Barbell Shrugged. Barbell underscore shrugged. Get over to BarbellShrugged.com forward slash DieselDad. And for everybody, that would be fun too. I hope. I'm Anders Varner. At Anders Varner, we're Barbell Shrugged.

At Barbell underscore Shrugged. Get over to BarbellShrugged.com forward slash DieselDad. And for everybody that is in San Diego, LA, Palm Springs, and Vegas, get over to Walmart. We are in the pharmacy. Three programs on the shelves. We'll see you guys next week. That's a wrap, friends.

We will see you guys on Tuesday with the DieselDad, Wednesday with Barbell Shrugged, Friday with the DieselDad. Stoked for all the shows coming out. Stoked for all the information. Really been enjoying getting some of this Diesel Dad specific content out. It's really hard-hitting, short, quick episodes, and really dig them. Make sure you get over to Organifi.com forward slash shrugged to save 20% and LeakyGutGuardian.com.

Use the code shrugged to save 10%. Friends, we'll see you tomorrow.