Barbell Shrugged - The 3 Mechanisms of Hypertrophy

Episode Date: January 18, 2017

How do you get big? That is the million dollar question. Everyone in the fitness industry seems to have a different answer for you, and they all claim to have the secret sauce. Take this supplement. Use this rep scheme. Drink this before you go to sleep. It goes on and on. We wanted to see what science has to say about this, and invited Andy Galpin on to this week's show along with Kenny Kane to talk about the science of getting big. We go deep into understanding what our bodies need to put on muscle, and how we can shift our training focus on this adaption goal.   In the show, Andy outlines the three mechanisms of hypertrophy. Can you guess what they are? 

If we understand the physiological stress needed to induce hypertrophy, then we can back-calculate what we have to do training-wise, or what matters, or what doesn't matter, or what's going to affect each other to get the desired adaptation. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Blatts. Oh, shit, we're going. Andy Galpin, Kenny Kane. This man was not prepared.

No, I was not ready for class. He was sleeping again. Sleeping again. Me or Andy? Andy part of the sleeping tribe. Well, I thought it was over 40, but I guess I was wrong. You've just aged Andy. Yeah.

He came up seven years. My time to sleep, one to two seconds. I'll be like, goodbye, Natasha. She's like, unreal. Ashley's been pissed for years. Well, we talked about that the other day with Dr. Kirk Parsley. We were talking about guys with more, you know, men normally can fall asleep more quickly. Yeah.

More muscle mass. More adenosine, is that what he said? Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's the thing that, that's what caffeine does by the way that's why caffeine activates the central nervous system is it competitively binds to the same thing that adenosine binds to adenosine is what puts you to sleep okay so it binds to that place and it doesn't allow that to happen so you are that's how it has a central nervous system effect oh right on yeah yeah that was really interesting i had no idea that it was actually like a a very common kind of gender-specific thing.

I don't know if that's actually gender-specific or it's just muscle mass-specific. Guys just happen to typically have more muscle mass per body weight. Yeah, you're saying muscle mass-specific, and yet men just happen to have more muscle mass. Well, you know why? Because you know what?

Dentisting puts you to sleep. You two at least know what dentisting is, right? Yeah. I remember. Why would we be here what adenosine is, right? Yeah. Why would we be here? Dr. Galvin, geez. ATP, right? Adenosine triphosphate. So when you break that up,

that's where you get your cellular energy from, right? So it goes from adenosine triphosphate, 1, 2, 3 phosphates, to diphosphate. Now you go to monophosphate and then you remove that last one. Now you have your free adenosine, right? You're just saying that because you saw the Kirk Parsley episode already. He said the exact same thing. Oh, did he? ATP.

Yeah, we recorded yesterday. So when adenosine levels are super high, that means you're low on energy. That means it's sleep time. Cool. Yeah, that's why. Is that what you're telling Natasha? My adenosine's high. Exactly. Sorry.

Folks, we're going to be talking about hypertrophy today. What's that? Building muscle. How do you make the muscles bigger? And luckily enough, we have a real-life muscle physiologist on the show. Oh, yeah. It's Dr. Andy Galvin. It's Andy.

For sure. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's Dr. Andy Galvin. It's Andy. For sure. So we're going to be – what direction do we want to take this? Because we talk about building muscle a lot. Good job starting this up. We only spent an hour setting this up. It's a strength and conditioning show. We're talking about building muscle. It's probably every third episode.

We're going to talk about the three mechanisms that need to be in place to build muscle mass and anti-hypertrophy. We just talked about this an hour ago. Andy brought it up, and we were all like, yeah, we know what those are. I've got my three mechanisms. You've got your three mechanisms. That's right. So we're going to hash and see if we can guess what they are.

We're going to start to show off. Which I feel very good about. I think I can make that happen. What do you think? What do you guys think they are? No, no. Since I do think I know what they are. I've got two. Hope and luck. I think I can make that happen. What do you think? What do you guys think? No, no. Since I do think I know what they are. I've got two.

Hope and luck. Hope and luck. Hope and luck. That's what I'm betting on. In prayer. In prayer. In prayer. In prayer.

I'm going to get bigger. Oh, man. I want to hear blood cells. Fuck. I don't even want to. I can't just know that I'm going to be so much different. Well, I mean, there's varying degrees. Are we talking about cellular mechanisms?

It doesn't matter. But, yeah, that would be a good start. Oh, shit. No, I pass. I'm pretty sure I have a good idea over there. So tell me if I'm going down the right track. Are you talking about, like, mechanical stress? That would be one of them.

Okay. So mechanical stress. Something about mechanical stress? That would be one of them. Mechanical stress. Something about metabolic stress. That would be two. Aneroglycolysis type stress. Something along those lines. You're in the ballpark. Then something around damage.

Tissue damage. You've got a winner. You bet. We're done. See you next week. Make sure you do that. At're done. See you next week. Good night. Make sure you do that. You'll be good to go. At a fourth, which would be prayer. Prayer.

Way. Two scoops away. Always. There's actually a couple of competing thoughts on that. So that would be one of them. And that was actually championed by well, I don't know if I want to say champion, but I'll give a lot of credit to Brad Schoenfeld. You guys know who Brad is.

And if you don't know who Brad is, you need to go look him up. He publishes the most amount of research in the planet by far on muscle hypertrophy. So fantastic. He's pretty active on Facebook especially. So I would really, really seek him out. And he wrote a really nice review article a few years ago that outlined this. So I would really encourage you, if you actually like this stuff, go read that paper. It's fairly easy to read, even for a non-scientist.

And I think it's actually just called Mechanisms of Skeletal Muscle Hypertrophy or something like that. I saw you just put out a book as well, just all about hypertrophy. He's got several books out, actually. I think the original one was Max Muscle Plan, and this one is Optimal Hy strength hypertrophy programming or something like that okay so he's got and those are like amazon books those are not um science books really they're practitioner friendly you'd find them at bards and noble kind of books so very very easy to read um he's speaking all over the world so he needs to get that credit because he really just does a tremendous amount of research in this area and i'm going to basically reiterate a regurgitate a

lot of the things that he's wrote so he needs to get that credit but on the opposite side of him is a guy named stew phillips in canada and sue is the same thing a little bit more of a molecular a lot more of a molecular-based scientist so he actually does biopsies and measures protein synthesis rates and things like that where brad just measures actually like how much bigger you got physically right so a little bit different outcome but he's got a different idea that it's really motor unit recruitment based. But really, I don't really see being that big of a difference, honestly, from a practitioner because the whole idea about the reason we need to understand this is then we can, if we understand the physiological stress needed

to induce hypertrophy, then we can back calculate what we have to do training-wise or what, or what doesn't matter, or what's going to affect each other to get the desired adaptation. So whether you're talking about Stu's activation of more motor units, or Brad's three mechanisms, it's really going to get you to a fairly similar

place training-wise. The methods may look similar, but what they're saying, the mechanisms of what's happening at the base, they may disagree on that or they may think it's something different, but it looks the same to the coach. It won't look exactly the same, but it would look similar. Yeah.

A lot of the concepts. Maximum muscle tension and maximum motor unit recruitment might still fall into just lift really, really heavy stuff really, really fast. Yes, exactly right. Right. So the thing you do to maximize muscle tension would be also the thing you would do to maximize motor unit recruitment. Right. So it would be.

So what's a motor unit? So the motor units, the way that your muscles contract is information comes from your central nervous system, which would be your brain, brainstem, and spinal cord. And that all comes from these big nerves, and those go out to smaller nerves, and then we kind of start branching our way through the body, right? So a motor unit is one of these alpha motor neurons and all the individual muscle fibers that it innervates. And this is like one of your most classic textbook physiology definitions.

Like, what's the definition of a motor unit? I guarantee I could have thrown that to both of you, and you would have been like, boom. That's one of the ones you're going to get hammered on, like every physiology student in the country. Constantly. Day one and day 365 right yeah it's always there and so what that basically means is all of your individual muscles are comprised of

probably millions of individual fibers or cells right and so not all those cells are innervated by the exacts are activated by the same nerve it would it would actually be disadvantageous for you if you did that you just lock up lock up. You'd lock up. You wouldn't have controlled movement, right? Yeah. You couldn't be very, very specific with how you move. That's why robots move the way they do? Exactly.

No, that's actually literally exactly why, right? You have maybe two or three nerves activating a leg as opposed to the thousands that you would have. They have a couple of motors and they have a couple of wires running, but we have thousands. Millions. Millions. Right. Wow.

So if you take just one muscle, one of your biceps muscles, you've got all these things going on there, all these neurons going on, and you can use mine as a demo because they're so large. Zooming in. Zoom in really far, please. Don't show perspective in the background. You Photoshop that? Nice.

And so what you would have is a bunch of neurons going in to activate maybe three fibers over here. Maybe one activates 30. And the more muscle fibers in a motor unit, the more force and power that that total muscle can generate. The less it has in it, the more specificity of movement you get. The more fine motor control, like being able to use your fingers to play the guitar. Exactly, right? And so if you look at something like your eyeball, you might have, say, three or maybe ten fibers in a motor unit, but your glute, you might have 10,000.

Right? Because what's your glute have to do? Like on, off, on, off, on, off, right? Did you get that, Hunter? Yeah. Try that again. I don't know if Natasha's going to be happy with that. He's always getting in trouble on the show.

Especially with these glutes. Anyone that's tuned in at the beginning is already gone. Oh, so gone. And you saw the Facebook Live. Oh, yeah. That was epic fail. Leading up believe this. Anyone that's tuned in at the beginning is already gone. Oh, so gone. And you saw the Facebook Live. Oh, yeah. Leading up to this. It was even worse. Yeah, so that's basically what it is.

So we don't have to have all three of those mechanisms. You don't have to have metabolic fatigue or metabolic stress. You don't have to have mechanical tension. And you don't have to have muscular damage. But you need to have at least one of those three, and probably if you can get yourself in a situation where you have two of three, then you're going to be in a really good spot,

or three of three would be tremendous too. I remember a few years ago you were saying, oh, you don't have to have damage for growth. Which means you don't have to be sore. Up to that point, I totally believed that that was one of the main reasons. It was like, oh, I don't have to be sore. Up to that point, I was like, I totally believe that that was one of the main reasons. Right. It was like, oh, I don't have to be sore. So there's no relationship at all between the level of sore you are.

I kept getting sore. Of course. I'm massively sore right now. But you don't have to have soreness to cause growth. You just simply have to activate growth. Now, the reason it kind of works is when you do the type of training that does make you sore, that tends to also be the type of thing that causes growth.

So there is sort of a loose relationship between those things. But if you just maximize soreness, that does not maximize growth. That's not going to put you in your spot. It's more correlated than causing a shock. There's an association, but there's a wall. There's a cliff where you drop off.

You're like, this is no longer productive. In fact, it can be detrimental if you're out for a month because you're so sore. So like a German volume training. Yeah. I mean, some could handle it, right? If you have a really, really, really extensive training history and you recover well, you might be able to do that kind of a load. But most people, 3 set to 10 at 60% of their max is going to make them very,

I mean, the people that you work with, that's going to crush them. They're going to be gone for a week. It works. I mean, you get stronger doing it. Right. And you grow doing that. So, I mean, 10 by 10, that's probably far excessive. Yeah.

So, practically, since we're talking about sets and reps and all that, for the three categories, like what are the types of training that give you that type of stimulus, which hopefully in this conversation spurs some type of growth? Yeah. So I want to back calculate this one, and I want to throw you two under the bus a little bit. Shit.

And we'll actually throw you kind of back under later. But what's the classic textbook programming prescription for hypertrophy? Three sets of 10, like you just said. Eight to 12 reps. Eight to twelve reps. Eight to twelve reps, right? Tens and twelves. Tens and twelves, right? Between three and five sets, usually.

I mean, that's pretty classic. At a load, what would the load be? Around 60 to 70. Okay, and then what would the rest interval be? Like a minute, minute and a half. This would be the time you take between sets, right? Well, Brad's work has actually quite clearly shown that a lot of that's not the case at all. In fact, what he's shown several times, number one,

that most of the time you can get equal hypertrophy with two to three minutes rest in between sets. Right now, have you ever done, I know you all three have. I know it. I guarantee it. I personally know you've done it. I personally know you've done it. I'm sure you have. But do that three sets of ten. Just go do three sets of ten of your squat.

70%. Go 65%. Now, most of you training are probably thinking, like, super easy, right? Now do it with 45 seconds rest in between. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That gets really hard, like, really fast. Oh, yeah.

Your reps are going to go from 12 to 10 to 8 to 6, like, pretty quick. To 4, yeah. Yeah, on the floor. Unless you're, like, crazy, crazy, crazy conditioned. Right. Or you're used to doing it, things like that. But most people, we always say that rest intervals are like the forgotten child of programming. Because no one just pays attention to them.

Yeah, they don't write them down usually. It's like, either don't rest at all or just rest until you feel like you're good. I would say when I started weightlifting, that's when I stopped timing my rest intervals. When I was doing the nine years I was training before I discovered weightlifting, you got 60 or 90 seconds almost all the time. Then you go away from it, right? Yeah, I got away from it because I wanted more optimal. I want to lift the heaviest load possible every time or the fastest.

So there's no doubt having a very tight or short rest interval, whatever it happens to be, a minute or so, plus or minus, it's a completely different training session than three minutes. Now, what we classically would say is, okay, because of what we originally thought was happening with the acute hormone response, now that we know that it actually doesn't matter. So, for example, we could do a, this is actually what my blows to minds, the acute change in testosterone, specifically after exercise probably plays

no role at all in hypertrophy so this is one thing people are like oh you got to make sure you you jack up testosterone this is why you do this type of thing you want to get this big growth hormone surge that doesn't actually change anything with hypertrophy probably is playing almost no role in inducing hypertrophy now the reason why exogenous testosterone works is because now you're talking digits fold increases in testosterone. Yeah. Not for a short peak. It's all day long, too.

Yeah, and it's jacked up there. Not a 15% increase. Right. It's a 5,000. If you're doing it right. Right, right. And you've gone way past physiological numbers now. Right.

But it's tremendously effective for that reason. And so once they start to realize that, they're like, wait a minute, what if I extend the rest interval to three minutes? What do you lose when you go to three minutes? Time. Right, okay. Your workout's three minutes longer, I guess. How would that feel different

if you did that? Your metabolic stress is going to be lower. You're going to be able to filter out all your metabolites that were produced from the first set. What do you gain? You recover. recover. So what happens then the next set or the set after that? You just get a better set. You're more rested. You can do more reps. So instead of doing 12, 10, 8, 6, now you're doing 12, 12, 12, 12, or what have you. So you get more volume. You're probably doing faster reps because you're not as tired. So you get a little more tension because you're contracting more forcefully.

You could have put on 5 more pounds maybe or five more percent, whatever, right? Movement qualities probably sustains. Yeah, right. Hopefully, right? Hopefully. That would be the goal. And so what happened when we played with just that one variable rest interval? We've shortened rest interval, which means metabolic stress went way up.

And so we lit ourself up on that metabolic stress for sure. That one is checked. Okay, mechanical tension, meaning heavy. Did it stress the connective properties sufficiently where they really had to work to connect? Okay. Well now, because I've had to shorten my rest interval, I got tired. I had to take five pounds off. And now you know what? I got to the next set. I realized I only got seven reps this time. I got to take 10 pounds off or a plate off. And so mechanical tension has started to leak down so I gained metabolic stress but I lost mechanical tension my damage might be about the same right when I do the opposite when I add breast I lose probably almost all the metabolic stimuli but I

keep the the load really high or the volume depending on what I want to do or some combination and so why do both of those work equally effectively, which is what Brad's research showed? Because we realize we've got these three mechanisms, and I can get one and gain the other one. Hitting two of the three at all times. I'm just deciding which one I want to gain. So that's the key is hitting two of the three pretty much at all times.

It'd be nice. For all intended stimuli. It'd be nice to gain all three a little bit. Right. And that's where you're probably going to get the most. But if you get two of the three really hard, if two are way up there, and one's...

Maybe you could focus on two one day, and then have a rotation in your training program. Exactly. Yeah. So this is when you have to pay attention to,

like a lot of the people you work with have multiple goals. They want to gain strength, and they want to gain muscle mass. Okay, now I understand this. I can put you in the situation that gets you the hypertrophy box,

but what's the other one you want checked off? Oh, okay, you want strength? So I'm going to give you more rest so we can keep the load higher and you'll be able to work a little bit more on strength while you're doing that. And so it allows you to understand these adaptations. Now you can pick the specific way

you manipulate them based on the other things that are going on in your program. So that's part of the rationale for having your first movement of the day being a heavier type set. So say you're squatting and you want to you want to put mass on your lower half and and you also want to get stronger so you know you build up to a one rep max and then you take off 10 and you do three sets of three or whatever you're going to do uh five sets two or or something where mechanical stress really is the goal with appropriate rest intervals three to five minutes

rest and all that and then your next set then now you're doing you know you're doing walking lunges for for five sets eight right something like that so you had you had the high tension stuff and then you had a little more volume or maybe maybe it's four sets 12 or whatever you want to do so you had more metabolic stress in the in the lunges you had the mechanical tension from the squats and there's a little bit of crossover a little bit with with each one of those things but then as far as mechanical uh or not mechanical, as far as tissue trauma, you're going to get sore from both of those things. That's kind of going to be thrown in there,

but you focused in this short, simple example on mechanical stress for the first movement and then metabolic stress for the second movement. And then again, the tissue damage is kind of sprinkled in there. You're probably going to be sore. But you wouldn't maximize tissue damage like you would if you did something like 10x10, where you're going to get just amazingly sore,

but the strength will be very, very low because the load has got to be so low, right? Where that's really going to give a lot of muscular damage. So if someone asked, would that type of training work? Yeah, of course it would. It just wouldn't do that. And so another thing that Brad did, which is really clever, is he started to look at our volume number. So what's our optimal repetition per set?

Because, again, our textbook says 8 to 12, right? Right. So he started to look at, okay, 5 to 8 or so, compared to 20, 25, 25, 30 reps per set, and again found equal hypertrophy. And you started like, okay, why is that possible? Equal hypertrophy, but probably not equal strength. So that doesn't mean equal everything.

Exactly right. So who got stronger? Right. The So that doesn't mean equal everything. Exactly right. So who got stronger? Right. The group that did the 5 to 8 reps. Right. Equal hypertrophy, but this group got way stronger. And so, again, you have to understand, well, what happened? What did you get more of with the 25 to 30 reps?

You got a lot more of the metabolic stuff, right? That's the pump, right? That is the pump that we talk about. That's why bodybuilders can be big but not strong. Even if they're benching 400 pounds, like they're not strong for this conversation like compared to benching 800 pounds. Like they're not powerful for strong

even if they're 300 pounds of muscle, they have some strength. But yeah, they're doing mostly volume. In a lot of cases, I'm stereotyping here in a lot of ways. But the metabolic stress they do get affords them the ability to get very, very, very big, even if they're not focusing specifically on strength.

You won't find a bodybuilder on the planet who only does sets of 8 to 12. You would never see that. They're going to go up to sets of 50, up to sets of 100, and they're going to go some singles, they're going to go some triples, they're going to play that whole spectrum. We've all seen the Ronnie Coleman leg press video, right?

All his videos are awesome. The old Unbelievable, that's the Ronnie Coleman leg press video, right? Oh, geez. Right? Well, whatever. Amazing. All his videos are awesome. Right? Amazing. The old, like, Unbelievable, like, that's the name of the DVD set, like, from back in the day. Like, the Unbelievable Ronnie Coleman video where he's doing, like, Ben Over Rose with, like, 495. And he's just, like, he's just kind of rocking them out. Yeah. That whole set is awesome.

Exactly. He's not weak. No. He's way stronger than all of us. Right? You cannot have that muscle, that kind of muscle without being weak being weak. Coming out of powerlifting. It's physically impossible to add muscle mass and not add strength. So can you take two steps back and just kind of talk, because where we train, we do a lot of 10s and 20s at our

gym, but we also do a lot of 5s and 3s as well. And so people's experience is very vast within that. And so obviously we're going to bias, especially when we're doing 10s, like right now or recently we've been doing three by tens floating between 60 and 70 percent. Various lifts, front and back, just as an example. But we also pepper in periodically 20s and use that systematically. Now that's a very different experience. And the endocrine experience, I mean, it feels, just from a practitioner standpoint, it feels like very different things.

So can you backtrack just one sec and kind of clarify the point that you were just making, but using that as a case example? Yeah, so sets of 10 versus sets of 20? Yeah, or even 5, just that experience. I mean, 10s are hard enough. And we're sprinkling in with the sets of 10 just as a reference. We're using basically 3 minutes as rest, plus or minus. But we're hitting that sort of spot versus our 20s.

Yeah. And we have used, like, we've done twos on a two-minute with a little metabolic piece at 85%, accumulating 16 reps over eight minutes or over 16 minutes, which is another technique we use. But just hit those first two if you don't mind. Yeah, so the heavy one, right? You're going to get a lot of mechanical tension. This is heavy, right? You're absolutely going to get that thing. You're still going to get a little bit of a metabolic

stress on there, but it's not going to be killer. And it's probably going to give you a little bit of damage, too. Like lifting that heavy for most of us, unless you're 23, nothing gets you sore anymore. Like when you're that age, nothing makes you tired. You're like, I'm super sore for an hour. And you feel great again. The rest of us, unless you're 23, nothing gets you sore anymore. Like when you're that age, nothing makes you tired. You're like, I'm super sore for an hour. And you feel great again.

The rest of us are like, I'm super sore for three weeks. You don't recover as fast. But that's going to get you the strength end of it and a little bit of the muscular damage of it. The other end of the spectrum, it's probably you don't have to check in at the beginning there. But boy, if you want to keep going, you feel the burn at rep 12. But you're trying to get eight more. And you have to check in at the beginning there. But, boy, if you want to keep going, you feel the burn at rep 12,

but you're trying to get eight more. And you have to be able to get that pump and to keep moving, even though the load, and this is the classic, like you've done so many reps where you can't even feed yourself anymore because your arm stops working, right? Like how can I not lift a pound? I started with 100-pound presses. I did them to like now I can't move the barbell.

And so you have enough strength there, no problem. It's just are you really willing to keep pushing and getting there? I did them to like, no, I can't move the barbell. And so you have enough strength there. No problem. It's just are you really willing to keep pushing and getting there? So that's going to be excessive metabolic damage. And if we take that even further, this is when the really exciting blood flow restriction comes in. And this is the mechanism behind how that works. So this would be if you wanted to take a voodoo band and just wrap it around your bicep or something,

and then you just train with it. Well, you would actually, you only use maybe 20% of your one rep max with that. So you're doing bicep curls with 20% of your max and you do 30 reps or something. And the burn in your arm is something like you've never felt before. Now you're not going to have muscular tissue, mechanical tension. That's not heavy. You're not going to get a tremendous amount of damage, though you can get pretty sore from it. But you're getting a whole bunch of metabolic stress.

And that's why blood flow restriction is so effective for hypertrophy training. And you're seeing a lot of people doing it now. A lot of athletes are doing it. This is actually one of the biggest things that we're working on with NASA going up. Like this is maybe the real, this is going to be potentially the answer for that problem. Because you can't induce weights up there. It's just such an engineering nightmare. You guys know, the full depth episode.

Yeah, that's an interesting thing for doing that type of ischemic training. It's really popular in some circles, especially in the bodybuilding world, where it's really easy on your joints. If you're only lifting 20% of your max, you're not stressed. If you're doing curls or whatever, your elbow's not really taking a lot of stress.

But in the astronaut example, how do you, I don't know if we need doing curls or whatever like your elbow's not really taking a lot of stress um but in the in the astronaut example like how do you i don't know if we need to go down the strap a hole but how do you do that type of training for all muscle groups oh it's super easy it's easy on your arm i'm wondering how you get that to your perineum no no yeah you just have a big cuff for your quad training my taint today. Sneether training. I need a compression. It's actually... I'm buying that domain, sneethertraining.com. Just think of it as if having you had compression shorts on. Okay. So they basically have that where the compression fills,

goes around the entire quad, and then you can just basically turn it on and it inflates and it cuts off a lot of the blood flow there. And then you can do bodyweight squats, you can do hinging, you can do lunging, step-ups, whatever you blood flow there. And then you can do body weight squats. You can do hinging, you can do lunging, step ups, whatever you want to do.

And now you're getting a similar effect. It's not perfect, but you're going to be able to get your arms and your quads. And if you do that, and then you do a bunch of movement based things where you're moving in different areas, that's going to get a lot. Because remember that metabolic stress is not just affecting the exercising muscle itself.

You got it going through the entire system. Yeah. So it's going to be most influencing the exercising muscle itself. You've got it going through the entire system. So it's going to be most influencing the exercising muscle itself. All right. I shouldn't turn that motorcycle down. Sorry. Sons of anarchy.

I got a question for you. When we were back at the University of Memphis, Rick Bloom was doing some stuff with scheming reperfusion. How does the reperfusion aspect of that affect this situation? When you uncuff and you get all that blood flow flowing back in,

wasn't there some type of mechanism there where there was causing some type of change? I don't remember exactly what he was doing. Well, there's a lot of mechanisms there. It's really the same thing. Look, all you're really doing is stimulating exercise. It's the same thing. The exact same occlusion happens. You'll need

depending on the movement you're doing, anywhere between 30 and 70% of your one rep max on to completely occlude a blood flow to an area. I'm not talking about the blood. I'm talking about normal, uncuffed training. Just from the contraction. The contraction pressure. 70% or lower is probably going to completely block

off blood flow. Then when you stop, the blood flow comes rushing back in. It's really the exact same mechanism so what you've got is this massive buildup of waste product in the tissue itself yeah carbon dioxide uh adenosine like all these things are getting way high right amp levels are getting way up and these are metabolic signaling uh signal life signaling signals it. No one would have known. I could have rolled right through that. Signal and stimuli? No.

Matched together, right? People are going to start saying it now. Stimuli. All these things are activating a whole sequence of gene. You have FOXOs going on. All these. FOXOs. Yeah.

These proteolytic actions are happening. Metabolic ones that are saying, okay, all kinds of damage in here. You've got acute inflammation, oxidative stress. This is a real problem. And then when that stuff gets cleared out, then you've got the signal that comes in and says, let me fix all of that. And so then the opposite starts rushing back in. So you've got everything from the nutrient level,

from glucose coming back in, all the way down to gene expression happening that are causing that whole cascade. So I don't know if there was a particular protein you were remembering or referring to or anything. No, I don't know. I just didn't remember what the hell he was doing, and I was curious if you did. If it had any relevance to our conversation.

I think he was looking at nitric oxide particularly, but I can't remember. Or it's nitrite and nitrate. That does ring a bell. That's right, which is one of the things that is in a lot of the pre-workout supplements these days. Yeah, it used to be. That does ring a bell. Yeah. That's right, which is one of the things that is in a lot of the pre-workout supplements these days.

Yeah, it used to be. They've fixed that now. They've engineered back around. It's a vasodilator. Yeah, that's what they're doing arginine stuff for. It's because it's more bioavailable. But that's where

that's all coming from. Let's take a break real quick. When we come back, I want to talk about how conditioning plays a role. Or can it? Yeah. I wrestled in high school.

Picked up some jiu-jitsu after that. But between those two I started working out with a couple of meatheads. Doing bench press curls, things like that, never doing legs. You know, the standard gym guy workout. Never really got anywhere with it, just enjoyed my time at the gym, kind of socializing. I've done CrossFit since 2009, and I started playing with the barbell just a little bit, you know, doing some overhead squats and front squats, thrusters, you know, basic Metcon. I really shied away from doing strength training because it was intimidating, you know, I'd

never been a strong guy. At 130 pounds, I could always play that size card. I could always say, okay, yeah, clean 220, but come on, I'm 130 pounds. But I've been crossfitting since 2009, so it was time for me to nut up and do something different. And so as an athlete, I was like, what is the next step for me?

It's time to gain some weight and time to find some strength. I'd say the biggest thing that sparked me to do the muscle gain challenge was a simple workout that I did with a buddy that was 12.96 of 185 pound power cleans and ring dips, like that's a 90 second workout. He crushed it. And it took me 12 and 1 half minutes to be put down that

hard by a workout. It was really like a blow to me. That was the evolution for me. I was like, I have to get stronger. I don't feel capable at all. The volume absolutely blew me away. I had no idea what I was in for volume-wise because this is coming from somebody who lifted Monday and Thursday.

That was the days I lifted. That was it. One lift, snatch on Monday, clean on Thursday. I might squat on Saturday. It was hard, but being stuck where I was, I was ready for a challenge and just something different. The conditioning and the musclecle Gain Challenge is is perfect complement to the program. It's short and intense workouts that are really there to help you kinda maintain your abilities. You know, your ability to do pull-ups and muscle

ups and things like that, all those needs are addressed and so you know a lot of people think again with the Mus gain challenge Oh shit, I'm gonna gain 20 30 pounds My pull-ups are gonna suck. I won't have handstand push-ups and that's all bullshit Because they make you do those things multiple times a week All the skills that you you know need or value will remain intact Before the muscle gain challenge my nutrition was pretty zone paleo because I was so into CrossFit I think that I was underfed.

For breakfast I remember having three blocks of egg whites with some almonds and some unsweetened applesauce and it was like a three block breakfast. I guess I didn't think about eating for my goals, but food is the most important tool that you can use to get strong. I always wanted to be super healthy and have this zoned out, you know, paleo-type diet, but I also wanted to be a lot stronger. By abandoning those principles

and taking on the proper nutrition, you know, I made a huge change. Just using the knowledge that they give you through the Faction Foods Nutrition Course and all the tips on nutrient timing, when to eat, when to eat what, those things become a habit. And they actually introduce you to habits in the Muscle Gain Challenge. Here's habit one, weigh yourself daily. Habit two, eat this after you work out. And those habits, I still use them, you know.

After the first four weeks, I could tell that I was on the right track. My first time maxing my back squat during the challenge, I made like a 15-pound PR, and it was the first time I'd ever squatted I think 275 pounds high bar and I was I was like okay this shit works when I started the challenge I was I was 130 pounds had a 2x bodyweight back squat like on the dot I think I was 260 265 on my squat at the end of the challenge I was over 150 pounds I had a 300 pound front squat and a 365 pound back squat so my squat went up a hundred pounds during this muscle gain challenge

competing in weightlifting was part of I think it just like a natural progression if you do this you know runners run 5ks 10ks you know Cross, you know, crossfitters compete in crossfit competitions and you get into weightlifting and I think it's just a natural progression to want to do a competition. My goal is to try to maximize my strength in the current body weight that I'm at now and compete in December at the American Open. And then after that, if I feel like I'm kind of maxed out on my body weight, maybe bump it up a weight class and kind of relive the whole muscle gain challenge thing and

see how far I can take this. Strength helps build confidence and a confident person walks you know differently than someone who's unsure of themselves. And being strong and just having that whole thing about you I think is attractive to people. Chicks definitely dig that. Being stronger has absolutely changed me fundamentally in just the way I think and feel about things. Definitely more patient. I'm nicer. I'm happier, more confident and I can help move your couch a lot more efficiently now.

Nice. We're back. We can't be back. Andy. The good doctor's on his phone. He's not even paying attention. Hold on, hold on. Sorry, I'm tweeting.

Texting my bitches. Oh, my gosh. Thank you. I was texting my mom. My surprise present for the... Thank you. Thanks, Doug. Cool.

She's one of many. She's in the stable. I love you, Mom. Oh, man. Dick us out, Mom. Oh, man. Dig us out, Mike. We've never had that at a show before. I love that Mike's the guy to dig us out of that. Of the four of us, he's the one.

How'd that happen? Well, my appearance on the show, we short lived. Jeez, guys. It's been great. Really taking it far this time. It's been great being a part of the show. So we rolled through mechanical tension a little bit. We talked about metabolic stress quite a bit.

And then all the trauma stuff, all the tissue breakdown stuff was kind of just like, oh, well, it'll be in there a little bit. If you do an insanely high volume, you'll definitely be sore. But we haven't really talked about specific mechanisms to induce some type of tissue damage, like long eccentrics or tempo reps or things like that. So how do those type of repetitions factor into this? Yeah, so if we actually kind of back all the way up a little bit, this is one of the reasons why I'm never particularly interested

in talking a lot about hypertrophy programming because I think it's super easy. You basically can't screw it up. You can go anywhere between like 3 and 30. Right, right. Okay, is that a big enough window? Or actually 3 and 100 probably, really. This is another one of those examples where

do something that makes you sore? Okay, you probably landed right. Okay, what's your answer? Maybe you want to do one set of one, but that one repetition is a 35 second eccentric squat. That's probably going to make a lot of people sore and that would be enough because you have mechanical tension the whole time. When you start adding things like different tempo,

and what I mean by that is the amount of time you spend in the repetition, right? Well, then that throws the rep scheme numbers way off because you could do three sets of five and be very, very sore if that was a 10-second, 10-second, 10-second rep, each one of them. That's why a lot of people like tempo is they can actually do the math on how much time the muscle is under tension versus saying three sets of eight. It's like an estimate of how much time you're actually in the squat. Right. So the time under tension thing is important too,

and that's one of the components to it, but it's not the overarching has to have happen thing. Like when we were kind of growing up, that was a big thing, time under tension, right? You have to make sure you control this and count this and stuff. Well, we've realized that's probably not a huge deal because a lot of other things factor in. It's not to say that it's unimportant, but it's not probably the king of all things hypertrophy needed for that. And what's really interesting about it is, you know, I'll give the classic example of the typical student in my classroom.

I realize I'm going to probably say some un-PC things right now, but this is legitimately based on numbers in my classroom. This is the place to put it. Not at the university campus. Yeah, right? Isn't it weird how we're not allowed to actually do that in university anymore? Anyways. Place where you're supposed to go to have open thought and discussion, but apparently you offend

people. So, anyways. Well, a lot of the times you'll have females that are interested in working out, but they don't want to bulk up. Okay, great. And so they're like, well, I'm going to stay light. I'm going to do more reps. I'll do like sets of 15 or sets of 20, nice and light because I want to tone. We're like, great.

So you're going to land still just smack down. Well, every time I train, I just bulk up so fast I can't train. Yeah, because you're doing right dead in the middle of that perfect hypertrophy zone, which is your 10 to 12 to 15 to 20. You're landing right there. Right? Oh, okay, so why don't we go the other way? It's counterintuitive, but that makes sense why they think that's the

right thing to do, but it maybe is not the right thing to do if they're trying to minimize hypertrophy. Yeah, they would probably go the other end of the spectrum and put you in a little bit better spot, which is actually heavier for less total time under tension. Yeah. And not doing things that are going to make you very, very sore,

like massive eccentric stuff. That would make you stronger but not necessarily bigger. Exactly. And you could still burn a lot of reps. You could still lose a lot of weight if you wanted to get a workout in. You could sweat a lot. You could do more circuit or interval-based stuff, throw in conditioning, do other things that are going to allow you to still train really, really hard. You're not going to get

really, really sore. You won't get hugely buff. You're going to build a little bit of muscle. You're still moving. But you're going to get whatever adaptation that you were there for, the burn exercise or energy or lose fat or whatever you're trying to look for. So the eccentric stuff too is another good way. This is anytime you're lowering or going against the direction

of the force, and you're specifically trying to extend the amount of time it would take if you just let gravity do its job. That's going to usually induce a lot more damage than the concentric stuff, which is something that you need to take advantage of. So for example, if you imagine pushing a prowler, this is a great example of an exercise that's primarily concentric. You're pushing the load the entire time. This is why you can do things like Prowler pushes a lot, because you can burn a lot of gas on them, and you don't get really, really, really sore. But if

you did things like a lot of box jumps, or jumping off of things, and you're not used to it, you're going to get really sore really fast. High-speed eccentrics, like when you're landing, tends to make you feel very sore. Plow metrics make you casually sore. Exactly, exactly.

So I had a UFC fighter I worked with years ago, and he needed his – oh, my gosh. I saw that happening. He's putting his foot up there. One of his big issues was, you know, just being basically more athletic on his feet. And so he went from never really – he didn't play field sports as an athlete growing up or anything like that. And he went out and did a bunch of agility work, change of direction stuff on the field and came back the next day. And a couple days later, it was like my calves, my ankles, like my knees shot. I'm done. I'm so sore.

I'm like, yeah, I didn't tell you to do that. That's not what I wanted was an hour and a half of agility drills. But that caused him, even him, a huge athlete, a lot of hypertrophy in that very small window because he caused a lot of damage. That was not metabolically taxing at all for him. It was definitely not heavy for him, but it caused a lot of muscular damage. Speaking of MMA fighters and other weight class sport

athletes where they're coming up onto their event, whether it's a fight or whatever, they're typically trying to ratchet their weight down. That way they can make weight. They want to be as big as possible in the weight class, but typically they're already pretty big and they're typically trying to ratchet their weight down. That way they can make weight. They want to be as big as possible in the weight class, but typically they're already pretty big, and they're trying to just barely skate by at weigh-ins.

Things like pushing a prowler, given that it's concentric only, you're not going to get particularly sore because there's no eccentrics. The chance of you putting on a lot of weight hypertrophy-wise by doing something like pushing a prowler is really, really low. Not when they're already pretty trained. Yeah, helps your conditioning. It's super, super safe. It's easy on your joints. And then also, it's not going to spur any mechanism for growth. And so if you're trying to be conditioned, but you don't want to be sore, and you don't want to be tired, and you don't want to put on any

growth for something like a fight, then it's a great option. And other similar things like it are great options. If you're a power lifter and you're in a weight class, if you're a weight lifter and you're in a weight class, or if, again, you're just not wanting to put on five more pounds for your upcoming wedding or whatever it happens to be, but you still want to get strong for all these things, it's the same answer either way, right? So stick to the primarily concentric-based movements.

This would be things like a deadlift, right? Concentric, and then instead of lowering it back to the ground, you can just drop it. Okay, that's going to keep you concentric. You're not going to get This would be things like a deadlift, right? Concentric. And then instead of lowering it back to the ground, you can just drop it. Right? Okay, that's going to keep you concentric. You're not going to get as sore as if you really took a five-second time under tension lowering it and setting it. That's when you're going to be blown to all kinds of sore.

You can do high pulls. Just don't do the catch. You know, a lot of those things. Yeah. We used to do that a lot before MMA fights. Lots of clean pulls, lots of snatch pulls. Just pull it and drop it on the ground. Right.

Call it good. Moving on to the next one. Like jerks and reset to the back of clean pulls, lots of snatch pulls. Just pull it and drop it on the ground. Call it good. Move on to the next one. Like jerks and reset to the back of the rack, drop it back down, go again. You catch that little bit right there, that's a little bit eccentric when you catch the jerk, but don't take the time to lower it back down to your shoulder, reset, and then go again.

Things like that. So that all puts you in a pretty good place where you can still have some hypertrophy, and you're going to have some of it. If you did that over time, if you did that concentric-based training only for five years, you're going to be bulkier at the end of the five years than you were at the beginning. But that's going to take a long time, and it's going to be a few pounds. So it's happening.

It's just not at a very, very large scale. And that's what most people are, or some people are looking for. Right. If you're still pushing a prowler, like if you're contracting your muscles, there's some mechanical tension there. And then, of course, you push it a long way, like you're going to feel your quads start to burn. So there's some mechanical stress there. Right. If you're still pushing a prowler, like if you're contracting your muscles, there's some mechanical tension there. And then of course you push it a long way, like you're going to feel your quad start to burn. So there's some mechanical stress there. Absolutely. Or excuse me, there's some metabolic stress there, but the chances of you getting really, really big as fast as possible compared to other methods is just really, really low.

Yeah. Right. It's not going to happen. But again, this is why even you'll see people that like bodybuilders, a lot of bodybuilders or anyone in that category, it doesn't matter if they're competing in bodybuilding or anyone that's trying to put on muscle mass, they will also do things that are in your anaerobic conditioning space. So they will do things like sprint up hills. They'll do stairs.

They'll do other things like that. And you're like, why are they doing conditioning? Like, well, they're trying to get that out into the spectrum as they had maybe a very heavy lifting day today. And they want to complement that with things that push the anaerobic conditioning, things that push the metabolic stress in a totally different way that's way more than you could ever get. I mean, think about it.

You ever thrown up from arm day? No. No. Ever thrown up from leg day? Yeah. Yeah, leg day. Right, for sure. I heard a guy throw up from back day. I was like, damn, that's fucking intense. Back day? Yeah. You thrown up from leg day? Yeah, I've thrown up from leg day. Right, for sure. I heard a guy throw up from back day.

I was like, damn, that's fucking intense. Back day? Yeah. You threw up from back day? No, no, I didn't throw up from back day. It was a bodybuilder. Oh, my gosh. He threw up back and biceps day, and he threw up, and I was like, and he's not out of shape.

He's a fucking pro, pro, pro bodybuilder. I was like, that's insane to throw up from back day. Yeah. So when you do different movements like that, there's a level of systematic insult that causes really upsetting to the entire body where you're like, we've got a projectile. Get rid of some things. And so you can compliment

and you can do this. Some bodybuilders will do track workouts and they'll maybe even sprint. In fact, one interesting study or couple actually showed that even wind gates, so this is 30 second bike sprints all out, can still induce hypertrophy in the legs. Oh, yeah. All right, now this is not probably your go-to mechanism,

but it still has that metabolic insult. Another classic example why a couple of colleagues published a paper several years ago that showed equal and even greater hypertrophy in the legs with young and old people after 60 minutes of cycling three days a week. And you're like, well, what? Like, yeah, they cycled.

That's it. They weren't taking tests. They weren't having a bunch of protein or anything else that you would normal. Young and old people, well, they were all very, very untrained. And so that little bit of a stimulus was enough. Now, if you tested them again, six months later, six years later, that's probably not going to be the type of stimulus that causes growth anymore, but it did. And the number, again, the amount of growth they had

was actually at, if not exceeding what you would predict with strength training or normal traditional route. So I think that what that shows us is we have got a lot more plasticity in our ability to adapt than people realize. And it is not so rigid and set and fast that you cannot do this. You have to do this. Your body, this only works one way. Hypertrophy, conditioning, these adaptations, they come in a lot of fashions. And we all respond very different. And we have to be like, okay, most people probably want to do three sets of 10 of 8 to 12.

If you started everyone on the planet with that prescription, it's probably going to work for 80% of the people really well, but you're not 80% of the people you're you. So if you're talking about running a gym and you've got a hundred people walking in, if you start every single one of them with your, with your standard textbook prescription, that's probably going to save you a lot of guesswork and a lot of time. Cause it will be good for most people. But then we go, you know, you're not responding well to that or that's too heavy for you. You're getting way too sore from that

or you don't have the technical ability to do those movements. Whatever reason you're coming up with, maybe we're going to start you by just pushing the prowler. Okay, we're going to start you with some other prescription. You don't like lifting heavy mentally or you don't enjoy it. It's too hard. What do you like? Oh, you like longer stuff.

Okay, we're going to start you over here, actually. Oh, I like sets of 50. Great, you're going to go over there. Maybe this could be even something like holds, isometrics. You get the idea, but now you have options, and you can tailor and find out what's hitting them going, oh, man, I just love it when we do those wall squats. Okay, great, we're going to do those.

We're going to build that in your program, or we're going to do one other thing you do. And so that's also why you can't complain and be like, all these textbooks are so stupid. No, they're not. They're pretty much right. They're just not perfect for everyone. And it is a pretty good damn starting spot. So even with the advancements we've

learned, we're not regressing and taking that stuff out of the books. We're just now saying you actually have more options than maybe we said before. One of the things I noticed when I went for more of like a bodybuilding protocol, did that for years, discovered weightlifting, started doing like no more than three or five reps at a time, and then I put on some size. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And specifically in some muscle groups which I had trouble with previously. And I wasn't even trying. I wasn't focused on it. I wasn't thinking about it. I was just trying to move faster, be stronger. And the next thing I know, with rep schemes that weren't supposed to make me bigger. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was like, oh, wow, why is this muscle group getting bigger? It must be from that exercise. You know, everything I had read up to that point, I was wrong. Yeah.

And it was, I think there's something to be said. Well, I think I'm a good responder to that genetically. And then also if you've been doing something one way for a long time, just switch up the stimulus. Absolutely. This is why we would encourage people to, if you want a well-rounded print printing program, you should maybe have each body part doing different things every week. Right. And so maybe one of the days your glutes do singles, doubles, triples,

something like that. One of the days maybe sets of eight to 10. One of the days maybe sets of 50 to a hundred, something the days maybe sets of 50 to 100. Something like that. And if you don't want to do it every week, maybe every month you change it. Whatever you want to do. But, yeah, you're exactly right, Mike, is you want that.

If you've been doing the same thing for 10 years in a body part, maybe change it up. Have you ever done really, really, really heavy bicep curls? Like sets of like, yeah, right? It's crazy. Do those. If you've never done anything besides like 12 or more reps or your curls,

do as heavy as you can do for threes. I remember doing that with sit-ups, actually, on like those inverted tables where you hook your feet in, lay in backwards, and doing as heavy as I could for like three or four. And my abs went and just ripped in size. Couldn't believe it. Now, you don't want to do that maybe all the time. Most people probably don't want to do that.

I want some big-ass abs. My karate instructor used to hang me up, sit down when I was getting ready for my black belt test. He used to that maybe all the time. Most people probably don't want to do that. Want some big ass abs. My karate instructor used to hang me upside down when I was getting ready for my black belt test. He used to put us on the board and hang us upside down on those, on those wall setup things. And then he'd- Dump water over your face? No.

But he would hammer fist us. Oh, nice. On the way down, he'd hit you, and then you'd go again. Yeah. Did you fart a lot? A little bit then. I was experimenting with proteins in the 80s. True story.

The proteins in the 80s and 90s. Oh, man. Dude. Oh, man. The smell. It was explosive. Might as well just be eating chalk. I remember sitting at my kitchen table just staring at my shaker bottle in high school.

Do I really want this? Close my nose. Like, get down. They just mean like, I'm not doing this for you. I'll drink those instead. It's like someone now introduces to me a new supplement. I got this new supplement. We've been working on the flavor.

What do you think? I'm like, it's great. Every time. It's great. Compared to what I was drinking in 1997. This is fantastic. What you mentioned earlier about your muscles specific too, we know this very clearly now. We've shown this in our lab that each of your muscles actually has different amounts of

these myogenic or growth-inducing proteins, and they express the genes differently too. So what that literally means is you probably need to train some of the muscles a little bit differently. So what's good for my quads might not be good for my hamstrings. Exactly. And your calf. This is exactly why the calf doesn't grow as much. Right. Why it's notoriously difficult to hypertrophy your calf, your rhomboids, things like this.

And so what we probably need to do then is start maybe even matching or at least experimenting with, okay, I'm not getting the growth in my traps that I need. I'm not getting growth in my hamstrings. Why? That's because I'm doing this every time. Well, maybe I need to hit the other end of the spectrum or do something different with it and try that for a month or six weeks and see what happens. And my guess is you're going to see a lot better results when you do that because it may need one of the other ends of those three mechanisms of hypertrophy. When I was putting together a nutrition course years and years and years ago, I was making a comparison between animal-based proteins and kind of more plant-based proteins, finding complementary proteins like mixing beans and rice and things like that.

And so the comparison I made at the time was if you're a 200-pound guy and you're trying to get a gram protein per pound of body weight, it's relatively easy to do if you're eating animal proteins. But if you want to do something like mix beans and rice, like how much food do you really need to eat to get that 200 grams of protein total? So it ended up being something like 3,500 calories just from beans and rice. Like in your day, to get the amount of protein you would need to match the protein from the animal source. And then when I dug a little deeper and I looked at the amino acid profile of the two different, I think I was doing beef and then the beans and rice, and I looked

at branched chain amino acids, like the leucine content in the animal protein was like three times as high as it was in the plant-based protein, which you can speak to this probably more than I can about leucine being like the primary amino acid that stimulates the cascade of cell signaling pathways and whatnot that lead to muscular growth. And so that was just one example of many that we probably come up with why animal-based proteins are likely better in some cases than trying to get all your protein from purely animal sources. So can you riff on that a little bit? Do you know anything about the leucine content and different types of proteins?

Yeah, a lot. What I would say is my biggest piece of advice on all of that is all of us need to just calm the fuck down. In particular me? Is that what you're saying? No. That's a great example of it. Ten years ago, you're just like, let's just look at total protein number and we'll make all these decisions and see, like, this is why animal-based protein is so much better

because look at total protein. Then we start to realize actually maybe total protein throughout the day doesn't matter that much for growth. Actually, what matters is how much essential amino acid. And so the old 20 grams, 25 grams of protein per serving is now everyone's like, well, that doesn't matter, actually. What matters is, are you getting your six grams of essential amino acid per serving? That's what actually matters.

And then we start folding that back even further and saying, OK, well, let's look at leucine or valine or one of these branching amino acids. And then we were like, back even further and saying, okay, well let's look at leucine or valine or one of these branching amino acids. And then we're like, okay, leucine is the key regulator. It's it. This is the one turning on the myogenic process. It's turning on growth. Boom. Great. We start giving these big trials of leucine to people and realize BCAAs don't do shit.

Damn it. All right. So now we're like, okay, there's some... Dude, I drank all that really bad tasting shit for so long right that's true BCAA tastes like shit

dude so bad terrible right now it's not to say they don't do anything so I'm probably just infuriated half the internet right there

at least supplement supplement companies but they have they have a marginal to moderate effect at best but that doesn't mean

right or wrong because what's what's important there to understand is to step back and ask yourself first, well, what effect am I really trying to get? If I'm interested in chasing these things that taste like shit and they're $50 a month and serving for a 0% to 3% improvement,

is that worth it or not? Well, for some of you, you're like, yes. And I'll say, great. Some of you are like, no, then great. And so it's not a work or not work. It's defining what work means. It's not going to give you 45% growth. well for some of you you're like yes and i'll say great some of you are like no then then great and so it's not a work or not work it's defining what work means right it's not going to give you 45 growth in a day like that's not where we're at and so some of you were like yes i will take i will spend a hundred dollars a month on bcaas and if that gives me three percent difference in

a year that's worth it there's somebody over here three percent they're like holy shit give it to me is it magic like that's amazing exactly right so it's not a work or not issue. That's probably one of the biggest questions I get as BCAs. We need a whole other show for me to answer this question. Do they work or not? I'm like, yes. Every supplement ever works. All of them work. We have to have a whole conversation about what work means

though. How are you operationally defining in that conversation? Have you already picked all the other low-hanging fruit? It's like, oh, you're not even eating whole foods Relationally defining in that conversation. Have you already picked all the other low-hanging fruit? Right. It's like, oh, you're not even eating whole foods, and you're worried about getting BCAAs at this point.

This could be an issue. Work versus worth is a different question. Is it worth it versus does it work? Right. That's the question of is it worth it? Right. Like, does it work? Well, again, if you're 200 pounds and you're consuming 350 grams a day of animal protein, I'm not sure

BCAAs are going to do anything. Probably not. You're tapped out. Are you on a lower base? Then work matters. Then it does. It doesn't matter. Are you training a lot? Are you not training a lot? This is one of the things. When we give leucine in cell culture and we give it to rats and animal

models, it seems to be extremely effective at causing hypertrophy. When we give it to humans over a big scale, it doesn it seems to be extremely effective at causing hypertrophy. When we give it to humans over big scale, it doesn't seem to be having much of an influence. That doesn't mean we change it. As we continue to go in the next step, then we're going to start to identify, oh, it's leucine in this format

or it's leucine combined with this or this is when leucine matters. We're only going to continue to discover because clearly there's some relationship there, but we're not at the level where we're like, this is the losing matters. We're only going to continue to discover because clearly there's some relationship there, but we're not at the level where we're like, this is the key one. And it's also sort of, for me, it's pretty stupid to think that your body is so fragile

that it's relying all of its muscle growth on this one particular amino acid of which there are so many. And so there's not one thing, and it's also underplaying your ability to find ways around systems. Your body's ability. So don't have enough leucine? We'll figure out a way to get around that. We'll do something else. We'll up-regulate

the signaling mechanism so we don't need as much of this protein to kick this stuff on. Or we'll find another way around it. We'll find a surrogate for it. Some other way we'll get there. We need to calm down of being so like, absolutely, you need to have this much. Or we're going to go hard and fast and say,

of course we can, animals, proteins better, or of course it doesn't matter. We can't, of course, anything right now. We just don't know of these types of things. So we have some information there. Have you read Doug's paper? I mean, there's also,

I mean, I did a Facebook post about it. It's really in-depth. Basically, it's science. I mean, and what Doug was talking about was. Peer reviewed. All my friends read it. All my peers. All my other idiot coaches.

So 10, 15 years ago, we're thinking about like plant-based proteins. We're thinking about rice and beans. And now we have. So much better. All this stuff that we've discovered since then. You know, pea proteins, hemp, all these things, which aren't rice and beans. I think what's actually more interesting...

They're pea and hemp. They're pea and hemp. But it does make it easier to get that balance between things because when I thought about plant-based proteins back in the day, it was like, how much protein does broccoli have in it? Nobody was talking about, can we powder down some pea protein? You haven't even had the discussion of bioavailability yet. And now this thing gets even more complicated.

So now you start calculating numbers. Well, if I look on the nutrition label, broccoli's got nine grams of protein per serving or whatever it is. You know, it's a lot for a plant. And steak's got 35. Oh, okay, great. Or whatever your numbers happen to be. Whichever light you're trying to make look better, you can spin the numbers however you want, right?

Sure. Well, now you haven't talked about, okay, when it actually gets into my gut, how much am I actually able to physically break down and absorb? Now I get through. And then we haven't even started talking about what happens when you take it through different cooking mechanisms. So when you cook those things differently, then you're going to have different absorption levels.

This is all going to denature some of the proteins. You're going to lose some micronutrients, but you're going to gain availability of some. And even like a sweet potato, if you look at Penn State's lab, they're phenomenal. They've got this food and nutrition lab. When they've looked at the potato and saw significantly different changes in blood sugar based on the way you cook it,

mash it, broil it, bake it. This all has massive- What I want to know is which way it works. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Right? And so it's far too complex to just be like, I looked at the protein, I divided it by the calories, boom, better.

Really? It's not that simple. Like, we haven't even discussed any of these other layers behind it. I've got to redo my whole course. I almost think it's- Me too. I mean, with that- Hope that's not that simple like we haven't discussed any of these other layers behind it I gotta redo my whole course I almost think it's with that point it's kind of comical sometimes when someone's like oh I adjusted my macros by

1% and I lost all this weight I'm like you know yes that happened and it's probably not why you think it happened not even close yeah uh it also is like i'm totally derailing and going somewhere else uh but it's okay we're about to wrap it up anyway okay this is this is the time to get really you know tangential off track you say it um with

what we talked about earlier is another avenue that I hear this one a lot is the apparent confliction between doing endurance training and hypertrophy. Oh, yeah. All right. And so we were going to go here. We never really got there. But we can kind of. We tried to. Yeah.

Start the conversation a little bit where, you know, when we were all growing up, it was like, absolutely, do not break a sweat outside of your hypertrophy training. Right. And that was all based on originally, at least what got the bulk of the attention was Hickson's classic 1980 paper. Right. Such a good read. Fucking Hickson. I read it in Thor last night.

Yeah, Thor sleep. I assume he had follow-up questions for you. He's a sharp cookie, Hickson. That's a really classic study where uh a guy went down he worked with a guy named john alazi who was a father of biochemistry for the most part in humans um in st louis and they basically and i'm kind of cutting the story short based on time but alazi was a long time runner distance runner etc etc was always giving crap to hickson about hey you need to start running with me hickson was a longtime runner, distance runner, et cetera, et cetera. He was always giving crap to Hickson about, hey, you need to start running with me.

Hickson was a lifter at the time. He was like, okay, fine. Started running with him. Started noticing, man, every time I run with this guy, my bench goes down. And then they basically ended up fighting, and they ended up getting kicked out of the lab because of the whole thing. And he was basically like, no, this endurance training is bad for my lifting. So he launched a study where he had people do a little bit of both or a combination and found that the endurance training inhibited the strength and hypertrophy gains, but the strength stuff did not inhibit the endurance gains.

All right. This is 1980. This is the launch of now our… Well, this is what… I mean, this happens all the time, it seems like. This is the same issue we ran into with Don't Squat Past 90 Degrees. Right, right. As people found one study. The client, right, yeah. The client or a journalist, and they published a whole thing about one study, and now it's the truth for everybody all the time.

Right. So if anyone's ever citing a single study, that's a sign right there. Right. And then they followed that study up several decades later when they actually started, they took biopsies and looked at the physical mechanisms and they were able to identify a particular protein that inhibits, that blocks the myogenic process. So that entire signaling cascade is blocked by a particular protein that comes off of AMBK that goes to TSC2 and it stops mTOR and AKT and that whole pathway. And it's actually cool. So many people are familiar with that now.

Like signaling proteins are all hot now. So many people are familiar with that now. Signaling proteins are all hot now. And then everyone's like, okay, great. They're the next big thing, for sure. What circles are we talking about? In Andy's universe. Totally. Peer-reviewed.

In Andy's world. I guarantee you, so many of you are going to be like, yes, Blood Soap, I know what AKT is, idiot. Don't play stupid for him. You show him how smart you are. All the A&P Kynase fans out there are offended you said that. I'm sorry. Dear Lucy, so sorry. You're smarter than Michael gives you credit for.

And so then it was like, okay, for sure, it's set. It blocks it. Don't do it. Don't do any aerobic training, whatever. And then my colleague and good friend, Jimmy Bagley, published a really nice review article, I think it came out last year, and he actually looked at all the data and was like, hey, guys, we're not seeing it.

If we compile all the studies that are put together, we're really not seeing this massive interference between aerobic and endurance training. And I think of all sports, CrossFit has also quite clearly shown that to be evident. It's like, okay, look at these people at the CrossFit Games. They're not small. They're only getting bigger, it seems.

And so we have a spectrum. They're enduring more. Right, right. Yeah, no doubt. the volume is only getting higher it ain't getting smaller at the games and in training so you have a clear spectrum if you're running 100 miles a week

that's definitely going to have an interference effect you're not going to have 35 pounds of muscle with 100 miles running on the other end of the spectrum I'm pretty sure if you did a 400 meter jog every day as a warm-up, I'm pretty sure that's not going to block your gains. Like that's going to be fine.

We don't know where the spectrum lies in the middle. Clearly, there is some interference effect at the far end of the spectrum. But there's a lot of gray area in the middle. We're trying to figure out how much a week and how do we calculate this bike riding, swimming, what exactly affects it. If you did a light swim once a week for 30 minutes, i'm pretty sure that wouldn't affect your grains much at all and there's some benefits to your ability to recover more quickly absolutely yeah right so there's a lot of fun stuff in that area perhaps we'll have to do a follow-up episode when we talk just about that whole that's called scientifically by the way concurrent training like we've we've called

it different things over the years practically but that's if you want to look at more stuff scientifically that's the term you want to going to want to go after is concurrent training. We've called it different things over the years practically, but if you want to look at more stuff scientifically, that's the term you're going to want to go after is concurrent training. And that's effectively just developed the mitochondria and the ability to recover. Amongst other things, that would be the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot of other stuff going on that plays an important role because the biggest issue, and we can finish up here now on this, Mike, but it's the fallacy of simplicity. In other words, it's thinking that one molecule in your body

actually has one purpose and one purpose only. Right. When it actually has thousands. So even if you take something like mTOR, mTOR activates growth, right? Well, it doesn't actually do that. It activates thousands of genes, probably not thousands, hundreds of genes.

Some of them are myogenic, and some of them are proteolytic. That mTOR, the famous world AKT, this growth one, it also breaks you down. It's just a matter of balance now. Hopefully, it activated one or two more on the growth side than it did on the other side.

What other things is it doing? Remember, we're talking about molecules here. We tend to personify these things and give them like, this is what they do for a living. No, they're molecules. They just do. You're watching a commercial about a pharmaceutical drug and it's like, they make

it out to be about this one thing and then you've got a hundred things like you're going to bleed out your ass by the end of it. It's obviously doing something more than that one thing. Which is generally why I take those. Yeah. Yeah, so it's far more complex than that. Your molecules, your genes don't do one thing.

There is no gene for growth. No gene goes, oh, you activate me, this is exactly what I do. It does a bunch of things. And we just happen to measure the growth one or something. We're like, aha! But this is also why, if it was that simple, making drugs would be very easy. Yeah.

Very, very easy. Oh, turn on that gene. Cool, your hair's back. Done. Yeah. Doesn't work like that. So if we were to summarize everything you just said, you said lift weights and eat a lot of food, right?

Yeah. That's what I heard. Some variety. A lot of variety. A lot of schemes. Hit all your major movement patterns. Lift heavy stuff. Lift a lot of volume. Stay consistent.. A lot of variety. A lot of schemes. Hit all your major moving patterns. Lift heavy stuff. Lift a lot of volume.

Stay consistent. Eat a lot of food. Yeah. You'll get bigger. Yeah. We figured it out. And pray. A lot.

Hope and pray. And be lucky. Two scoops of hope in the morning smoothie. Ah, there you go. We've got it. Awesome. Was that in our smoothie this morning? Yes, of course.

Nice. Every day. we've got it awesome was that in our smoothie this morning yes of course nice every day