FoundMyFitness - #078 Resistance training for time efficiency, body composition, and maximum hypertrophy | Brad Schoenfeld, Ph.D.

Episode Date: December 6, 2022

Dr. Brad Schoenfeld is a professor at Lehman College in the Bronx, in New York City. His research primarily focuses on muscle adaptations to strength training, muscle hypertrophy. Publishing over 300 studies in the field of exercise and sports nutrition as a scientist, Brad began his career as a competitive bodybuilder and personal trainer. In this episode, we discuss: (00:00) Introduction to Dr. Brad Schoenfeld (05:26) Why should we lift weights? (06:56) Why building bone matters (11:33) How to lift in old age (13:45) Why to lift while young (especially women) (16:21) Should children lift weights? (17:05) Does lifting stunt growth? (19:48) How to change body composition (27:22) Protein requirements (29:19) How to calculate protein needs (36:54) Protein per meal - what's the right amount? (38:18) Does time-restricted eating undermine hypertrophy? (43:19) Anabolic window: myths vs. reality (46:15) Total daily protein intake (54:49) Why aging affects muscle power (loss of type II fibers) (57:52) Power training vs. strength (59:20) Benefits of explosive power training (fall prevention) (1:03:18) How to power train with plyometrics (1:03:58) Training to failure (is it important?) (1:09:59) Rest in between sets (is it needed?) (1:11:12) Number of sets per week (1:22:31) Tips for recovery (1:33:41) Should you get sore from exercise? (1:36:47) What can you do for soreness? (without blunting hypertrophy) (1:40:16) Does aerobic exercise undermine resistance training? (1:44:46) Resistance training for endurance athletes (1:46:33) Can stretching increase muscle growth? (1:51:06) Is yoga a type of resistance training? (1:53:37) Blood-flow restriction training (1:58:37) What is Brad's routine? Watch this episode on YouTube Show notes are available by clicking here Join over 300,000 people and get the latest distilled information straight to your inbox weekly: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/newsletter Become a FoundMyFitness premium member to get access to exclusive episodes, emails, live Q+A's with Rhonda and more: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/premium Learn more about the premium podcast The Aliquot: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/aliquot

Hello, my fellow found my fitness-friendly faces. Let me start out by saying this episode is amazing. Everything you want and need to know about the science of resistance training with applications for every fact coming from one of the leading researchers in the field, Dr. Brad Schoenfeld. Dr. Schoenfeld is a professor at Lehman College in the Bronx in New York City. His research primarily focuses on muscle adaptations to strength training and muscle hypertrophy, publishing over 300 studies in the field of exercise and sports nutrition as a scientist, Brad began his career as a competitive bodybuilder and personal trainer.

In my opinion, this gives him a unique practical lens through which he communicates his academic expertise. In this episode, Brad and I discuss practical perspectives on whether we can lose fat and gain muscle at the same time, in other words, recomposition. What's the minimum effective dose of resistance training? How many hours per week should you train not to be a bodybuilder, but to just get great results? We talk about how to prevent muscle loss while in a caloric deficit. Loading versus volume, whether you need to lift heavy weights to gain muscle.

Whether you need to train to failure, will you get better results? The chronic interference hypothesis does performing resistance training, and aerobic exercise back-to-back act synergistically, or are they at odds? Why power training may be really key for aging. We talk about time-efficient training using drop sets, supersets, and multi-joint exercises. We also talk about how multi-joint exercises are key for building and preventing the loss of bone mass. Is there a benefit to eccentric movements or negatives, and whether or not we should emphasize them in our training. We talk about interset recovery and how often and how much to train the same muscles. Some active ways to speed up recovery, such as omega-3s, and being physically

active throughout the day to increase blood flow. What exercise-induced soreness really means? Should we try to get sore? Is it necessary for a good workout? Is stretching important? Resistance training in youth. Should kids train? When should they train? And how? And so much more. Before we kick things off, I want to mention just a couple of quick items. First, if you are listening to this podcast, if you enjoy this podcast, it is because listeners like you support the show. Supporting listeners get some really great benefits over and above what's available for the free podcast. This arrangement is called the Premium Membership, and it is what makes all of this work. This membership includes access to a weekly members-only podcast called the Aliquot, where we publish new segments roughly

weekly. The last four episodes of the Aliquot have featured segments on exercise and muscle hypertrophy and strength. In Aliquot number 69, we covered the benefits of high-intensity interval training. In Aliquot 70, we covered preventing age-related muscle loss. In Aliquot-7, 71, we covered eating for aging and the protein argument, and in Aliquad 72, we addressed the question whether supplements can enhance adaptations to exercise. Plus, becoming a premium member also gives you access to a live and recorded monthly Q&A with me, where I answer the questions you submit. You also get a science digest email twice a month, where we summarize some of the most interesting research that has come out. These all add up to a

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So, Brad, thank you so much for coming out. I'm really excited to learn everything that we're going to talk about today related to muscle hypertrophy and muscle adaptations in response to resistance training. But maybe we can just start with resistance training. I mean, why should people care about resistance training? So in my humble opinion, certainly there are every form of exercise or most forms of exercise are very beneficial. doing something is always better than doing nothing for your health.

But if I were to say, if I were to pick one activity that is indispensable, it would be resistance training. And there's a couple of reasons. So certainly cardiovascular exercise, it's been much more well researched over the years. And indisputably, it has great effects on your health and wellness. But resistance training has many of the same benefits as cardiovascular exercise. but it goes well beyond what you can get through aerobic training, and particularly dealing with muscle strength, obviously, and bone density and other things like posture.

So aerobic exercise itself has very minimal effects on your strength levels, on muscle development, on muscle hypertrophy. Even on bone development, so certainly running has certain benefits to bone, but nothing in the way that resistance training does. Again, things like your posture, people don't even consider doing, if you are sedentary and not doing anything, over time you're going to lose muscle, your posture is going to go. And you can do all the aerobic training you want. It's really not going to have these benefits. So you just mentioned two things that I was unaware of, and the bone density and the posture.

So can you talk a little bit more about that, resistance training affecting bone density? Because that seems very relevant for particularly post-penetement. menopausal women. It is. So osteoporosis, which is basically porous bones, it's when over time the aging process, your bones, if you are sedentary in particular, will start to degrade. And the 80% of osteoporosis, people with osteoporosis are women. Because women generally, number one, start out with less bone mass.

There's also effects of, as you mentioned, estrogen is osteoprotective. So when women undergo menopause, postmenopausally, they're going to have increased bone resorption, which is going to increase their chances of getting osteoporosis. And resistance training by pulling on the bones, a muscle pulling on the bones. So there's an interaction. Your musculoskeletal system is the muscle that allows when you have movement. It's the muscle pulling on the bones to move. and strength training really is the primary way to strengthen the bones.

So while you're strengthening the muscles, necessarily the bones become strengthened as well. There's certain ways that are going to be more appropriate than others to maximize that process. But really no matter what type of resistance training you do, whether it's light loads, heavy lows, etc., you're going to be strengthening bones. And it's always, by the way, specific to the joint that you're working. So, weight-bearing exercise in particular is what strengthens bones. If you're doing cycling or even the elliptical machine, it's really not weight-bearing enough to have substantial effects on bone development

and swimming another endeavor. Whereas running to some extent there is ground reaction forces, but it's mostly specific to the femur to your lower body musculature. whereas the spine and the wrist is going to be a major area for osteoporosis, particularly in women. Anyway, long story short, is that resistance training when done regularly and consistently over time has profound effects on staving off the potential for osteoporosis and even building bones, particularly when you're younger.

Is there, are there, you said there are certain types of exercises that may, you know, be better, or is there any types of exercises that you can talk about? Yeah, so it seems so most of the research has been using somewhat moderate to heavier loading. I'm not convinced, though. I think it's an effect that we just don't have research that's really looked at doing lighter load training with bone density. And I would surmise if you are training with a good deal of effort. high levels of intensity of effort, that you would achieve similar effects. But it also does seem that doing more multi-joint movements, so multi-joint meaning like squats,

movements that are utilizing more than one joint. Multi-joint is more than one joint. So rather than curl, you can get better effects overall on bone because of the loading that is imposed. So again, not really great evidence. This is more speculative based upon the literature I've seen. So again, I'm a fan of any type of resistance training over or not. But if you're looking to maximize bone development, I would certainly say you want to include

some multi-joint movements. And I think just in general there's other reasons why you'd want to as well. Besides the squats, what are some other like... Rows, presses, I mean push-ups. type of movement where you're involving more than one joint. For someone that doesn't, like someone that's working with dumbbells, for example, who's not going to go use a machine, can you do them, can you do multi-joint movements with dumbbells? Shoulder press, chest press.

Dumbbells are great, sure. Shoulder press, chest press, you can do squats, you can do a goblet squat where you hold the dumbbell here and do a squat. So yeah. Well that was very, I didn't realize, I mean I had a question there about bone density, But I didn't realize that it really does play a significant role in the bone density. And it's really good to know about that. Muscle mass in general, aging.

I mean, what about someone who hasn't, let's say they're more of an endurance athlete throughout most of their young adulthood and they're getting into even just maybe perhaps older age? Is it ever too late to start resistance training to help, you know, build muscle mass, help prevent the atrophy that's going to happen? Absolutely not. So, in my previous life, I was a personal trainer before becoming an educator researcher. And, I mean, literally, I was involved in the training of thousands of individuals.

And I had clients at the time that were 60s, 70s, and 80s never lifted a weight and saw huge benefits. In relatively short periods of time, we carried out a meta-analysis on the oldest, of old, which was 70 and above. Well, the 70 is actually not that. It's the new 50 now is 70. But 70 plus years old and up to octogenarians to onagenarians. Profound improvements in muscle strength, muscle hypertrophy within 12 week, 8 to 12 week

training programs, never, these are novice trainees who've never done anything before. Now, I will say this with the caveat. it's always better to start when you're at. The earlier you start, the better. Because once you start losing to get it back is harder. So yet you can always improve upon where you're at a given point in time. But trying to get back to where you were when you're in your 20s is going to be almost impossible if you're not starting through your 70.

However, if you start when you're in your 20s, you can maintain a majority of your muscle mass. And certainly, I would say this, someone who is not doing anything in their 20s, I've had clients in their 70s who were stronger and more fit than people in their 20s, who were serious lifters. So yeah, it's always best to start when you're younger. And I will say this too. For women in particular, and particularly in reference to bone density, it is very important

to start early. Again, it's never too late because you can... get some... How early? How early? I mean, as early as you can. But certainly like in your teens and 20s. Because you do build up a bone bank. I mean, the analogy I like to use is having a retirement account.

Yeah, it's never too late to start technically. But if you start when you're 50s, your retirement is not going to be what it is if you start in your 20s. And there is this concept of a bone bank where if you start when you're young and particularly again for women who have the biggest issue with osteoporosis, you end up staving off the possibility of having osteoporosis. If you start when you've already lost bone density, it's very difficult to get back. You can stave off. You can certainly prevent the progression of osteoporosis, but getting back your bone density becomes much more difficult.

So it's very similar to this concept of building up a muscle reserve, right? Because that's also, right, when you get your, I don't know, 30s even? Maybe. You start to lose the muscle mass. And so, yes, like you said, starting with that bigger reserve is always better because things are going to be taking away from it. So you want to have like a bigger starting point. So that's really great to know because, you know, in particular for women, I think, you know,

and at least for myself in particular, and I know like many of my friends and growing up even throughout high school, I mean, we were always endurance. We were endurance athletes. You walk into the gym and there was mostly guys in there lifting weights, you know, the wrestlers, the, you know, and so I don't know that this may be changing now where women are starting to understand the importance of resistance training and building up muscle mass and bone mass through resistance training. But, you know, for me it was always endurance.

If I'm doing my endurance, then I'm checking the box. I'm, you know, I'm getting that exercise. I'm going to be healthier because of it. So this is all, it's really so important, I think, for young women too to really, it's easier to convince young men who like want to get the muscle. I mean, for them, they've got other goals as well in mind. But I think there's now a growing interest in bone mass and bone density and preventing osteoporosis as well.

So that's really great to know. What about starting, like, so starting young. Like, can you start, like in childhood? Absolutely. So there's compelling research now that children, it's never too young to start, provided the child's maturity as such that they're able to lift. I will say that always it should be done especially early on if you're dealing with children. Six, seven, eight years old, you want to have a fully supervised environment even beyond

that until they are in their teens even. But yeah, there's really compelling research now that resistance training in youth not only is not detrimental. So I mean, it does not, I want to dispel the myth now that it stunts growth. I mean, there's been this myth around forever that, you know, that training, if you do resistance training early on, it will stunt your growth. There's zero evidence. I would think the opposite because growth hormone increases with resistance training. Yeah, growth hormone really does not have the effects on the... effects on interestingly, even though the name is growth hormone, it's really not the driving

force of development. Well, it is on height. High, yeah, that's what I mean. Growth hormone is pulsatol and the effects on growth hormone for, it's never been, it's actually interesting, it's never been studied, but it's pulsatil and the effects on growth hormone with resistance training are very specific to the one hour or so after the workout. But it was thought that you would injure the epiphousal plates and the bone that would

somehow start to grow. Anyway, zero evidence to that. The issues can be that if someone is not, and I want to emphasize if a child is not emotionally and mentally ready for that, yeah, they get injured, but I'll say this. It's kind of, to me, it's always this weird thought processes that parents often have no no issues with letting their children play football and basketball, the possibility of getting injured and potentially breaking bones in sports, in these major sports, are much, much higher. Resistance training is one of the safest things you can do in a supervised environment.

So, so yeah, with children, again, very young as young as six, seven, eight years old, there's been a good, compelling research on this, that they can do it. I generally say you want to start off with lighter loads with them, and again, it's getting them into the feel for doing it. And look, when you're dealing with children, the most important thing is making it fun. So if something is not fun, you're forcing them to do it. Not only is it not going to work and you're going to have a rebellion against it,

but it can also later on in life get them to a point where they're kind of adverse to doing that. So again, I think what's really important is to make it enjoyable for them and it improves self-esteem, obviously, it improves so bullying in children. These are all things that can help to stave off a lot of the issues that children can have and make some better athletes. So from a parent standpoint, you can get scholarships to make them, if that's the avenue they want to pursue, it can make them better in their sports and lead to just a host of positive improvements. With respect to body composition, so we're talking about the benefits of resistance training

on bone density, obviously muscle mass, and people are now thinking about those things, but back in the day, body composition, and it still is important as well, but that was kind of one of the major things people would think about why they should do resistance training. Can you talk like a little bit about body? How does resistance training, you know, affect body recomposition? Can you gain muscle without gaining fat mass, sort of things like that? Great question. So, well, let's start from the basics that resistance training can improve.

Certainly it improves lean mass, which is largely muscle mass. I do think it's important to understand like certain measures underwater weighing, like a lot of the measures that you'll see Dexa, underwater weighing BIA, bioelectric impedance analysis, they are looking at not necessarily muscle mass, although there are ways to try to derive that. But when they talk about fat-free mass and lean mass,

generally depending on the measure, they're combinations of, in the very least, muscle and water. So it's not necessarily just, if you're gaining water, that'll show up as fat-free mass. Anything outside of fat mass would be fat-free mass. And that I think is somewhat important to understand there. But with that said, resistance training certainly can impact the fat-free mass aspect.

And it can help with fat mass. Now, I want to say in general, and this goes for cardiovascular exercise too, exercise is not the best way to lose body fat. It's certainly, I think, a good adjunct to a fat-loss program, which I'll get to in a second. but you have to do a lot of exercise to meaningfully lose fat, whereas it's just much easier to do it through reducing the calories and nutrition, the energy intake. So, for instance, if you do an hour of cardiovascular exercise and hard,

you know, where you're running for the most part, I mean, you can burn five, six hundred calories in that hour. You know, you have a bag of potato chips that can pretty much offset everything you've done. Whereas if you focus on reducing the energy intake through your food and using exercises as an adjunct, it can certainly help with the weight loss not only in terms of increasing energy expenditure to some extent. Because by the way, doing an hour of exercise every day for most people is just not a, it becomes very laborious. And that's just cardio. Like I said, you want to do resistance training as well.

And resistance training, cardio actually is somewhat more effective just purely from creating more energy expenditure than resistance training is. But here's the catch. It is, in my humble opinion, fundamental to combine resistance training at the very least with an energy deficit through nutritional restriction to promote weight loss. And here's why. If you do not lift weights, even if you just do cardio, you will lose muscle as you're losing body fat. And depending upon how you're going about it, evidence shows 25% to 30% of the weight loss will come from muscle. So you might lose, let's say, 70% fat, and it can even be more if you're a somewhat leaner, and 30% coming from lean men. if you don't do resistance training.

Now, you talked about recomb. Resistance training not only will stave off the loss of fat-free mass often, but you can actually recont. Recomp means you can gain muscle while losing fat. There are two primary factors, and I'll leave out, so there's three. The elephant in the room is anabolic steroid use, so if you're taking anabolic steroids, yeah, you can have serious recont. But putting that aside, that's probably not your audience,

or most of the people listening here. The two primary factors are, number one, how much weight do you have to lose? So are you obese? The more weight you have to lose, the easier it is to recomb. Also, how long have you been training? So someone who has a lot of years of experience of training

that's higher to their, closer to their genetic ceiling, will have a more difficult time recombing. Now, I will so, by the way, so if you have a lot of body fat, to lose and you're just starting out, you can do serious recomb. I see this all the time. Not only anecdotally, have I seen this in clients, but we have controlled experiments run through our lab where I see this all the time in individual subjects that we have. You cannot, however, maximize

muscle mass while you are losing fat. So this is important. If your goal is to go into, let's say, a mass gaining cycle where you want to, let's say, body bulldoers do this or strength athletes, athletes and your goal is to maximize muscle development, you're at the very minimum going to need to be at maintenance. And generally, you're going to need to be in a small surplus where you're going to gain a little bit, at least some amount of fat. Okay. Boy, this is fantastic information.

I'm just, it's sinking all in. So if you are in a caloric deficit and this kind of brings us into the protein, you know, dietary protein requirements world a little bit. If you are in a caloric deficit, but you are, and we should probably talk about what the protein requirements are, but let's say you are getting sufficient protein intake, daily protein intake to counter, to prevent your body from pulling protein out of your muscle, basically. Can you not lose the lean mass or muscle mass? say you're not doing resistance training, but you are just getting the protein in.

Say you're doing aerobic, but you're still in the caloric deficit, but you're getting the protein. And not lifting weights? You're not lifting weights. So the answer is it will help to preserve some lean mass, but you're still, no matter what, if you are not lifting weights, I mean, this has been shown again over and over in research. You will lose, well, I want to at least, I always hate to talk in absolutes because if you're very obese, where you just have, let's say you're 100 pounds overweight, you can lose fat without losing muscle much more in red,

because you just have so much fat to lose that the body's going to pull from the fat stories. But I'm talking when you're starting to get down into, people who just are quote unquote overweight, you're going to lose muscle. If you do not resist the strain, now, even if I want to point out, though, even if you're lifting weights,

if you are getting insufficient protein, you're going to leach some muscle. So you need to still take in sufficient protein. And there's actually evidence that you need more protein than what has been shown for people at maintenance or above to maintain muscle or even to gain slightly when you're in a caloric deficit. So that actually increases protein needs to some extent. Can you talk about what those coronets are?

Yeah, sure. We start to get into generalization. So the general literature shows somewhere around 1.6 to 1.8 grams per kilogram per day of protein is required for resistance training people, which is about double the RDA. So RDA for sedentary individuals is around 0.8 grams per kilograms per day, per kilogram per day. you need roughly double that to maintain or to promote an abelism while you're resistance training. In the upper confidence interval is about 2.2 grams per kilogram. So meaning that to really be on the safe side, if you're, for the vast majority of people,

if you're in the gen pop, it's probably not going to make a difference. But if you're a bodybuilder when I'm coaching bodybuilders and consulting with them, It really does not hurt to take in more protein. I mean, there's a lot of myths about kidney damage and healthy individuals. No good evidence that there's any negative effects on renal function. Certainly on bone density. These are all unsupported from my reading of the literature. So there's not necessarily a downside to it.

You have to look at cost benefit. Everything is cost benefit. For bodybuilders, I would say go up to 2 grams per kilogram per day, which is roughly around for those of us in the States. It's about a gram per pound. It's not going to hurt. But I would say that becomes even more important to stay in that upper realm. So if you're like 1.6, if you're especially in a surplus,

you generally need the needs for protein are going to be encompassed because the body isn't going to leach protein needs. When you start getting into a deficit, that's where I think it becomes even more important to be at that upper realm, that 2.0, 2.2 grams per kilogram. So people that are, let's say people that are obese, and I always say obese or overweight, and maybe it's important to distinguish these too based on what you just said. But if they are obese and or like, you know, overweight and they're wanting to lose fat

mass, right? Should they be calculating their protein intake based on their targeted weight? Or, because if they're like, you know, 300 pounds, for example, or, you know, that's a lot protein, right? It's a great question, and the answer is no. So the protein needs have been based on men and women who are relatively lean. I want to say relatively for the vast majority of the population, they would consider it lean. So for guys, somewhere like in the 12 to 15% body fat range, for women around 20% body fat or so.

So if you are 300 pounds and you should be 200 pounds, you would want, let's say you would calculate it at your, the weight that you would be where you would be at your lean weight. We're, you know, for a guy, 12 to 15% body fat. So we can then regress to saying, base it on lean mass, but most people aren't getting dexas scans to determine their lean mass. Or even, you know, they're not going out and getting body fat caliber measurements. Just not in the realm of what most people are going to do. And you can make a general estimate.

These are not precise measurements. It's not like, you know, people think that we're doing these experiments and they really nail it down into these precise areas. They're generalized recommendations based upon what we know. And there's going to be variations around the mean. You're always going to have people that are, when we do research, we report the means, as you well know, which are the averages. But people aren't an average. You get some people that are up here, some people here, and they average out the year. So, yeah.

So if you're overweight obese, you want to figure your protein needs at what you would be at a relatively lean weight. Let's see, again, for a guy, 10, 12, 15% body fat. I will say this. It doesn't hurt to take in, like I said, a little extra protein. On the good side, protein is very difficult to store as body fat, much more difficult than carbohydrates and fat. So, if you're going to earn the side of caution, that's where you'd want to earn the side of taking it a little more protein at the expense, if you go with weight laws, at the expense of carbs and fat.

Right. Now, we had Stuart Phillips on the podcast, a colleague of yours, and he was talking about, with the protein requirements, like the buy-in being more like, you know, just to get like at least 1.2 grams of protein per kilogram body weight. And for me, I was like, okay, because that's what I'm going to try to aim for. But then as I started to do more resistance training, I realized I was meeting the buy-in, but I wasn't meeting the 1.6. And so I have to now increase, like a can of sardines will get me there.

Like I need about 16 to 20 more grams a day. So, you know, for people, like my dad, for example, he's. He's in his 70s and like getting, good luck getting him to 1.6. Like I'm trying to get him to 1.2, right? I'm trying to like prevent him from like just, you know, completely depleting his, you know, his amino acids from his muscle every day, which he's kind of doing. So he has to supplement and do the protein, protein shakes and stuff like that. And I'm happy at least to get him there.

Next step would be then 1.6, you know, and of course, adding the resistance training, which should be essential, but I haven't been able to get to that point yet. So I wanted to mention that with the protein requirements because there was like, I know, the RDA is so low, 0.8. And Stewart talked a little bit about like some of the flaws in the early studies that were done to calculate that. And I'm just like wondering when is it time to reassess this, you know, and change it because a lot of people think they're getting enough protein.

Many people don't even get the RDA. So to address that, two things I think that are important. So 1.2 is better than 0.8, certainly. But I mean, there's good literature showing we've done work on this that if you want to maximize an abelism. So again, it doesn't mean that you're not going to gain any muscle if you're taking in 1.2, but it will impair the gains that you're going to get. Especially when you're talking about older individuals, they're anabolicly resistant.

So it becomes even more important. I think this is another important thing. When you're dealing with older individuals, the resistance, not only anabolicary resistance to resistance training, but also to protein, where the per dose aspects need to be higher to some extent to get what's called leucine, which is one of the essential amino acids. And there's, I don't know how deep you want to get here, but there's a lucine threshold. Lusine is the amino acid that seems to kickstart the muscle growth process. it seems to be somewhat higher, at least some of the literature does show that in older individuals

getting more elucine is important to kickstart that process. As you point out, though, unfairly, for older individuals, it becomes increasingly difficult to get protein in. And I'm a big fan of whole foods. Supplementation is something that you do when you cannot get whole foods in. But as you get older, taste buds start to dissipate your, your, you're, you're, Food does not have good taste. So older individuals have difficulty chewing sometimes too.

And that is where supplementation can come in. It's much easier to drink a weight protein or a casein or egg protein shake and get that protein in through supplemental means if you're not meeting your daily requirements. So I think that's where, and for anyone, I mean, women, it seems that women often also are not programmed to take protein as much. And yeah, it's just very easy to do through protein shakes if you're not going to be able to do it through whole foods. What's the leucine threshold?

Like, can you, like, in terms of protein, like, obviously, we can get into the vegan vegetarian because it's a whole other thing. But like if you're eating meat, chicken, poultry, fish, you know, if you're getting the essential amino acids, like what gram dose per meal would you say, would be important for that crossing that loosening threshold and what age? Yeah, so these aren't again hard cutoffs in either of those. I've seen three grams where it starts to increase from two to three grams of

lucine as you get older. Where is that cutoff from being quote unquote older? There isn't one. And if you don't necessarily, I certainly don't think you need to take lucine as a supplement if you're taking in a high quality protein source. If you're eating meat-based proteins, which by the way, aren't just meat, they're also milk and eggs, etc. So proteins from animal, I should say animal-based sources, you're going to be getting quality

proteins that are rich in Lucine. And again, it's just getting the proper dosages in, which might be, it's been shown there is a graded, there's a recent study out of Luke Van Loon's lab is a terrific researcher, protein researcher in the Netherlands. And they looked at, again, my memory now, it's been a while since I looked at this study, but they did zero, 15 grams of protein, I believe they used weigh 30 and 45, I think it was. But anyway, it showed a dose response relationship for a muscle protein synthesis where they kept getting a greater response. Now, it did seem to somewhat, the curve It wasn't a linear relationship, so there was more parabolic where it started to trail

off after 30 grams, but it did continue on above the 30 grams. So it just shows that in older individuals that it's needed to take more per dose protein to hit that lucene threshold, particularly in the time after resistance training. I mean, yeah, that's talking about a dose that you're going to have in your animal products, then you're also probably going to have a protein shake with it because it's quite, I mean, I guess unless you can eat large, large, large stakes and stuff. But for me, I know, as a female too, I won't be getting... I mean, four ounces of chicken is 30 grams of protein. Is it 30?

Yeah. I mean, it's four, you know, if you get... I eat four ounces of chicken. Yeah, so it's... Pretty good. Um, with respect to what we were talking about with the being in a caloric deficit and gaining muscle mass and how it's, you know, you have to do the resistance training and get the protein. But it seems as though gaining isn't, you're not going to be really gaining if you're in that caloric deficit, if you're the person that is actively doing calic restriction for recomb, like, you know, I guess aspects. But what about, you know, so like something I practice is time restricted eating, or I like to eat all my food within a, like,

10-hour window. You know, I don't go too crazy, but, you know, like I like to have a resting period. And when you're not digesting and all that, you are in a repair process, right? You're in repair mode. The problem that a lot of people make with time-restricted eating is they go, oh, in order to eat within this 10-hour window, I have to skip breakfast, right? So they skip meals, which ends up being caloric restriction combined with the time-restricted eating. And so what I do is not skip meals. I do not skip breakfast. I do not skip meals unless there's some circumstantial thing that happens where I have

to get somewhere or whatever, right? But if I'm getting all of my protein within that 10-hour window, so it's more of a, it's an intermittent fasting but not being in a caloric deficit. So getting the same calories that I would get if I was eating my food throughout the day. And then I'm adding in resistance training, making sure I'm eating the the protein, is that going to be conducive with gaining muscle mass? Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, we actually are starting to get some good research on this topic.

Now, time restricted feeding, it's interesting, you bring that up. I have a paper currently in review or a review paper. A review with my colleague Alan Aragon, who's a big nutritional expert. And we covered this exact topic. The interesting thing with time restrictive feeding, number one, there's various, iterations of it. So there's 420. So we have four hours eating and then 20 hours off. There's 6, 18. There's 816. So there's all variations. Then there's also the 2-5 concept where you fast for two days and then eat up five days. So a lot of that will depend upon the specific

type of time restricted feeding. What you're talking about, a 10-hour window is much more friendly towards an abelism. But most of the, it's interesting, because conceivably, spacing out your protein would logically have benefits. And there's been some research, even longitudinal research, that backs this up, that you get better utilization of protein. If it's spread out, let's say at least over three meals relatively spaced, like breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and perhaps even four. But now again, so this is where the nuance is coming.

If you're a bodybuilder, I would recommend trying to take in protein across the day as much as possible because when you're not eating, you're catabolic. Eating is anabolic. So what not eating is catabolic. But for these studies on time restrictive feeding really don't show much difference. Now, our measures that we have are current measures of looking at hypertrophy or even MRI, which is the gold standard, still has a margin of error. It's not like we're doing, you're looking at a cadaver and you're actually, you know, measure

or you're doing like rodent research, we actually can weigh the muscle, et cetera. So our measures might not be sensitive enough to detect subtle differences, but for the vast majority of people, you're not looking to bodybuild. It's just not going to be much of a difference. If you're going to do a 420, I would say you're then going to be in a lot more. And there's been research as one study certainly showed diminished animalic, diminished muscle hypertrophy with a 420 versus a traditional eating pattern. I could see where a 2-5 might be have issues.

So again, I would say if you're going to, whatever you do, try to structure your training within that eating window that you have. Because, and there's actually been quite a lot of research on this, that the body is highly anabolic for at least 24 hours, if not more, after a workout. But when you start getting outside of, you know, six, eight hours or so, it's probably going to trail off where you might not harvest some of the gains, depending upon what you're looking for, especially if your goals are more optimizing muscle mass. So I would say it's beneficial to try to get the feeding in within that window, whatever it is. If you're going to be, let's say,

in a 10-hour window, try to train within the earlier part of that eating so that you're going to be able to eat after your workout and not go, let's say not do it right after your final meal and then be catabolic for 14 hours. Okay, so is there some, with the anabolic window, is there some... It's really a barn door. Yeah, we've done a ton of research on this. So certainly there is somewhat of a window. And even in the paper we publish, which people take, there's no antibiotic one.

That's not what our research showed, but it showed that it's really minor. The much more important thing is getting your total daily protein intake. And that's what we're kind of, to your point, if you're hitting your daily protein, protein requirements, whatever your window is, if you're doing, let's say, certainly 10 hours, but even like an 816, which is the most common time-restricted feeding strategy, if you're getting 1.6 grams per kilogram, you're pretty good. You're going to get the majority of your gains regardless. Then it starts to come down, you kind of mentioned this with Stu Phillips in similar veins, that that's kind of like the, now you're starting to get more like the cherry on the

Sunday here, if you want to eke out the maximum amount of gains. And really, it's, like I said, more of a barn door. It's not this narrow window. I think what we've debunked is that after 45 minutes, you, oh my God, I got to slam my shake immediately after training or I go catabolic. And even if you're an advanced bodybuilder, I don't think there's utility, the utility in that is virtually nil. But I do say, when I'm coaching bodybuilder, you know, get your protein in as quickly as you can after a workout. You don't have to stress and slam your shake the minute you finish your last set. But because small, this is where even small amounts of gains can be the difference between winning and losing a competition.

So, again, it's highly context specific. We try to make these general guidelines and apply it to the population, but everyone has their own, you know, goals, their own lifestyle that they have to deal with. and other factors, and that needs to be taken into account. If you are working out at home, let's say, and you can go, and you're not a professional body, but you're a recreational, you know, I guess I wouldn't call it a gym goer if you're doing it at home, but you're a recreational at-home gym goer.

And you can go and take your shake right after your workout because you're at home and it's not stressful, and you don't have to think about packing it and all this. I mean, would that... Not going to hurt, and it could have... Even if it helps a tiny bit, Yeah, I would say that is the cost benefit where there is really no cost and a potential very small benefit. Now, again, if you start going longer and longer, if you're taking five, six, seven, eight hours,

and again, if you're doing a, let's say, 10, 14, and you train right after your last meal and then go 14 hours, then you can start compromising some gains. So there's no hard rule to this. It's on a spectrum. But I would say the quicker you can get it in conceivably the better. It's just no downside to it. With your, you mentioned the aging study where the fellow from the Netherlands was looking at, I guess, on a per meal effect with respect to protein intake and muscle protein synthesis.

Is it like, you know, you're not going to have three, like most people aren't going to do three meals with 40 or 50 grams of protein without supplementing on top of that. Maybe, you know, maybe there's, you know, some people that will do it, but not like, not all the women, not of the older folks, you know, for the majority, I think, of those types of people they might not be taking in that much protein per meal. Should they try to at least get 40 grams in at least one meal? Yeah, I mean. Is 30 enough?

I mean, so is 40 better than 30 for these older people? Is it something they should even think about? Or is it like just the cherry on top, but you don't stress yourself kind of thing? Yeah, it's great questions. And one of the things I think that needs to be understood is that the studies are sterile. So what I mean by that is that they're taking people, they're going to look at kind of proof of principles. So they take them fasted, they're having nothing in their body and they're giving them

a weight, let's say a way protein shake. is a very fast-acting protein that gets into your body very quickly, into your circulatory system, the body gets to use the amino acids quickly. When you're eating a whole meal, the amino acids are released in a much more time-released fashion, because the body has to digest the food, break it down, there's fats that are going to delay absorption. So again, you're eating, let's say, chicken with broccoli and rice, etc. You're eating a whole meal.

There's time-delayed release of nutrients. into your body. So you don't, that's why I said the most important thing, 90% is targeting your, I hate to give exact percentages because I'm just pulling that out of the air. But I just want to emphasize the vast majority is getting your total daily, worrying about getting your total daily protein intake, stressing over this, you know, minutia of how much is in the meal. If you're getting, if an older individual is taking in 1.6 grams, they're going to be doing fine. They're not going to be meaningfully compromising their gains unless they're looking to bodybuild, do a master's level bodybuilding show.

Okay. Well, that's good to know. I mean, for the people like us, you know. Shifting a little bit into mechanics and, like, the training load. I mean, that's a big one. I mean, for the longest time, you know, I remember you'd hear lift heavy or lift big or go home or something like that. I mean, you're like, you know.

Go heavy or go home. Yeah, that's it. Like, what does the science say about that? Like, you're, this is, you know, you've really contributed to this area about, do you need to train heavy to get your gains? So this is an area that I've done pretty much a one, so I've changed my opinion on it. So many things that, you know, that I learned as an up-and-coming sports scientist and that were treated as dogma, you know, in textbooks. That my views have in certain respects done 180 and nothing can be characterized more so than loading. So I had always thought that if you're doing anything over 12 to 15 repetitions, it's

basically glorified cardio and that, you know, it's just muscle endurance. You're not going to gain muscle. The literature is now compellingly shown. I just, there's so much literature on the topic. Iro lab has done quite a bit of research as well as many others. And it shows that you can gain muscle, similar amounts of muscle, regardless of the loading across a wide range of loading spectrums, up to 30 to even 40 repetitions, which is a long, that's a long set. And that's at the whole muscle level. Now there may be, I want to really emphasize this is not, this is still equivocal, there may be some muscle type, muscle fiber type specific benefits to doing light loads for type 1 fibers and type 2 fibers for heavy loads. If you're asking my

confidence in that literature, it's modest at best. But I can't rule out that that would be the case. But when you're looking, let's say, at MRI data or ultrasound, which we've used extensively, really shows no difference. And I'll tell you what I think is a quite funny story, looking back. But Stu Phillips had published a study circa 2012, and he went on social media with Facebook at the time, and it was on untrained subjects doing leg extensions. And it showed that there was no difference in whole muscle hypertrophy between 30% 1RM, which is like 30 reps, versus 80% 1RM, which was like 8 reps.

And I remember it as clear as day saying, still, come on, this is untrained subjects doing leg extensions. They get Jack from doing spin cycle. That was, I think, my exact quote. And I said, I'm going to do this study and train individuals you're going to see. There's going to be no question the older individuals are going to need the heavier loads. to get those highest threshold motor units, the type 2 fibers into play. And lo and behold, I carried out that study in no difference. It was really eight crow.

And since then there's just been so much evidence, not only just across the spectrum of populations, untrained, trained, older, younger, men, women, really any and every population has been extensively studied. And it really is a beautiful thing, because it provides so much flexibility and options to carry out resistance training. And it's particularly, I think, beneficial for issues like training through injuries. So if you're training through injuries, heavy loading can be contraindicated.

And also particularly for the older individuals. Because joint-related issues, as you know, as people get older, they get osteoarthritis and other joint-related issues, where heavy loading, can be very uncomfortable for them and perhaps debilitating. So it's kind of contraindicated. And they can use lighter loads. Now, the caveat to this is, is that the lighter loads have to be taken with a high degree of effort.

So they have to really, if you do not extensively challenge your muscles, meaning that the last few reps are difficult to complete, you're not going to achieve gain. So when I talk about light loads, it's not this, you know, taking pink dumbbells and just, you doing some lifting, okay, I stop. You must challenge the muscles. So heavier, when you lift heavier, just innately you're going to challenge the muscles regardless, because the weight is already heavy.

With lighter loads, the first number of repetitions are very easy to complete. And if it's easy to complete, you're really not doing much for challenging. And this goes back to a survival mechanism. So the reason that the body, I think this is important, because the reason that the body adapts to strength training is survival. The reason that the body adapts to anything is through a survival mechanism. And if you are not challenging it in a way it is not accustomed to being challenged, it has no impetus to adapt.

So the reason that you will get these adaptations in strength and power and hypertrophy, muscle endurance, bone density, etc., is because the muscles and bones, etc., tendons, ligaments, are being challenged beyond their prison capacity. And so as you get stronger, then you have to push past that and challenge them more. So the big take-home for lifting lighter, which is what I tend to do, is to get fatigued, right, when you're doing it. And so it often means more reps, which I enjoy doing. I've done both, and I do find for me I like doing the lighter lifting and more reps versus doing heavier and fewer reps. And I also notice I'm less likely to injure my wrist if I'm doing, if I'm doing, now maybe

that wouldn't, if I was doing things like proper form and all that, maybe it wouldn't be such an issue. But you mentioned the muscle type 1 and type 2 fibers and maybe there's some evidence that lifting a little heavier might help shift a little bit more type 2. Can you talk just for a moment? Like what are the roles of those types of fibers and should people anxious? to kind of gain both of those? Or are there distinct differences, you know, in terms of with aging, their roles in aging?

Yeah, yeah. So great questions. So I'll tackle the second question first. Yes, aging is mostly specific. So when it's aging, the what's called sarcopenia, which is the age-related loss of muscle, is most specific to the type 2 fibers, which are your strength-related fibers. So just to kind of even circle back, for those who don't know, type 1 fibers are endurance-oriented fibers. They do not produce force as well as type 2 fibers, but they're indefatigable.

They can go on for longer periods of time. They're hard to fatigue, whereas your type 2 fibers fatigue relatively easily, but they have the capacity to produce greater force. As you age, the type 1 fibers are more well preserved, where the type 2 fibers, there's even what's called apoptosis, which has been shown as a loss of fibers, but certainly there's a diminishment where the fibers get smaller, it's smaller. It's more specific. This archipenic effect is more specific to the type 2 fibers, which is obviously problematic because the ability to produce force is where your functional capacity, primary functional capacity, at least from being able to open cans and jars, avoiding falls, etc.

on. Circling back, so then the training effect, I want to emphasize, you're going to train, if you are training hard regardless of heavy light, you're going to be targeting both one and two fibers. So we're talking now nuance. So if you're a, I think this is where this kind of gets lost in context, where I think this would have the greatest, if it is in fact true, greatest relevance would be to, let's say, bodybuilders. You want to maximize the muscle development, it probably is beneficial to utilize some heavier training and some lighter training so that you at least make sure you're kind of hedging your bets and make sure that you're maximizing development of all fibers. For the average individual, if you are training

hard regardless of light or heavy, you're going to be getting type 1 and type 2 fiber development. And it's been well documented that light load training does target the type 2 fibers, which had been And that was one of the myths. It used to be taught when I was an up-and-coming sports scientist that if you just use light loads, you would not activate the highest threshold modi units which are associated with these type 2 fibers. And thus you would not optimize your strength and power and hypertrophy. So we were talking about the resistance training. We've mentioned strength training.

And then there's power training. And I think this probably has a little bit to do with what you just mentioned with the, problem with aging, right? And so can you just briefly talk about differences and then maybe where, like does one shine more than the other with respect to like what older individuals should be doing or focusing on or is it like, you know, or, you know, women versus men? Is there any differences there as well? So the definitions do somewhat vary depending upon who you ask. I'll give you a mind. So resistance training is kind of a catch-law for, any type of exercise that moves against resistance. This would be body weight exercise, push-ups,

pull-ups, body-weight squats would be resistance exercise, free weights, machines, cables. Any of these would be considered resistance exercise. Strength training often is used synonymously with resistance training, but also it can be thought of specific to, let's say, power lifting, where you're moving very heavy loads, and necessarily when you're lifting heavy loads, you're doing You're moving them very slowly. You can't, if I give you a very heavy load to lift, you can't move that fast, or you'd be able to do more than whatever you're doing.

You'd be able to do more repetitions than what you're doing. Whereas power is the ability to produce force over time, so more quickly. The more rapidly you can produce force, the more power you generate. Power is developed on a foundation of strength, but it also involves this time component. And there is evidence

that at least it is some training needs to be done, quote-unquote, explosively. So moving weights quickly, or when I say weights doing resistance quickly, to generate maximal power. And our group was involved recently in a made analysis on older individuals that showed functional improvements were optimized when they did training that involved moving the concentric action quickly and then doing a controlled eccentric. So I do think it's important for older individuals to incorporate some power training in their programs.

It doesn't mean that every set needs to be done in this respect, but at least having some of the training that will be devoted towards power training. And I think it's really exemplified by the fact that hip fractures. So when older individuals fall and it's a frequent thing now, particularly in those who are sedentary, they are not able to quickly reverse their fall and avoid the resultant effect of a hip fracture and studies show that older individuals when they get a hip fracture it's been a while since I've looked at the literature

I think it was 50% never recover full function and die within I think two years half of them go into convalescence they have to be under constant care they're not able to be functionally independent. So, I mean, it's a big thing. You know, as a younger individuals, they can get their cast signed by their friends or whatever, and it's not a big deal.

But older individuals, these are really important, you know, issues that you want to stave off. And I would say that having some power training and then, again, other types of training. It's not, this is another thing I think is really important. We often think in binary terms, train this way, not that way. or there's programs that are devoted, this is how you should train. We should be thinking of training as combining different concepts to a given goal, because often doing some lighter load training with some heavier load training, if possible, sometimes that's not possible, but sometimes it is.

Doing, like I said, some power training with heavy a load training, or lighter load, moderate training. These are things that ultimately can optimize the effects for a given goal. for thinking about the power training for me I would think well sounds like it would be easier if I had lighter weights can you do I mean is that still considered power training if they're or does it have to be like a heavier like a fast movement with a heavier no no you so again you're not going to be able to move heavy

heavy and lighter relative terms so if you're using a very head let's see you're doing what's called a 3RM the maximum amount of weight you can lift three times let's say I'm doing a bench press with a 3RM even on my first rep, if I try to move it fast, I'm not going to be able to. Because if I could, I'd be able to do more than three reps with that. So you're going to have to choose a weight that is relatively light. Let's say you're able to do a minimum of 10 repetitions or 8, 10 repetitions. So again, light exists on a spectrum.

Eight is lighter than three. Three reps is heavier than 8 reps. Eight reps would be heavier than 15 reps, 15 reps. So at what point is that optimal effect? There's no research that indicates that at this point where you're, but you're not going to be able to use heavier. It'll be above, let's say, eight, I'd say you'd have to go a minimum, as a minimum of eight repetitions, eight RM.

If you could do more, if you could do a heavier load, you're not going to be able to move it quickly enough to get that benefit. And by the way, there's other things you could do. You can do pyometric training, now for some older people, people that can be somewhat dangerous. But I mean, you can throw a medicine ball. That's a way of power training. So take a medicine ball and, you know, older people can easily do that. We're for the upper body. These are good upper body movements that would be, I think, very user friendly for people that are older. It can be fun, which again, it's kind of, we do see kind of this trajectory

from youth to getting into our adulthood and then aging. We're making it fun again. A lot of times is important for older people. What about, so you mentioned with the lifting lighter and the important thing of basically fatiguing yourself, right? Like you can't just do a couple and it's like, you know, compare that to lifting heavier and doing a couple, right? This whole idea of training till failure and what does that mean?

Do we need to train to failure? Is that important? Yeah, so failure, for an operational definition, would be the inability to perform another repetition with proper form. And we carried out of meta-analysis recently on this topic. And the bottom line is that, and that's kind of the go-harder-go-home philosophy, that's the bodybuilding mentality of go-hard or go home. Every set needs to be taken to failure.

The evidence does not indicate that's the case. So certainly you need to train with a high amount of effort. But to take all certainly to take every set to failure is not, Not only is it not, doesn't show any benefit for hyperchemy, it actually showed a small detriment for strength. So with strength, stopping a couple reps short of failure seem to have better effects on maximizing strength than training the failure. Again, there's some limitations to that research.

How much of that, does that mean that if you train the failure, you won't maximize your strength? I'm not necessarily on board with that, but that is what our results showed. I also would not dismiss the fact that for very high level, let's say you're very close to your genetic ceiling, that it might make the need to go to failure, at least on some of the sets, more relevant, beneficial. We don't have good, this is purely speculative on my end, but I can see at least the logical rationale where it makes your challenge, it's a way to challenge the body in a way that it is not used to. I will tell you that when I coach bodybuilders. I generally incorporate some failure training,

but another area where my view has shifted, maybe not 180, but probably 90 degrees, where I used to be the go hard, go home dude who every set need to be taken to failure. And now most sets within two to three reps of failure. So there's a concept called the repetitions in reserve. And a zero, it's the RIR scale, repetitions in reserve. An RIR of zero means you're at failure.

It means you cannot have done another rep. There's zero reps left before you got a failure. An RIR of one would mean that you could have done one more rep, and at that rep you would be at failure. From the literature, although we don't have a definitive way of making estimates on this, but my own interpretation of the literature is somewhere between probably one to three rep, RIR, reps from failure, would be needed to promote optimal adaptations. You can still see adaptations, particularly when you're more in the newbie stage, in the early

stages, below that. But one to three, I think, is a good general recommendation to, that's necessary to see adaptations. Again, then you start getting into the weeds, getting into the nuances. for the gen pop, I probably would say that's always going to be effective and you'd probably never have to go to failure for the goals of most gen pops. For bodybuilders, high-level athletes, perhaps some failure training,

the last set to failure on some of your exercises at least. And again, you want to get into the weeds, probably using your single joint and machine-based exercises would be more appropriate for failure, let's say, than squat. So a biceps curl. a lateral raise, a leg extension, they're going to be, first of all, there's less issue of injury

because when you're going to failure, let's say, in a squat and you're if you've ever squatted it, and you're in the hole and you're trying to push out, there's a greater potential for injury. Certainly you're going to need a spotter in that regard or else you could be stuck and you can have problems with a bench press where you're trying to do that rep

if you don't have a spotter, that bar is stuck. to your chest. Whereas if you're doing, let's say, dumbbell curls or lateral raises, at the very least, you're not going to be really torched after your sets. You're going to be able to come back strong. So these are just general, it's speculative in my part, but I think there's good logical rationale behind these things. And I do want to say that an evidence-based approach, so I do want to promote. One of the things I look, my biggest hobby horse in life is to promote the importance of evidence-based practice. It is not simply deferring to research. Research is never

going to tell you what to do, virtually never. It's going to provide general guidelines, particularly in the applied sciences like exercise and nutrition. It will get you into the ballpark, you know, give you general strategies to use. You then need to take this to the individual. What are their genetics? What is their lifestyle? Their stress level, their sleep, their nutritional status, all of these things together. And then, of course, goals are going to enter into it. So developing a program from the research means to understand the research and then to use your own expertise in combination with the goals and abilities of the individual.

Right. With the designing the training program sort of aspect, we're kind of, I mean, sort of talking about this. And, you know, the training until failure, it sounds like you, that's pretty clear for me, like, you know, maybe the bodybuilders, that's a little bit more important. But for most people, getting within one to three reps until failure kind of answers the, well, you get a lot of questions about how many reps do I need to do? How many reps do I need to do?

It sounds like it depends on the person. And when you start to feel that fatigue, when you're getting close, you know, right? So that's kind of what I'm thinking for myself. Resting between those reps or between the sets or which way is it, the resting intervals, it's between the sets. So, yeah, so basically when you're getting ready to do another set, like how many sets do you need to do or how long do you have to rest between them? Is that important? Yeah. So again, it's on a spectrum and it depends on.

So when I talk to my students, they'll ask me questions and I say, you know, pretty much any applied question you're going to ask me, I will answer within it depends. Because within broad spectrums, you can gain. If you're doing a very minimalist routine, you can make gain. So if you're saying, is it important, it starts to become more and more important, the more important it is to you to maximize your results. If your goal is just to build some muscle, gain some strength, a very minimalist routine. I mean, training an hour a week, let's say two days, two half hour sessions a week can give you

very nice, most people, very nice results, provided your training hard. If you're looking to be a bodybuilder, is that going to, or you're going to step on stage? No, I would say with 100% confidence, that is not going to be sufficient to optimize your gain. So volume has been shown to be a driver of hypertrophy. Again, we've done original research on this. We've done made an analytic work. And there is a dose response relationship up to a certain point. It is individual-specific as well.

So some people respond better to respond well to lower volumes. Some people need more volume to maximize their results. hard to study individual responses, but these are kind of general insights that we glean from the literature. But I would say as a general guideline to optimize hypertrophy, you want to be somewhere between 10 to 20 sets per muscle per week. Now that's not going to be able to be done doing two half-hour sessions per week. But we recently published a review paper called No Time to Lift. It's open access. You can maybe post on this podcast, the link to that,

or show the image of the study. But we basically kind of looked at what is your minimal effect of dose? And it was roughly around four sets per week, per muscle per week, which again can be done to maximum three half hour sessions, two to three half hour sessions per week. You can get very nice results. and I think it probably, for most people, the majority of gains in that period of time. And then if you want more, you're going to have to devote more time.

Are there certain strategies that can be, so we were talking about like powerlifting, are there certain things that can be done to, you know, be able to not have to have as much time as well? I mean, certain types of exercises. Yeah, so a couple things. Number one, there are several. First of all, training with lighter loads, while again, it's a very viable option, it does extend the time of the workout. So if you're training, let's say, with 30 reps, the set's going to take triple the amount of time if you're training with 10 reps. So that, if you're very time pressed, can be a consideration.

Now, how much that, depending upon how many sets you're doing, if you're doing minimalistic training, it's probably not adding that much time on. If you're doing a lot of volume, it can be more extensive. but using multi-joint exercises so again multi-joint is more than one joint presses rows squats deadlifts push-ups chin-ups these are exercises that involve multiple muscle groups and a lot of stabilizer muscles they're much more time efficient than doing let's say a bicep curl so when you're doing let's say a lat pull-down or a chin-up you're working your biceps very effectively you're performing elbow flexion in addition to working your lats the external portion of your packs even are working in many of the stabilizer muscle groups.

Squats involve many muscle groups, really the total lower body, and even stabilizers in your torso. So I would say focus more on your multi-joint exercise. And then you can use various time efficient strategies. So kind of these advanced training methods such as a superset, which is doing two different exercises. And there's different ways to structure these. There's something called a pair set, paired set, where you do agonist antagonist movements, such as, so the biceps and triceps are agonist antagonist muscles,

meaning that when one is contracting, one is shortening, the other is lengthening per se. So if you do a biceps curl, you can immediately do a triceps press down. After that, and really you're working the muscles in different fashion. You don't have to rest between the sets. you could do a leg exercise followed by an upper body, so lower body followed by an upper body exercise. Again, you're working different muscle groups so you get, it's more time efficient, you don't have to take the rest. If you're going to do, let's say, sets of chest press, so let's say I do the typical traditional way of doing sets is you do a set, then you rest, then you do another set for the same muscle group, you rest.

That's going to take more time because you're going to have to rest between those sets. sets. There is something called drop sets where you can do a set to failure or certainly close to failure. Then you drop the weight. I don't know we drop literally, but you reduce the amount of load. So let's say, for instance, let's say you're using, you have a rack of dumbbells and you use 20 pound dumbbells for curls. You can then, when you finish, you're getting really difficult on those last wraps. You then go to the 15 pound dumbbells and you do more reps because you're lightning the load, you're able to do more weights. You can do triple drops. So you go from 20 to 15 to 10 to 5 even and just do them without any rest and then not do any more sets. Rather than doing multiple

sets, you just do this one drop set, long drop set. Now is that as effective as doing multiple sets of the same muscle? We don't have enough evidence to show, but I do think we have enough where I would confidently say for the gen pop, it will be just close to as effective. I don't think for the majority of the populations, it will make much difference. Again, for the high-level athlete bodybuilder, it might. And that's where, again, context is important. This idea of resting, this is great information because typically the way I work out, which is far from bodybuilder level, I don't rest in between sets.

but I'm also, I immediately switched to the next thing. And then I'll eventually go back to that first muscle group I was working. So I'll have, you know, like three different muscle groups and I'm doing the lighter and faster. And then, so if you are doing a set, like, why is it important to rest in between the set? Is it like something to do with like muscle protein synthesis or what? Well, I mean, if you're going to, let's say you're going to do four sets, of chest presses. You have to rest because if you're training really hard and that last rep, you pick up the weight, let's say, in two seconds, you're not going to be able to do it.

By default, if you're training very hard, you're not going to be able to do any more reps or else you're at failure. So you have to have some degree of rest. Now, if you're resting very short periods, let's say you're resting 30 seconds. The amount of load that you're going to be able to do will be much less, or the amount of reps at the time. this same load. And this is actually interesting. So it had always been promoted. This is another area where I've shifted my thought processes. But it had been promoted that resting shorter was better for muscle hypertrophy. So what I've been taught when I was an up-and-coming strength and conditioning professional, that if you want strength, you take long rest, like three minutes in

between your sets. And for hypertrophy, it's like 30 seconds to a minute because that will maximize the hormonal response. So in between sets, or depending on the type of training that you are doing, shorter rest intervals will promote interset rest intervals, will promote greater growth hormone, testosterone, and IGF1 responses after the workout is over. The literature, and that used to be thought to be a main driver of hypertrophy, the compelling body of literature now shows that it probably doesn't have, if it does have an effect, it would be very modest, and it might not even have any effect at all. So certainly it would not be something that I consider would be important to take into account. And the issue is, is that volume load, the amount of

total amount of weight that you lift in a given session, which is the amount of work that you're doing, does seem to be a factor. So let's say I'm doing a set of squats with 200 pounds for 10 reps. And then I rest 30 seconds between, I'll try to do another one after 30 seconds. Let's say I try to use that same 200 pounds. I'm not getting anywhere near 10 reps. And based on the literature that we have, I'm probably only getting five reps. Whereas if I would rest two minutes, I'd be able to get much closer to that 10 wraps. And if I rested three, even more. And that's why it's actually been shown that resting short, having short rest periods between sets, if you're doing a certain number of sets and you're resting short, taking short rest, it actually compromises

hypertrophy. So it actually has a negative effect, giving greater credence to the fact that at the very least, the volume load is more important than any hormonal effects that are given. Which makes sense. I mean, and what, you know, and we talked about this a little bit with Stewart, is that, as you mentioned, the hormonal effects, at least, you know, endogenous and hormonal effects you're getting from resistance training, not taking exogenous hormones don't seem to have much an effect on muscle protein synthesis.

But, and Stu was mentioning this with growth hormone, you know, affecting collagen synthesis. And so then a question I've of course had was, well, what if that's doing something for preventing injury because you're getting more collagen synthesis and tendons? I mean, I don't know that anyone's looked at that. No, we don't know, but I would say, again, growth hormone is a very interesting hormone because it's pulsatil. So it's secreted at very, you know, at night is when you're getting your greatest growth hormone release.

It's your guess is as good as mine because, like you said, it's purely speculative. I would be skeptical that that brief spike in growth hormone post-exercise would meaningfully alter tendon synthesis, let's say, to where it would be reducing your injury potential, but without knowing it could. So I didn't dismiss it. We would need research on it. With respect, and I think you kind of already answered this, but I just want to make sure with designing this program, differences between men and women, should women then really

be focusing more on the multi-joint exercises, specifically also because of the effects on bone mineral density? Or should all of us be, I mean, all of us should be focusing more on that? Yeah, women really should not train much, if it's all different from men. The one area that there seems to be some evidence is that women are able to recover a little more quickly, both intersets so they can actually rest somewhat shorter and gain back most of the volume load, like I said. It's not clear whether this has something to do endogenously internally or whether it's the fact they're just, in general, using lighter loads than men, so it's easier to, you know, come back if you're using 200 pounds versus 100.

we don't know. And even the recovery between sessions may be a little better, their ability to recover. There's some evidence of that. But as far as the overall program, I don't program women much of it all differently than men. For recovery, you hear a lot about the importance of recovery, the importance. What does that mean? What does that mean? Well, it means that you need to take sufficient time so that you're able to come back strong for your, I mean it means a lot of different things, depending on the context, but I think in the context of our talk, that you're able to come back with sufficient energy and joint related reserves where you're able to train effectively in your next session, that your training is not compromised in the next time you're

going to lift. To some extent, it also has to do with the muscle protein synthetic response, which is roughly the time course. It's about 48 hours. It can be truncated a little as you get actually more advanced. You seem to get a higher spike so it happens quicker and actually trails off a little more quickly in some of the research, which is, I think, getting a little too much into the weeds. But theoretically, you probably wouldn't need to train a muscle

or it would be beneficial to give it 48 hours rest. so that you can maximize that and work on other things or even just recover. Where it wouldn't be, certainly doesn't seem to be beneficial to train it on a daily basis, the same muscle, and that having that recovery allows you to do other things that would potentially develop your body and or your health to a greater extent. Does it blunt hypertrophy if you're training the same muscle?

No, so there's actually some interesting, it's kind of equivocal. We actually can tell I've done a lot of work in all of these, variables. So we carried out a study where these were young men. It might, we don't have any evidence in older people and I can make a case where it might, because recovery seems to be blunted and older, but I'll get to that in a minute. But in young men, we had them doing either the same exact routine done over three days with more. So when they did it over three days, they perform more sets per session. So it was like twice, each session was twice as long, or else doing shorter sessions, spread out over six days, the same exact routine.

And no difference for most of the muscles, but we looked at the biceps, and the biceps growth was much greater in the group that did three days versus six days. Is that an anomaly? Again, we don't know. You'd need to replicate the study. Now, as I just mentioned, older individuals, recovery does start to become a factor. And this is just, look, aging, you can't, certainly you can stave off aging, but you can't prevent it and the consequences of it.

So to a large extent, we can live extremely healthy and vibrant into our older years, provided we take care of our bodies and do things. But father time, mother time, we'll catch up to some extent. And we do have to take this into account with programming. So like I said, no differences between men and women per se, but there are differences between younger and older individuals. And one of them, when I have consulted with older individuals, is to factor in, not have as much volume. So the ability to tolerate volume seems to go down to some extent. And by the way, interestingly, it seems their maintenance needs to be somewhat higher for volume. So they can't use as high volumes, but also they need to have kind of a higher minimum.

volume to maintain their mass. There's limited evidence of that, but there was one study in particular that seemed to indicate that. And also having more cognizance of inter-session recovery and sometimes having fewer sessions per week. How much recovery would the older people? So again, this really depends on the individual because there's older individuals, like I mentioned that I can wipe the floor with 30-year-olds. And there's other ones. So these are things that it really will depend upon.

So it depends. How long have you been training? Are you just new when you're 60 years old to training? Or have you been doing it since you were 20? You know, what do you have joint-related issues? What's your nutritional status? What's your sleep and stress status? Are there any other medical issues?

So a lot to unpack. And on a general level, I think most kind of three days a week is a default that would be a good. I mentioned that two days a week, people can still make robust gains. But I think three days a week would get you a little better gains. And if possible, even on a minimalist basis, if you can do three half hour sessions per week, I think that's a good kind of minimalist guideline for everyone, including older people. and then, you know, some older individuals can do a what's called a split body routine where they can do, let's say, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Thursday, Thursday and up or lower, upper lower type routine and recover well, whereas others need that three day, you know, shouldn't do more than three days a week. Is there anything that can speed up recovery?

So recovery being passive recovery, active recovery, like things that could help speed it up, nutrition-wise, or other. things as well. Yeah. First of all, being recreationally active. So blood flow does help with recovery. One of the worst things you could do is just be a cash potato. So let's say you do a resistance training workout and the rest of the week you're just sitting on the catch, you know, munching on bonbons and watching your favorite TV shows. That's, circulation itself is going to optimize the delivery of nutrients and expedite delivery and recovery in that respect. Other things have somewhat less evidence behind them. So massage has been shown to potentially help recovery. What's a problem with that? Well,

it's hearts as sham massages. So when your massage feels really good, and hey, I feel better, is that because of the massage or because of the psychological effect that you, yeah, I feel better now. I feel vibrant. Foam rolling. You know, these are all things that, it's hard to sham them properly and get a sense, was it really the treatment or was it the placebo effect? Because you always want a placebo. If you're comparing it against nothing, then, hey, it felt good, so I feel I have better recovery. You know, taking in proper protein itself, that to me isn't a recovery strategy.

That just should be part of your lifestyle if you want to. if you want to maximize your results, but if you're not taking it enough protein, protein are the building blocks of your muscle and of any tissues. So you're not going to get proper, quote, recovery if you're not optimizing your protein nutritional intake. And there's other, I mean, essential fat fatty acids, particularly your N3s,

your omega-3 fatty acids seem to have certain benefits. effects on muscle development, particularly it seems for the older people, but we don't have great evidence longitudinally. We have some good acute studies that seem to show that. Anyway, so these are all, I think, strategies. Again, cost benefit? Well, massage, if you're paying for it, there's a cost to that, but if you have, let's say, a significant other that can massage you. Could that help foam rolling? You know, really not a cost to that. there is some evidence that cold water immersion, we can kind of get into this, might expedite quote-unquote recovery so that you're not going to be a sore.

So if the recovery has to do with getting back to trainability levels so that you're reducing soreness, and heat, by the way, is another thing, which generally does not seem to have negative effects at least. So again, those are potential strategies. if you want to get into, it's kind of interesting with cold water immersion and cryotherapy, particularly it's been shown with the cold water immersion. There is emerging evidence that it actually has negative effects, particularly on hyperchfee, but on strength measures as well. Somewhat limited evidence, but it's been showed.

There's triangulation of evidence, meaning that we have acute data that shows it blunts intracellular anabolic signaling, that it wants muscle protein synthesis, satellite cell. So when you talk about anabolic signaling, the pro-inflammatory response, which on one end is why, quote, unquote, it helps with recovery, but the acute pro-inflammatory response actually has been shown to have a positive effect on muscle development. So chronic inflammation, bad, acute inflammation, good. At least that's the extent of what we see from the literature.

And there's been longitudinal evidence showing that it wants hypertrophy. over longer term studies. Now, that is when these studies have been done doing this every day or very frequently, post-training. I would say that if you're only going to do it one time, let's say you're feeling really sore, nothing wrong with getting in a cold tub. It doesn't mean all your gains are going to go if you occasionally do a cold water immersion. But I do think that using it frequently, probably.

if your goal is optimizing muscle growth, not a good thing. Timing might be a concern. So if you want to do that, probably spacing it out at long periods after. But then you might not get the benefit you want. Like if you're sore, you're going to want to be doing it when you're sore. So if you're sore the following day, yeah, I think that might be beneficial and where you've kind of gotten out of your window or at least gotten the majority of your protein synthetic responses in.

But again, the primary reasons that cold water immersion seems to have negative effects. A number one, blunting of the pro-inflammatory response, A number two, blunting of the circulatory response, that cold water restricts the circulation, and thus you're not getting nutrient delivery to the muscles. It's speculative, but that's the working theory. Right. So that would make sense to not do cold water immersion right after your training. Like if it's like your day, like I like to do cold water immersion for brain benefits,

like in feeling you get norapin-ephine release and it affects my anxiety and my mood and focus and attention. But I don't ever do it after strength training. So it's usually on a day that I'm not strength training. So the other thing would be you mentioned soreness and people using it for soreness, but should you be sore? Like should you train to be sore? Does that play a role in hypertrophy?

and then, you know, like, is that something, do you get more sure with age as well? Or is, what is, what's that indicative of? I mean, yeah, so another interesting question. Soreness, to some extent, is genetically influenced. And interestingly, it seems, women seem not to have as much soreness as men. There's been some speculation it might have to do with hormonally, with estrogen. It could be other effects as well. But, so it's an interesting question.

Soreness generally is due to a novel response, or a novel stimuli. And usually that's primarily due to the eccentric component of exercise. And that, by the way, can also be done through, let's say, downhill running. It would be an eccentric form of aerobic training. But let's just focus on the resistance training aspect where the lowering. So eccentric is a lowering, basically, length, muscles are lengthening under tension.

And even concentric exercise can cause soreness, and there's muscle damage that occurs. But it seems to be also more specific to muscle damage and even damage within the epamycinum or extracellular matrix. Again, these aren't necessarily clear, so it's connective tissue might be even more relevant. speculative that that might have greater relevance to soreness, with nociceptors that are exposed to free nerve endings and there's interaction with free radicals. It's the whole theory behind this.

Do you need to be sorted to make gains? No. I think that's pretty clear. But could being sore potentially be indicative that there may be some additional positive gains? It's not clear, but a novel response, again, why does the body adapt? it adapts because it is being challenged beyond its present state.

A novel response would generally indicate it's being taxed beyond its present state, and thus having some degree of soreness might indicate that you are challenging it beyond its present state. But again, some people, it's genetically influenced, so some people just don't get sore and some people get, are very responsive to soreness regardless. There does seem to be a repeated bout effect, whereas you keep doing the same thing over and over again, the body adapts and gets less and less sore over time, but some people keep doing the same thing, and they keep getting somewhat sore.

Where soreness is an issue. So if you are mildly sore, I think it's probably not only okay. Maybe it's positive. It certainly shouldn't be a negative. If you're not sore, I don't think you should worry about that per se. But on the opposite, if you are very sore, that is a negative. Because that's going to impair your ability to train again hard.

and that would be an issue. There are things people can do to help with the soreness that aren't going to blunt their hypertrophy or maybe be bad for them health-wise. So that you know about any evidence-based things that people can do to improve their soreness? Improve their response to soreness? Yeah, so that they're not, maybe not as sore as long or... Well, I mean, could you?

Yeah, you cannot focus on the eccentric component. which probably is not a great thing because eccentric, not only is the eccentric component as important, there seems to be a synergism between eccentric and concentric exercise where the intracellular signaling cascade for eccentric exercise is somewhat different than that of concentric, and that would imply a synergism in terms of the hypertrophic response. There is also evidence that muscles develop regionally.

So it's interesting research that certain parts of muscles will develop more than others. And eccentric exercise seems to work more in the distal portion of the muscle, whereas concentric seems to work more in the mid portion of the muscle, and thus combining them again would be beneficial. So it doesn't seem to be, although yes, you can reduce the soreness that's developed by not focusing on your concentric. Wouldn't suggest that. By the way, there was a, I don't know if there's still. around, but there was a gym chain called Curves.

I know if you heard of them, but they had these machines that just did the concentric exercise because the whole thing was they didn't want their, they focused on older women, and they thought that this would be a negative, the soreness would scare them away. And they just had these machines that focused on the concentric portion. But again, if your goal is to optimize gains, that's not a great strategy. So, look, you can do warm water baths seem to, again, help to alleviate soreness doing active recovery, just walking around. You know, if it's for upper body, doing certain motions that would aerobic. You can pump your arms.

You could do the elliptical that has the arm crank just to get blood flow to the area would help to alleviate the soreness. And the other thing I would say, if that's the goal, stick to the same exercises over and over. Now, again, one of the benefits, exercise selection is another potentially important thing if you want to optimize gains. And that's, again, promoting a novel response. Factoring in different movements can be beneficial to optimizing results. And that would, again, have to do with the novelty of the movement. But that will come with the caveat that there'll be some sorenness. Right. So two things that come to mind. One is aerobic exercise. You're talking about blood flow,

and that's another area that I was wanting to talk to you about was the combination of aerobic exercise and strength training and the effects on muscle hypertrophy. Combining them, maybe even just either with like days. So you do strength training one day and then aerobic exercise the other day. So that's kind of a little bit. It seems like what you're talking about having the blood flow to help even with recovery. or soreness, but also what if you do it within the same, on the same day, in the same session even? Yeah, so there's been a lot of talk about concurrent training being detrimental. There was something called the Chronic Interference Hypothesis, which basically was actually

shown in animal models and rodent models where the signaling, interestingly of the signaling for cardiovascular exercise upregulated your catabolic pathway. your AMPK pathway. Again, I don't want to get too technical here, but the AMPK is a catabolic pathway, which actually blunts the mTOR pathway, which is an antibiotic pathway, and alternatively your resistance,

your anaerobic exercise was your anabolic pathway, and thus if you did aerobic training, it would blunt the adaptations for resistance training, and that actually has been shown to be at least, at the very least, at a way over simplification. Now, at some point, there will seem to be some interference. But it does seem that it's a lot, that point is a lot further along than what we originally

had thought that, yeah, and I think that more has to do with the overtraining effects than probably the intracellular signaling effect, though it's not clear. But we have some pretty good meta-analytic data now showing that within, you know, Decent volumes of training, there does not seem to be a blunting of the anabolic effect, and that's even when it's performed in the same day. There was some evidence that perhaps, even at somewhat higher levels, that maybe there was a negative effect on fiber type specific, particularly in the type 1 fibers. Again, I think it's a little premature to draw strong inferences on that.

But what I would say is, I think the general recommendations, that I would make from the literature that we have. Like you said, if possible, space it out so that if you're doing resistance training, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, you want to do six days a week of training. Do your aerobic training on your alternative days, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday.

If not, possibly do a morning afternoon type thing or evening, where you do, let's say, resistance training in the morning, cardio in your evening. And at worst, if you have to do them in the same obsession, do you resist, always do the resistance training first, because if nothing else, the aerobic training can compromise your energy levels to do the strain training. It can compromise the performance. So that in itself would have a negative effect if you're going to compromise

performance on your results. I do also want to point out that this is, again, a very nuanced topic. So how much resistance training are you doing? How much aerobic training? So it's particularly with the aerobic training, are you doing long, slow distance, are you doing six days a week of marathon running training? Yeah, that's going to certainly start to have negative effects on your muscle development. If you're walking 10,000 steps a day, 12,000 steps a day, very unlikely that's going to have any negative effect. If you're doing three high-intensity interval training sessions per week, very unlikely that's going to have a negative effect. So there's a spectrum on these things. It's not.

These are not yes or no questions that I can give a cookie cutter response. But on a general basis, you need to, I think at the very least, be in tune with your body. And that's, to me, one of the most important things I can communicate to the audience is to really start to be in tune with your body. If you feel you need extra time off, you're probably overdoing it. And I think a lot of times people are just oblivious to get into a routine, and it's just a have to do this, have to do this. and try to be intuitive. Use your intuition and, you know, if you think you need a day off, take a day. If you think you need two days off.

Delode periods, when done properly, can be beneficial where you're having periods of reduced training frequency, particularly if you're training very hard. If you're doing the typical type of workout that most gen pops through, you probably don't need a delode. Because you're not training hard enough to warrant that. but certainly if you're a very serious exercise or bodybuilders, particular in high-level athletes, interspersing regimented periods of reduced training, frequency, volume, intensity, I think are very important. How do people that are endurance athletes that are training for a race or whatever do that? I mean, like, can they still incorporate their resistance training in their obviously very extensive

endurance training program without over-training. Is it even? Yeah, yeah. So one thing I would say for endurance, so endurance training athletes are somewhat of a fairly encompass a fairly wide spectrum. But let's take your typical runner. So when we're talking endurance cross-country, you know, doing a marathon-type running or long-distance cross-country, weight is an issue.

So you want to train in a way, in a more minimalist fashion, because higher-violence Higher volume programs will tend to put on muscle mass. You want to try as an endurance-based athlete to reduce muscle mass development and maximize strength development. And that would be using heavier load. So that's where you don't want to do your light load training with higher volumes. You'd want to focus more on your, let's say, three to five rep training for a few sets. So that is not going to, the volume will be insufficient to substantially increase muscle mass.

So volume is a driver of hypertrophy. And if you're doing low volume training with heavy loads, then generally speaking, you're not going to gain much weight in terms of muscle mass, but you will be able to get the benefits that will help you optimize your endurance capacity. That makes sense. What about stretching? That's something, you know, I see people stretching in the gym, they're stretching before a set, they're stretching in between sets after working out.

What role does stretching play in muscle protein synthesis or muscle hypertrophy or injury or anything, flexibility, anything? Yeah, so I'll approach it from different levels. But on a basic level, most people think of stretching from a flexibility standpoint. Do people need to stretch? If you need more flexibility, then it would be beneficial to stretch. stretching for the sake or getting i should say this gaining flexibility for the sake of gaining flexibility is is misguided because increased flexibility reduces the stability of the joint so if you can do what you need to do from an activities of daily living standpoint from a mobility and flexibility

to step, but no reason to gain more flexibility. If you are a, let's say a punter in football, you're going to need to be able to get your leg very high, a racquet in the Radio City musical. They would, you know, necessarily want to do, if they're not able to do it, or even to continue doing it to do some type of flexibility training. But for the majority of people, that's not an issue. So they'd have to, everyone has to assess their own flexibility needs. With that said, resistance.

training itself is a active form of flexibility training. And there's been studies that show that compared to static stretching, you get similar benefits doing resistance training protocols provided that you're training through a full range of motion. So if you are lifting weights, total body through a full range of motion, you get similar benefits to static stretching. Combining them is even better if you want to add on your flexibility. So if you don't think you've gotten enough flexibility from your resistance training and you need more from an ADL activities daily living standpoint then go for it now I have approached this also from a muscle protein synthesis this is actually quite interesting I'm collaborating with a group from Germany and they actually

have other research that's recently come out showing that long term if you stretch now this is a lot of stretching but they did an hour a day using the stretching boot they got marked hypertrophy, like 15% growth in the calf muscles. And the muscle thickness, really interesting. Now, I don't know who wants to use a stretching boot for an hour a day. But it just shows that stretching, I mean, there is tension during the stretch, and that muscle tension is a mechanism of hypertrophy. So doing long duration stretching, and these were intense stretches that were

like an eight out of 10 on the discomfort scale. So not a fun thing. So it's not like, I'm stretching, you know, and they were fairly intense stretch. So it does show that stretching itself can have an anabolic effect. We recently published a study, and there were some papers before this also showing this, that what's called intersat stretch, loaded stretch,

promoted somewhat greater gains. We used it in a calf exercise. So basically subjects did calf raises, what's called plantar flexion for their gastricnemiaus and soleus, which are the two calf muscles. And this was actually within subject design, where one leg, they just rested for two minutes between the sets. They did their calf raise and then they rested two minutes. The other leg, they would do their set, and then immediately after the set, they would descend into a stretch. with the weight still on. So they were, basically was a loaded stretch.

And it was intense. I mean, it was, you know, they were kind of hurting at that last, we're doing what they could to endure towards the end of the stretch. And they did it for 20 seconds, and then they rested for the rest of the rest interval. And we found somewhat greater growth in the soleus muscle and really no difference, no substantial difference, in the gastricenemia.

Now, interestingly, the solesiose, is a type 1 dominant fiber muscle. It's about 80% sootwitch type 1 fibers. So what kind of raises the possibility is the stretching, at least the loaded stretching that we're doing more specific to type 1 fibers than type 2. Not sure. All this talk makes me think about yoga. And, I mean, yoga, I mean, it's stretching, but it's also like pretty intense.

I mean, you're holding the pose and your muscles for it. Like, what are your thoughts on yoga? Does it somehow, do you think you could extrapolate a little bit? Yeah. So, no, again, they're different. I'm not a yoga specialist, but I have, I do know something about it. And there's different forms of yoga that have some of more, quote unquote, strength-related focuses within them.

You certainly can gain muscle from yoga, but is it going to optimize muscle? No, because, again, you're not really, as a general, general rule, at least from what I know through most of the forms of yoga, you're really not challenging, over time, maybe at the beginning when you're a newbie, you can, that's where you're going to see your gains. But over time, you don't challenge the muscle sufficiently to need to adapt. So you will plateau rather quickly. And you'll maintain. So you can get some gains at the beginning. Can there be ways that you might adapt, or alter the yoga principles to doing that, I would guess, but I'm not familiar enough with the strategy to

say. So maybe yoga shouldn't be used instead of a resistance training, but in addition to to... That would be correct. If you want to optimize, again, resistance training is paramount. All of these other things are potentially beneficial. And again, if you have all the time in the world, do them all, to the extent, I shouldn't say, as long as you're not overtraining, to the extent that you don't overtrained within your body's capabilities. But I think if you can only do one, my objective, somewhat biased, of you is that resistance training is irreplaceable. Yeah, there were some people that were kind of, you know, mostly women wondering, oh, can yoga be considered resistance training? And I was thinking,

And I was like, oh, I don't know. That's a good question because, you know, I could, in my head, come up with a way, yes, it would be. So that is good to know. One thing I want to talk to you about, I know we're getting close to the end, and this is something that I know you've talked about in your book before. And I've heard people talk about. In fact, I think Joe Rogan was the first guy that told me about this and talked about it. And I was like, you might just see my face on camera. I'm like, what? This blood flow restriction.

What is it? you know are there benefits drawbacks uh to it what yeah so again another topic that have carried out quite a few studies on um so it we talked about light load training blood flow restriction training uses a cuff uh and it's used proximally in the muscle meaning the upper portion of the muscle that you're looking to train yeah the caveat is number one you can only use it on your arms and legs you can't train with really your chest your back or your shoulders because You're, and we can do it proximate. But let's take your biceps, for instance.

You would cuff up by the deltoid, the deltoid muscle is your shoulder muscle. You'd put a place a cuff here, and then you do, let's say, biceps curls. You can do tricep-press downs, your same thing. It would be the cuff in the same place. With the legs, you would cuff at the groin area, you know, at the upper thigh, very upper region of the thigh and do, let's say, leg extensions or squats. And you do, generally you do this with very light loads. They've tried it with heavier loads, but it doesn't seem to work as well.

that it's even very light load, it's 20 to 30% 1RM. But when you're using these very light loads, you fatigue much more quickly than if you just did the light load without the cuff. So let's say if you're using 30% 1RM, your first set you might get 25 reps, and your second set you down to 20, and then 15. And usually the rest intervals are rather short between them. Good evidence that it promotes similar muscle development

to doing traditional resistance training or barados of the rep range. Strength is similar to light load training without blood flow restriction. Your strength is not going to be, it's good for hypertrophy, but strength is somewhat compromised, which is always going to happen. Heavier loads are going to be better for strength. It's just the way it is. But you still will get, you doesn't mean this, again, has been taken. It's not binary.

It's not strength, no strength. You just don't get quite as much strength, but you can substantially improve your strength as well, even in well-trained subjects. Now, the thing is, is it better than light-load training? Well, you can, light-load training, I should have mentioned this. It is, and you've done it, you say, it's not fun for a lot of people because you just get metabolic acidosis. Again, you have to train hard, and you get this burn, and when you're doing it over 30 repetitions, let's say, and it's a three-second rep, That's a 90-second set. Oh, it's, you know, 80, 70, 80, 90 seconds.

There's a long period of time where you're experiencing that burn, quote-unquote. Whereas if you're doing a leg, let's say, a leg extension or a biceps girl with blood flow restriction, you're cutting the time. You're still using the lighter loads, meaning that you're not putting as much joint stress on. But you're cutting the time of that set and thus somewhat reducing the discomfort. Is it necessarily better from a result standpoint than a lot? high or low training. There's been no evidence that we've had, and certainly that I've seen on that. But there is some hypotheticals. I can make cases for a certain, like the hypoxie inducible

factor is a substance that is thought to increase the hypertrophic response. It's just a hypertrophic response. So there are some logical rationales, but we don't have any longitudinal evidence showing it's better. And like I said, the limitation to it is the inability to do it. It's only specific to the extremities. There are some potential, I want to at least bring up the fact, in general it's shown to be safe, but in people that have blood pressure issues, I'm not completely convinced there might not be potential issues. And the other the thing that I want to point out too is that the research we have is in very controlled environments with researchers that know what they're doing. You get people, they just put a cuff on and their

arm starts turning purple where you can really do some damage if you're not doing this properly. So you have to be cognizant of how to go about doing it if you're going to employ BFR. I was going to ask you about that. Like what kind of cuff are we talking about here? Like I always think of a tourniquet with blood pressure and where it's like. Well, so in research settings, there are actually blood pressure. pressure type cuffs that are used that we can monitor the pressure that's going on. People just use like bandanitized and they use a rating scale, like a discomfort scale of one to 10 and saying you should be at a six or a seven.

But a lot of times people don't gauge their one to, you know, one to 10 well. And they can be, they're saying they're to seven and their arms turning purple. So you got to be careful. Yeah. Well, this has been a really enlightening podcast for me. I really, really, really appreciate. I'd love to ask you before we go about your personal routine. I mean, you're a busy guy.

You're a professor. You're publishing a lot of scientific papers. You're an educator. And you're also like very spoken on social media. Talk about it. Like, how do you find time and what is your routine kind of, generally speaking, look like? Sure. So for me, exercises like brushing your teeth.

you have to do it. It's not really fun for me anymore because I train hard when I do train, and it's at least resistance training wise. But my routine is much more streamlined from what it used to be. Number one, just time factors. I'm not looking, I was a former bodybuilder, and if I was bodybuilding, I'd be doing something much different than I'm doing now. And as I've gotten older, the recovery issues start to come in. So I'm on a four-day-week resistance training routine. I do basically a two-on, one-off two-ons. Two-on, then I take a rest, and I train two additional days and take another couple days off.

I do an upper-lower split. My workouts last 45 minutes to an hour, so I'm training like three and a half, four hours a week. I train quite hard when I do train. All sets are within that, like one to two reps of failure, and sometimes I do a set to all-out failure. I do again lower one day up or the other and I do look every day to get substantial steps I focus on a step count so I targeted 12,000 steps a day aerobic when I say aerobic type training just the general step count

which is for overall health and again my focus at this point is making sure that I'm maintaining my health that's the most paramount to me and you know still looking good is a is an issue but i'm not looking to step on stage at this point and thus again it's goal specific and uh lifestyle specific so i'm so busy as you pointed out with uh training with um research and teaching and also travel that uh getting the work at it's and when i travel by the way it's even now coming out to here San Diego, it's going to be tough to get. Maybe I'll get one day where I usually would get two with a workout, but it becomes more difficult when I'm away. And those are kind of structured delodes for me. What about your protein intake? Do you, is it like, are you the 1.6? Yeah, maybe even

a little more. I just make sure I don't micromanage it, but I make sure that I'm getting, I know just in general what I need to eat and I say a little more is not going to hurt me, so I'm probably getting a little more than that. Is it harder when you're traveling to? No. I mean, I was at breakfast this morning. I had my omelet and cheese and, yeah, I'll make sure I get that. Awesome. Well, so Brad, you're all over social media. You've got two books. Can you mention the books? And then maybe, so you're on Twitter. You're very active on Twitter and you tweet very interesting studies. And I follow you on Twitter. You're also on Instagram. You're very active there. And you, again, your breakdown of the studies are great. definitely want to make sure people follow you on your social media channels. Thank you. Yeah.

So my two books, I have a textbook, which is much more technical. For those who want to get into like the weeds of science, it's called the Science and Development of Muscle Hypertrophy, published by Human Kinetics. And that's a hardcover. That's a serious textbook. We use at a graduate level for exercise science students. But I mean, if you have a background, something like yourself certainly would understand.

But I also have a consumer-friendly textbook on optimizing muscle mass called the Max Muscle Plan, and that's also human kinetics. Both of them can be found on Amazon. And yeah, you could follow me, just Google me, and you will find me. So you're at Brad Schoenfeld on Twitter and at Brad Schoenfeld PhD on Instagram. Correct. I think I have that. Brad.

Pleasure. Thank you so much for all the great information. Thank you for having me. Thank you folks for listening to this episode and a huge thank you to Dr. Brad Schoenfeld for coming on the show and for the amazing research that he and his lab have done and continue to do. As Brad mentioned in the episode, research and exercise and nutrition is only going to be able to provide general guidelines which are then applied to the individual considering important factors such as genetics, lifestyle and nutrition among others.

For those of you interested in diving a bit deeper into genetics and fitness, you can check out our free genetic rapport on fitness, which focuses on SNPs related to fitness, including endurance, the capacity to improve VO2 max with endurance training, reduced lactate transport out of muscle and susceptibility to muscle fatigue in men, and susceptibility to injuries to soft tissues, including Achilles tendon, ACL and tennis elbow, and more. that information and more, all you need is your raw DNA data, which you may have gotten from a provider like 23 and Me or ancestry DNA. You can find that basic report at foundmyfitness.com forward slash genetics, forward slash fitness. That's foundmyfitness.com forward slash genetics

forward slash fitness, F-I-T-N-E-S-S. Or. Or, you know, or Or you can just scroll to the bottom of the genetics page and look for the big list of free basic reports. All you need is your DNA FIDAL. Thanks so much for listening and catch you all soon.