Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1070: Underground Muscle Building Secrets with Dr. Scott Stevenson

Episode Date: July 8, 2019

In this episode, Sal, Adam & Justin speak with Dr. Scott Stevenson, competitive bodybuilder, PhD in applied exercise physiologist, college professor and author of Be Your Own Bodybuilding Coach. Scott provides an interesting and insightful perspective on blending eastern and western philosophy and the science of building muscle.   How does training in herbs and acupuncture translate to muscle building? (2:21) What drove him to enter into the field of Eastern Medicine? (5:28) Did he experience any ‘ah-ha’ moments in his training in Chinese medicine? (11:25) Was he able to take his knowledge of Chinese Medicine to help even the extreme bodybuilders? (14:00) Does ‘bro-training’ have any validity? (18:50) How in bro science the biggest guys are usually the strongest guys. (26:45) The phenomenon of muscle wisdom. (31:25) 3903  What does the current research say about muscle hyperplasia? (43:04) Can people do cycles of anabolics and go off, but essentially be better off than they were before in terms of muscle size? (46:15) The science behind ‘trigger sessions’ to build muscle. (49:00) What are the most common things that he has to change in a competitor? (54:17) Do free weights tend to build more muscle? If so, why? (57:24) Is there a hierarchy in advanced training techniques? (1:03:34) What are some techniques that he uses on his athletes to allow their central nervous system (CNS) to be able to take on more? (1:11:35) Has he had any experience with an all-day workout? (1:15:50) For someone who has been working out for years, go on their first anabolic steroid cycle, should they change their training? If they do, what should they change? (1:22:40) Do receptors down regulate with too many steroid cycles? (1:26:24) Featured Guest/People Mentioned Scott Stevenson (@fortitude_training)  Instagram Website Podcast  Jordan Peters (@trainedbyjp)  Instagram John Meadows (@mountaindog1)  Instagram Ronnie Coleman (@ronniecoleman8)  Instagram Randy Couture (@xcnatch)  Instagram Jose Antonio PhD (@JoseAntonioPhD)  Twitter Mr Olympia Jay Cutler (@jaycutler)  Instagram Ben Pakulski (@bpakfitness)  Instagram Dorian Yates (@thedorianyates)  Instagram Brad Schoenfeld, PhD (@bradschoenfeldphd)  Instagram Related Links/Products Mentioned July Promotion: MAPS Anywhere ½ off!! **Code “ANYWHERE50 at checkout** Be Your Own Bodybuilding Coach: A Reference Guide For Year-Round Bodybuilding Success – Book by Scott Stevenson Applying Bodybuilding Science to Create a Genetic Freak Anthropometric and Physical Qualities of Elite Male Youth Rugby League Players Encyclopedia of modern bodybuilding - Book by Arnold Schwarzenegger Skeletal Muscle Fiber Hyperplasia | The ISSN Scoop Build Mass With Squats - Squats and Milk Training Program Rustproofing the Iron Warrior Integrative Bodybuilding: Are You Training Enough to Build Muscle? Paul Carter | All Articles | T Nation Resistance Training Volume Enhances Muscle Hypertrophy but Not Strength in Trained Men.

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mite, op, mite, op with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. So this is going to be a fun one for a lot of the audience that loves bodybuilding talk. Your technical bodybuilding talk. I love this conversation. I had a lot of people that had reached out and told me that we had to get connected to Dr. Scott Stevenson and we had a few mutual friends reached out. He flew out

to the studio and hung out and just had a great, great conversation. Yeah, I was very technical. Most of the conversation is about muscle building, hypertrophy. I think we talked about anabolic a little bit in this episode. So if you're really interested in the intricacies of building muscle and you like muscle talk, you're gonna love this episode. Now Dr. Scott Stevenson, super, super smart guy, one of the smarter guys in our space.

His website is b-y-o-b-bcoach.com, so b-y-o-b-b-coach.com. So b-y-o-b-bcoach.com. He has his own podcast called Muscle Mines and the website for that is advicesradio.com and then he wrote a book called Be Your Own Body Building Coach and then finally you can find him on Instagram at Fortitude underscore training.

So we think you're gonna enjoy this episode. Before it starts, I do wanna remind everybody that maps anywhere is 50% off. And I remember maps anywhere, is the workout program designed to maximize your body's ability to build muscle, burn body fat, and improve its mobility without any gym equipment. So this workout, the entire workout can be done outdoors.

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So that's it without any further ado. Here we are interviewing Dr. Scott Stevenson. What I found fascinating about you is your blend of Eastern and Western influences with your because you've got the Western education PhD. What's your PhD in exercise? Technology. And then you've got you're also an acupuncturist with the Chinese understanding what Chinese medicine and herbs and what not. Yeah I'm a Chinese herbivorous certified nationally certified Chinese herbivorous. I'm actually licensed in the state of Arizona as an acupuncture.

So you can call yourself an acupuncture physician there. It's a legal title, but my license is inactive. There's no point. I'm so busy with the bodybuilding things, that there's no point in trying to squeeze that in because the overhead of trying to run a full practice. Now, how does do both of those impact what you do for bodybuilding? What are some things you've taken from both that have really contributed to your ability to put muscle on people?

Oh, jeez, I'm very, very open to herbs just in general. I have to be careful. Leely, you can't do telemedicine as an acupuncturist or an herbalist because you need to see them in person. The nature of the diagnostic techniques, because this was something that was built thousands a year ago, required that you see the person. Some people are really going to facial diagnosis, for instance.

They can read the face and basically read your mind in the same way. And so I can't do too much long distance, but I've figured out ways in which when someone gets sick, for instance, what kind of herbs they can, they're readily available. I load people up, I've been doing this for literally decades, load people up on akenasia and various herbs

that have antimicrobial actions. I just sent someone, someone called Bonlon Gen, which has a wide spectrum antimicrobial action, which is just a very common tea that people would drink in China. It's kind of basic stuff, but we don't know about it here anymore.

What do you see in the face, like, or the, do you tongue? Do you look at the tongue also? And... Tongue and pulse are the mainstays. People, there are various schools of thought that it developed over the course of centuries, sort of a different time periods

in the history of Chinese medicine. What we get in the U.S. is kind of a generic combination, general practitioner, type of Chinese medicine training. In someone were to be functioning as a Chinese medical practitioner in China, most of the time they're internal medicine person, which means they're an herbalist.

That's their focus. They know that back and forth. And you might go into a complimentary medicine situation where they've got Western medicine. So the regular MDs in China, and then they'll have an acupuncturist who just does acupuncture. So it's a Chinese acupuncturist, and then herbalists who just does herbs. They might also funnel someone to do some internal martial arts like Qi Gong or Tai Chi as well, if that's what they see is needed. So there would be different specialists in the US, you get trained, they just basically roll it all together.

So it's about a 3,000 hour long program with clinical and diadactic training. It takes, it's a four year program but they squeeze it down into three because you go continuously. What actually even interested you in getting into Easter and I said, after you already have your PhD over here, what drove you that direction?

That's a great question. So I was an assistant, I was at Cal Poly Pomona down the road from you guys. You were at college. Yeah, yeah. So I was an assistant professor there and I was trying to figure out, I had the opportunity to do research and try to like

toss my my pennies in the giant pool of the research literature and I and I love doing research, but I realized Where can I do the most good for people? Where can I basically have my greatest impact on the world and I wanted to be able to reach out as much as possible Interact with people. I've been a personal trainer coach for years and I wanted to be able to reach out as much as possible, interact with people. I've been a personal trainer to coach for years, and I wanted to be able to do just nutritional interventions. So if someone were to come in, let's say and do some research work, do some sort of community outreach type of thing in the lab there at the school, you just have them exercise. You don't address an nutrition, or you're just pissing in the wind, part of my fridge.

So I was thinking about becoming a registered dietitian, and then I started looking at other ways legally that I could actually do nutritional interventions and in California, acupuncture is gigantic, seem it is in Florida. So I looked into acupuncture, and I started looking around for different schools, and actually I took a sabbatical.

I had a leave of absence from Cal Poly Pomona to go and become, or start my training in AccuPuncture. I took some classes there in California at South Baylow University. And then I went to Tucson and started training there. And then I sort of decided, you know, I, this is where my path needs to lead me is stepping out of academia. I still dabble a little bit as it adjuncts for University of Tampa.

It's hard to get back in. Once you sort of leave and burn that bridge, like going back into a 10-year track position is almost impossible. That's just how it works. It was fine. That's what brought me there because Chinese medicine is a full system of medicine. Like I said, in Florida, you're an acupuncture physician. You can be a general practitioner here in California.

It's designed, it's a holistic form of medicine. So it was better than just becoming a registered dietitian. And you can couch, I mean, you have to be careful where and how you do this legally speaking. But you can, I can count, if I wanted to, I could, if I saw someone person back in Florida and my license were active, I could see them and couch my dietary recommendations for them as a body builder Let's say dieting down what have you in the context of Chinese medicine and just the same way that a physician could Sition can legally tell anybody anything although Western Allopathic physicians don't know necessarily no medicine or nutritional that well

And dietitians can do that, carpractors can do that, naturopaths can do that, osteopaths can do that, and acupuncturists can do that. But it's more than that. You're a massage therapist, I'm a body worker too. Yeah. And you've got the herbs,

which is a whole system of medicine. And the acupuncture, which is phenomenal for pain. And the thing that's really kind of cool about a lot of acupuncturists, you can go, this can be pushed too far. You guys are probably familiar with what can happen with some chiropractor. Some chiropractors are phenomenal.

And then some chiropractors are kind of wacky, doodle. They can go like way off the beaten path and start doing all sorts of bizarre things. Chinese medicine practitioners acupunctures will do the same thing too, so they can focus on, let's say allergy elimination There's a woman actually down in California who came with an allergy elimination technique that works phenomenally well And I have a bizarre story. I actually saw that happen once. It's a totally woo woo type of thing So one of the things that I learned long while ago is when I was in my master's degree in in

The text as I took a Class from a woman named when I was in my master's degree, and the text I took a class from a woman named Juan Nins producer who's just brilliant. She was a woman in academia. She was probably in her sixes at the time. That was very rare to become a tenure professor in academia as a woman when she went through means she's just tough as nails. And so you would think she's gonna be just straight-laced.

Show me the evidence, give me the proof, show me the data, otherwise it's totally bunk. And she talked this, talked to research methods class. And one of the big sections, and this is actually in my book, lying there on the coffee table in front of us, is there are various ways of knowing things. And you can know it through your intuition, you can know it because you read the research. I mean, you can know it because you read the research. I mean sometimes the research can be fabricated too. You can know it because you've seen it in the trenches in the gym, you know, can know it because your mom told you. You can know it because you had a dream and you can weigh those things in different ways. So when I went into Chinese

medicine, it was really funny. I was literally, I was an assistant professor in a tenure track program There at Cal Poly Pomona and I'm taking these Chinese medicine classes and I'm constantly continuously having to suspend my disbelief Because I'm like, where is the evidence for the show me show me show me show me show me show me and the evidence is in thousands of years Her practitioners figuring this stuff out and the whole paradigm the way I sort of couch it with people is that the paradigm of Chinese medicine is sort of like Newtonian physics, the laws of Newtonian physics, where you can, if you want to know how far a projectile's

going to go, or you just plug in the velocity and the mass and those sorts of things, you can figure out where a rock is going to go. You can launch a man into space using Newtonian physics. Those laws apply. But physicists will say, well, quantum mechanics gives us a deeper, more true understanding what's really going on.

Newtonian physics really doesn't, doesn't give us the ultimate explanatory view of the world from a physics standpoint. Well, Chinese medicine is just a paradigm. Like the idea of Chi and Yin and Yang and blood is a vital substance, all these sorts of things. It's not that you can necessarily measure those in some way, shape, or form, per se. It also doesn't discredit them either.

It just means that the paradigm is a way of looking at things, exactly. It doesn't discredit them. So as long as you stick with the paradigm and apply it and use it, it has usefulness in the real world, just like Newtonian physics does. Now do you remember the first paradigm shattering moment that you had being a guy that came from Western medicine and now also, and you're doing all, you're learning all this Eastern medicine?

Was there the first like, oh shit, maybe everything that I was taught before wasn't all, there's various moments. There was once, I had actually, what sort of brought me in that direction in part was I was living in LA, the pollution's horrible. I was just, I was coughing and hacking. I wasn't doing well with the pollution.

So I went and saw an acupuncturist. And that wasn't so helpful, but it glued me into the idea of Chinese medicine. I read up about it. I looked at the NIH position stand, those sorts of things. And one day, I was really, really sick. I think I'd eaten something else super, super nauseated. And literally, and I have an iron gut.

I don't, I've only thrown up from training, maybe three or four times with the course of the years, and I've done some pretty horrendous training. And literally I drove down to get an acupuncture treatment, just sort of as an exploratory type of thing at the South Baylow University in in there in LA and I felt awful. I got out of my car and I went over and threw up in the bushes and I walked in and I sat down. It was just a student there and he's like, how are you feeling?

I feel awful, absolutely terrible. He's like, what's wrong? He's like, I'm nauseated. He's like, well, let's fix that for you. He laid down and he put needles in, what's called pericardium six. It's the point here where they put those C-signus bands. Right, right, right. And so I'm lying there, it's just feeling horrible. And about five seconds later, he says, how you feeling now?

I'm like, all right, that was magic. What the hell is this? You just do. It went away instantaneously. Wow. I'm like, oh, so how how the like worst, where's the way this one? Like what the hell's going on here? So that was just that's just an empirical point. It's been found empirically for nausea.

As far as I know, no one has traced some sort of nervous pathway, you know, that leads down to the gut, to the interic nervous system, or up to the brain, the areas that would be activated when someone has nausea. But there's something there. And I've seen that multiple times. That's why people use that as a sea sickness treatment. Literally, you can buy those bands.

And it does help many, many people. And they work. What you said that I really like is how you compare Newtonian physics to quantum physics. And there is no unified theory with physics. They try to get them to work together, but they don't, it doesn't make sense because at the very small things operate differently in the very large. And when it comes to health, I think that's a great comparison because there are, I mean, Chinese medicine has existed for thousands of years and does have that kind of evidence supporting it. My question to you is, what have you taken from Chinese medicine and a plot?

Because Chinese medicine is very much about balance. Very much about balancing energy systems in the body. If you have too much yang energy, they'll try and balance it with some yin. Body building is a very yang sport. It's very testosterone, it's very aggressive, lots of stimulants. And that probably causes

people a lot of problems without balancing. Were you able to take some of your knowledge from Chinese medicine and help even the extreme bodybuilders? I'm looking at a health almost continuously with everyone. I've got that was perspective as an acupuncture. So you're trying to make someone as healthy as possible, whereas your right competitive body believe is not about health. It's about basically trying to hack whatever adaptations you can from your body in the most extreme way possible, come hell or high water,

and sometimes it is hell and high water for people that push. So interestingly enough, there's next week, sometime we're gonna record on my podcast with a former client of mine who came to me and he wanted to get his pro card, very typical type of thing.

And I always ask goals, and that's the first section of my book is, what are your goals? Like a big time, bodybuilding goals, life goals, everything, where does it all fit? Where does this bodybuilding thing balance with the rest of what you want to do with your life? And he had just gotten engaged or married at that time and he wanted to have kids.

And I said, okay, he lives in the UK. So steroid use is totally legal. It's not really frowned upon socially in the way it is in the states. And that was going to be a no-go. So we had to, it will probably go into this on the podcast, but I had to go in and kind of do a detailed medical history with him as best as possible to figure out. So is it gonna matter like five years from now? I sometimes use the rules of five. Like, it will matter in five minutes,

it will matter in five weeks, five months, five years, five decades. How do we rank things in terms of importance? And five years from now, whether we got a pro card, may or may not matter, but five years from now or 15 or 20 years from now, whether he has a child and he has a family with the woman that he loves, is going to matter a whole heck of a lot more. So that's what we did.

We spent basically a year doing a PCT type of thing. We used the program for wellness restoration, power PCT. PCT is a post cycle therapy. Post cycle therapy, yeah. Microsoft Sc is a post-cycle therapy. Post-cycle therapy, yeah. My post-scally came up with that one. Pharmaceuticals, or did you use herbs and medicine? No.

I chose the best way I knew, and there's a little bit of research showing this in HIV patients that have used steroids for increasing red blood cell count and holding on a muscle mass that you can restore endogenous testosterone with this protocol using HCG and the robotation inhibitor and clomid. And so we had to run them, but a few that a few times. And he went from like basically a nil

sperm count to having a baby girl. Wow, wow, that's fascinating. Yeah, it's just seminal. So like those, those are the types of things that I will lose clients very often, because I, if they're so single, mind of the focus to the way that at least they won't tell me what their concerns are about their long-term health, they might just back away. I've had clients before. I'll ask question, because for instance, the GI health, it's central to Chinese medicine. I think it's central to bodybuilding too.

We talked about Jordan Petersal before and how much food he could put down. 10,000 calories a day, you said. He was at that one point. He made up the 10 grand a day when he was really putting it on. And getting that food in was essential for the growth that he had to, that he got during that period of time when we're working together.

So I'll ask people Chinese medicine, you ask a dozen questions about their poop, about do they have regurged, do they have bloating, it tells you about all the organs, quote, unquote the energetic organs in Chinese medicine. Literally, like there's a lot of books, the basic Chinese medical books, there'll be a whole chapter, chest on the poop. Is it long and thin?

Is it round? Is it diarrhea? Does it have blood in it? Setter, setter, setter. So I'll ask questions about bowel movement and poop. And I've had clients, it's like, why are you asking me this? I'm like, this is important.

Like if you, if literally if you got blood in you could see in your stool on a regular basis, we've got bigger issues and whether or not you're gonna get first or third in your next body bloating show, at least the way I look at it. So it's, it may be somewhat, I guess you could say in a way, arrogant for me to think that I would know what's best for someone, but I'm just trying to do what I, the best I possibly can help as many people as possible.

So I always step back from that medical practitioner standpoint and try to help in that way. Excellent. Someone like yourself with your kind of education and intelligence, are you ever, and you're coming from the bodybuilding space, which is also, for decades has been very bro-siancy. Lots of hearsay.

This is what we do, why? Because that's just the way we do it. Are you ever shocked at all how sometimes the old wisdom turns out to be true? Were you proven with science? You ever shock like that? Um, not not not so much to be honest. The thing that's here's the discussion that I have so often and I really find it fascinating because I ride the fence like that, is that almost all of the bro-sciencey things that have proven themselves to be true over the years, if you dig and dig and dig and dig, which is what I love to do, you can find at least some semblance

of an explanation in the Western science. You're not going to get it just by reading titles of papers or just skimming through abstracts. But if you dig deep in, you can figure out why these things might or might not work. One thing we're going to talk about maybe is training and I've got a... This is a... This would launch us into probably about a 10-minute explanation if you guys want to go there. Oh, love it. Okay, so the bro split, where guys will train like once a week. And that's... If you look at the biggest bodybuilders,

the biggest pros, most of them train that way. So stepping back, there has been research done looking at extreme responders, people who just look basically grow by driving past the gym, which has grown a matter of what. And the moderate responders, and there are people with non-responders when it comes to muscle growth. See, most people, yeah, a lot of people relatively speaking. There's some that are literally non-responders.

The hard, hard gainers. They'll get nothing. They'll train for eight or 12 weeks and you see, I love these studies, I have a talk that I've actually given with John Meadows, so I know you had on this. He was instrumental in getting me over here today. Why you don't look like a pro, and I go through biological inter-individuality in various ways. And there are studies where they have the individual subject plots of muscle growth, like increasing cross-sexual area with an MRI.

And there are people that are literally, they're like below the zero line. Like it's just, some of that's just measurement error, but they literally got nothing. They trained their butts off in a lab setting, got yelled at by these guys, come on push, push, push, push, push, push, and they literally got nothing. They trained their butts off in a lab setting, got yelled at by these guys, come on push, push, push, push, push, and they get no growth. And then there are some people who just grow like weeds.

And one of the things, there's several things that sort of fit in there, but one of the things that's really important for muscle growth and it's the way it normally would occur is an increase in satellite cells, which you guys are probably talked about here every time. So you need to have, and more satellites it cells in the muscle cell, they travel it's called a myonuclear domain in order to sort of government the, govern the protein synthesis and all the ultra-structural maintenance that goes on.

If you don't mind explaining what a satellite cell is in the muscle, it's like a stem cell, right? Or it's like a muscle specific stem cell. Okay. So it's not a contractile cell, it's not expressing contractile proteins, not adding to force, it's not connected to the tissue, the epimetium, repairimetium that winds through the muscle. So it's doing nothing but kind of hanging out and gathering information.

There's some really cool stuff on what satellite cells can do. There was one study where they took the satellite cells out of endurance athletes and cultured those in a petri dish and looked at insulin sensitivity. And these satellite cells that had never undergone any of the endurance activity of those endurance-trained individuals. It could have been some genetic things that are going on here. These people that have endurance trained, have genetic advantages, that's whether doing endurance training. But when they cultured those satellite cells that had never done any activity, they had greater insulin sensitivity than satellite cells from

sedentary people. That's exactly what you see in skeletal muscle that had been active. But these satellite cells never had been. That's probably an epigenic phenomenon. Wow. Yeah, so they're picking up on the environment. So, when muscles are damaged or when they're growing, the satellite cells will proliferate, they'll make a copy of themselves, and kind of the standard way you'd look at as they might make a copy. So there's two of them, and one of those will make its way into the muscle cell and set

up shop on the periphery of the muscle cell. So you can have all the protein synthesis and take care of all the interaction with mitochondrial proteins, etc. I always like in it too. If you're building a larger city, you need more post offices. So it's a city in large as if you're going to be able to transport all the proteins around and basically keep organizational structure in the larger city, you need more post offices. and those things stick around. It's one of the mechanisms of muscle memory. So, like in other words, build a bunch of muscle, you get more satellite cells, muscle shrinks,

satellite cells stick around. And that's probably why muscles grow back twice as fast the second time around. That's one of the mechanisms. That's the theory, yeah. Epigenetics is the other one where some of those genes become probably demethylated or otherwise set up so they're more easily expressed themselves under the stimulus of training. So individuals who are the extreme responders, when they start out, they tend to have more satellite cells. They have a higher satellite cell density. And they also get a greater release of mechanical growth factor.

It's an IGF-1, splice variance kind of IGF-1 that triggers all that satellite cell activity. So they start off with more satellite cells and their satellite cells are more, get a better oomph to do their job to set up shop so the muscle cells can get bigger. And the people who are non-responders, they don't have those advantages.

And as best I can find, I'm waiting for someone to explore this, but as best I can find that satellite cell activity that's triggered by the mechanical growth factor, myogenin is another approach and is expressing those satellite cells when they're doing their business. It lasts maybe five or six days, just about a week. So if you're someone who's a responder, who gets a good release of mechanogroth factor

to turn all that satellites to activity, that action, that activity is happening just about for about close to a week. So you're getting all that you train once and then you've got all those things set in motion for about a week. You you're getting all that, you train once and then you've got all those things set in motion for about a week. You come back and train again. Now, if you're someone who's got a piddly response as far as turning on those satellite cells,

then maybe you get a little bit of mechanical growth factor, maybe a little bit of response, but not quite enough to really turn on the satellite's activity as much as you like to. Someone like that might need to provide another stimulus. More frequent training. More frequent training. Yeah.

And what I found as a personal trainer, who I trained to average people, I didn't train very many bodybuilders, it was just everyday people. Most people responded really well to training their whole body a few days a week. And then the few people that I did work with who were hyper responders once a week.

And then what about muscle protein synthesis and how they measure that? And they find that it spikes in kind of drops after about 48, same, two hours. Is that a different mechanism that we're measuring? Yeah, that's part of it. That's part of what's going on. What's interesting is that that is turned on,

it's actually blunted the more trained you get, and it's shortened as well, the day that we have. So that suggests if you're just looking at those numbers you could train every other day, possibly. That's a standard basically example of a training adaptation. When you initially train and the stimulus is new and fresh, you will get this major response. And then the next time you train or the more trained you become, the less of a perturbation in the equilibrium of the cell that becomes. So the protein synthesis is turned on as much.

The muscle protein breakdown isn't turned on as much. You don't get a sore, all those sorts of things. So you have to push harder in order to elicit further adaptations. And the muscle protein synthesis is obviously very important for that. Now I have a question for you. Because that suggests that, you know, the variables, adjusting variables in your training will help maintain that protein synthesis signal, right? Not doing the same thing over and over. Right.

But at the same time, I've seen people take that so far to where they change the workout so often that they don't get enough, they don't get enough of that skill and that strength of focusing on certain, like for example, a barbell squat, you know, it might take that they don't get enough of that skill and that strength of focusing on certain, like for example, a barbell squat, it might take you months to get good enough at it to be able to really maximize the benefit of it, whereas we're hearing that you need to switch things up all the time. Where is that happy medium, or how do you judge that?

Yeah, so there's two different competing, I did a talk with John this year at the Arnold Classic and I kind of covered this one. There's so many different lines of research that suggest both of those things. Daily undulating periodization is the idea that you'd use like a low rep range and moderate rest range and a higher rep range on different days of the week. So all of those different rep ranges are all good stimuli for muscle growth. They're all gonna turn my hypertrophy.

So you wanna use all of them in a way, so that you don't get refractory to the same stimulus over and over and over again, always training heavy. But the bottom line is, at least when it comes to strength, it's the best that I've looked, and this is one of those things that's in the research.

This is why I did this talk. Is there are several studies where they've looked at the increase in strength and the increase in muscle size, fiber size, or lean body mass. And those things correlate really, really well. Probably the best study that I, nine know of, was done with rugby players, and funny you mentioned squats,

because they followed them for two years. And the correlation and increase in squat one rep max, and it's not that you just have to do a one rep max, just doing one rep max is probably not the best way to serve them also growth. Power lifters aren't necessarily always the biggest guys the body bloaters are. But that increase in one rep max in the squat correlated,

I think the correlation was like 0.88. Wow. Over two years with increase in lean body max. Yeah, it's a wreck. It's that covers about 80% of the variance in lean body mass. So you can imagine that. Imagine someone who took their squat from 300 to 450 and someone who took their squat from 260 to 85.

You're gonna see more growth than the guy that did the. Yeah, it's pretty simple. And that's kind of common sense. It's pro science. The biggest guys are generally the strongest guys This is not a perfect one to one, but if you double your strength and all your main core lifts That's gonna that's gonna show up in some way shape or form. Yep, so that's neurological Hopefully as much of it as possible is muscular

So the the part of of that which I think you were kind of Hinting at is that you can't just get really, really strong at lifts by just practicing those. That's what power lift is, Olympic lifts you're trying to do. So that's not what you're necessarily wanting to do is just to list it all those neural adaptations. You want to get stronger on as, perhaps on as many lifts

as you possibly can, and in many rep ranges as you possibly can. What I would love, I'm surprised, I need to, I wanna contact these researchers and see if they have to have these data, but I haven't seen them published, is we also know that the low load training, like 30% of the one rat max,

30 reps sets, which are brutal, absolutely, tropiously brutal. Yeah, if they're taking a failure, don't they stimulate growth, like almost anything else? On the short term, yeah, you get the same increase in muscle size. Brad Shonefeld's done one of those, worn bombs done one of those studies. Stu Phillips has done one of those studies. I would love to see the correlation between increase and weight used for those low load, low load trends. Oh, I see so stronger in the 30 rep

range. Yes, because we know stronger in one rep stronger than one rep max predicts muscle growth. But I haven't so that would basically that would answer the question, which I'm fairly certain is going to be answered with a yes, is that increasing the adapting to the training stimulus that turns on muscle hypertrophy is going to mean a hypertrophic adaptation. So whether it's lower reps, higher weight, or higher reps, lower weight, the more you adapt, the more you push yourself, the more you see the log book, and things move forward in the gym, the more muscle growth you're going to get.

In my experience, the training that you're not doing is the one that typically will give you the best. Yes. If you always train that one rep max range, absolutely. And then you go to the 30 rep, you just see crazy progress. And I'll flip one of my favorite things to do, especially with female clients,

because they never train the heavy rep range. They have at least not the average female client, has they taken through a strength cycle and blow their mind. They're all of a sudden, they're butt would lift and their hamstrings would develop and they'd get great arms and all that stuff. Along these lines, that neural adaptation

that we talk about with strength that plays such a big role in maximal strength. So it's not necessarily that your muscle's got bigger. It's that the juice going to the muscles, that amp signal is stronger and you have a more coordinated, I guess, lift. How big of a role does that also play in muscle building? Because if you have a better connection in signal, shouldn't that activate more muscle fibers or doesn't that also contribute to more

muscle growth as well? So the way I see things, a bodybuilding is an attempt to hack the biology of your muscular system, in particular, in order to create a muscular callus. You really don't care how much stronger you get. In fact, it's better for your overall joint health. Probably. To not be living as much heavy stuff as you possibly can. You mean, the guys who've done heavy squats for years, you know, like Ronnie Coleman, you know, that's like Ronnie Coleman versus Dr. Jackson.

Yeah, exactly. So there are so many things that go into those nervous system adaptations. The nervous system is uniquely set up to be able to activate the muscle as it adapts to a stimulus like weight training in a way that is can just happen with simple neural reorganization, simple neurological strategy. So there are things like simply being able to activate more motor units than you could before. That's a hard thing to test. The research literature is kind of wanky. It's kind of funny to be honest. But in the brain, for instance, when you're doing a concentric versus an eccentric contraction, there are different areas of the

motor cortex that are activated, even for the same muscle group. And it's a weird thing. Literally, I always say it's an unnatural act to lift weights because you're picking something up and you're putting it right back down. I'm doing it again. I'm picking up and eating it down. Like what is wrong with you? Where, move it somewhere, do something with it. Why do you just keep on obsessively picking up

and put it down? We're trying to create a catalyst. It's like rubbing sandpaper on your hand. You're trying to make a catalyst there. It's like if you saw people doing that. Imagine gyms, you know, and some bizarre alternative universe where people are just trying to make their skin really callous, and they just going in, they just rub sand paper all over their bodies.

It's kind of what we're doing with weight training. We're trying to make our muscles bigger. There's obviously evolutionary biological reasons for that. It's a display of fitness. So there's things like, there's a phenomenon called muscle wisdom whereby the muscular system will adjust the firing rate of those motor neurons that go to motor units as they fatigue, because fatigued muscle fibers are slower. So you could go on on, there's all sorts of neurological adaptations, yes.

They did it. I can't remember the name of the show, but they were testing high level athletes and they had Randy Cotor on there. And the test was they had to get a headlock on this device that measured like the pressure and then they had all these sensors all over their body to see how their body was reacting. And they had him compared to other strong athletes,

but of course he's a grappler. And they're measuring how his muscles are taking turns firing, but because he's been doing this for so long, his body had become so efficient. It was able to apply the same pressure for longer than everybody, not because he was stronger, but because of the efficiency of how his muscle wisdom, in fact, what you're talking about, how the body was able to fire certain muscles and activate

some harder than others, but maintain the same level of pressure. Within a given muscle, there's a rotation among motor units. So they'll do these studies where they can isolate. Within the same muscle. Within the same muscle, a lot of them are in the hand. It's hard to study these in larger muscles, but they'll be able to isolate different motor units, so that one nerve that goes to a number of fibers. Just when someone's turning on, like they're doing some sort of isometric hold, they'll

see those motor units come on and come off. So like when I teach, just when I teach to my classes or when I'm doing a presentation I'd say, so this half of the room, you're going to be involved initially when we start with this effort because it's light, there's no fatigue going on. And the five of you on this side of the room, maybe three of you are what's needed initially and then one of you will drop off, the other one will take up the slack for them, and the other person will then drop off, and someone else will take up the slack for them.

So you'll kind of rotate the load amongst yourselves, and as the fatigue occurs, then we'll start to call upon those higher threshold motor units, and the nervous system just knows this, the spinal cord figures out what fatigue is going on and how to do this, and it'll start rotating amongst those motor units. Instead of using just five of the low threshold, it will start calling upon seven, eight, and

finally maybe all ten, but some of them will be dropping in and some will be dropping out. It's rotating the load to reduce the fatigue. If you just, like electrical stimulation does, if you just turn on the motor units at a given firing rate, fatigue is great. It's a great way to stimulate muscle growth because it's kind of a bizarre activation pattern. But the nervous system knows how to do that. So it'll rotate amongst, and then when they start fatigue, it'll adjust the firing rate down as well. Because there's no point in centering firing rate to muscle that's now fatigued and slower. All that does is waste energy in the neurons. And then you have a potential for neural fatigue.

So that's the wisdom phenomenon. And then there's what you were sort of getting, I think, with the Rene Couture state, is that different muscles will be getting involved. I had a guy a long time ago. He was an older gentleman who had, he had owned a construction company. It's a general contractor, and he was training with his son.

He had retired. He wanted to just kind of do something, you know, keep stuff active. And we were doing, you know, back and bicep training one day. And I had wanted to do a concentration curl with him. And no one can see this, of course, on the radio. But I had him, you know, with his elbow, braced against his inner knee. And I just want pure elbow flexion. No, nothing at all. Just that. Just robotic pure elbow flexors. We're just trying to elbow flexors. He could not help himself, but pull his shoulder into it. He was basically using his shoulder to leverage an isometric contraction so he could move

the weight up. I literally, I couldn't even hold his shoulder in place. He had learned that because he'd been picking up heavy stuff for 50 years of his life. That's a requirement. That's why I required it. That's the recruitment pattern. Yeah, were you talking about that all the time, which totally reminds me of that. Why is that so important to establish the proper biomechanics and really just hone in on those, those main sort of movement patterns so that way, you know, that's what you're go to is when you get that fatigue set again, right? Well, that's what you want as a power lifter or Olympic lifter.

You want to use as much muscle as you possibly can, engage as much muscle mass to perform from the task. Body blooding is just the opposite of that. You want to have the quote unquote mind muscle connection, where if he's trying to train his biceps like that, that's no longer a concentration curl. That's just sort of like some sort of an elbow. He's just moving the weight. He's just moving the weight around it.

And he's basically removing the load as much as possible because that's how he'd been wired to do things from the biceps. And this is why I think, because you get good at whatever you train. So if you train like a bodybuilder, you start to become good at that. You get very good at isolating and activating and maximizing muscle growth through these types of patterns. If you're a strength athlete, you maximize patterns to lift maximum weight. This is why I think many times body building,

just pure body building has gotten a bad rap in sports. Because it trains your body to work in a way that's beneficial for growth, but not necessarily beneficial for total function or performance. Yeah, that harp comes back to specificity of training. Yes. So you want to increase the muscle mass in the gym, but make sure you're training the

nervous system to use that muscle mass on the field or on the court or whatever it is, you can apply it as an athlete. Exactly. So I have a question for you. Here's a little bromoth that I've witnessed. I've felt I have no explanation for. I have my theories, but I want to see if you know any science to support this.

For a long time now, and the first time I ever heard about this was Arnold Schwarzenegger's encyclopedia bodybuilding. How they would do a heavy cycle of strength training, and it would produce denser, harder, more granite-looking muscle than the traditional bodybuilding-type training. Now, I've seen that in myself. When I train heavy, my muscles seem to feel hard.

It's a different feel to my body, and I've noticed this in people I've trained. Is that total broscience, or do you think there's something to explain it? Have you witnessed it yourself? So that's where people would, if they wanna get really bro sciencey, and I just saw someone make mention of this in an article that I need to read, but I address this, maybe in this book,

I address it and I have a 42 training system and I address it in that book as well. People will then sort of evoke the idea of sarcoplasmic versus myophabular hypertrophy. And that is not something you can put those things into Google Scholar, go to PubMed, you don't find that those two types of muscle size increases differentiated in any way, shape, or form. But what we do know is that a certain percentage of the muscle cell is composed of mitochondria and that can change It's not a lot. It's it's maybe 5% but it might be 3% and type 2 muscle fibers and 5% in others and then glycogen levels

Can matter a good bit In glycogen carries water with it. Sure. So that potentially could create this sort of differential look that you're talking about where you've got a muscle cell That's has a little more glycogen in it and it brings water with it people will talk about the number of like 2.7 grams of water Yeah, that's actually from a study with rats in the liver Yeah, it's glycogen levels in the liver of rats You can't really translate that No, there was a guy named Mike Sherman at Ohio State who looked into this and it's all over the place in terms of how much water you get with a given amount of glycogen.

The glycogen stored as a glycogen, glycogen complex with protein, there's an osmotic effect, but it seems to vary. How much potassium in your system can make a difference? Are you actually won't glycogen load if you're devoid of potassium. If you're potassium deficient, potassium is one of the main intracellular electrolytes. There's that, and there's also intramuscular triglycerides stored in the cells. You take someone who's doing a high volume bro type of split and you're reducing glycogen levels.

You use muscle triglyceride pretty substantially. So I'm scanning the naven researches of looking at it actually can be dropped a good bit. And that varies, that's all over the place from the data I've seen. It's how much fat is then inside the cells, skeletal muscle cells. So in doing that, when you have a stimulus

that reduces the intracellular fuel stores, the adaptation is to store more of those. So you're ready for the next 30 or 40 set workout that you're going to do. So more of that pump, more of that fluid, whatever. Yeah, more of those, more of those, more of the fuel stored in there in the water. Yeah, the non muscle fiber structures and all that. Exactly. The stuff in the queniquit sarcoplasm. So there's a little bit of data that sort of would suggest

there's some variability there, but I haven't seen anyone. I would love to see someone study that. You can look at, oh, so what I, it's so subjective though, how they test that. Myo-fibular packing density, that's what they would do. So they look at, do a cross-section of muscle,

you can look at the myofibrils and see how densely they're packed in the skull. So if you have two cells that exactly the same size and one has 90 myofibrils, these numbers on, it'll act great. And the other one has 100. The one with 90 has a lower myofibrilic packing density. So it's gonna have more sarcoplasmic volume

relative to the myofibrilic volume. Interesting. Now, what about muscle hyperplasia? When I first got my certification years ago, 27 years ago, that didn't happen. They said, oh, it doesn't happen in humans. We've only seen it in animals. Now some studies are showing that,

no, it might happen in humans. It might take a long time to happen. Hyperplasia is where basically you get more muscle fibers, not just that your muscle fibers grow, but that you actually add more muscle fibers to your muscle. What does the current research say about that? I would say it's highly likely in well-trained bodybuilders. Actually, the strongest piece of evidence to that effect comes from data that's now decades

old where they've looked at the fibers of guys who are doing the brosplit, high volume type of thing, and they have large muscles, 50, 100% larger than untrained people, but their fibers are the same size, and they have lots of type 1 fibers. So unless they started off with just ridiculous small fight really anybody small fibers and they spent decades training to make them average size then something's probably going on there and and there's a study that this Jose Antonio is written some some nice

what I read. Yes. Yeah, he's the man when it comes to he worked with a guy named Gagne in Texas who did did the weighted quail studies. That's the one with weights. Yeah, they hang the weight on the wing or whatever in a stretch position. Yeah, it's kind of like the equivalent of him would be imagine literally a 200 pound guy and he takes like a 40 pound dumbbell,

you strap it to his hand and you have to carry around all day long and it's pulling on his trap. As he's constantly got, you imagine that trap would grow. And the greatest increase in muscle size was in a study that they did and they did a progressive overload weighted stretch and intermittently with these quail. So it was something like a hidden exact protocol

but they started off with maybe 20% of the animal's weight. So it'd be like a 40 pound dumbbell and they had them put them under stretch for a couple of days and they gave them a day off. So they wanted to actually have some recovery there. And then they they bumped up the load to like 20 or 30% and a couple of days gave a day off. They did it for like a month. And the interesting thing is that over the course of that month the muscle kept on getting larger, kept on growing. And the fibers kept on getting bigger for about the first two thirds or so, with three quarters of the study.

So they had some animals they sacrificed early on and some animals they let go the entire month. So they could kind of track what's going on with the whole muscle size, the muscle weight, and the fiber size. And in the last third or quarter of the study, the fibers actually started getting smaller. Hmm, that's suggestive of hyperplasia.

Hyperplasia, yeah. And that's been known to happen. They can count the fibers. That model of muscle growth produces hyperplasia. There's no doubt about that. Wow. Yeah, that's the, because my belief would be that it just takes a long time.

Like you got a train for a long time, high intensity for a long time. That's where you start to get that. Because I noticed as I get older, it's easy to keep muscle. It wasn't when I was first building muscle, it was hard. Now, I mean, it's not hard for me to keep the muscle that I've built.

And this leads me to another question, with the sport of bodybuilding, of course, androgen use, anabolic steroid use. And it gets you to a certain size, then you go off, you lose the muscle because now you're off. But if you stay on these anabolic for long enough and train long enough and increase the amount of satellite cells and potentially increase hyperplasia,

could that produce permanent muscle growth? In other words, could people do cycles of anabolic and go off but then be essentially better off than they were before in terms of muscle size or potential for muscle size. So you can look at this a different ways of knowing. You can look at some of the pros, like some of the best pros who've come off.

You'll see pictures like people love to post this on social media because they want it with the hashtag all drugs. Yeah. Sort of thing. You'll see these pros who've shrunk and back down. They've stopped training, they stopped eating the way they used to, they just don't care.

They stopped everything. Yeah, everything, they've gotten depressed. And they don't retain size, they look very normal or even kind of small. Some of them have gotten sick too, so it's hard to know exactly, it's not a perfect experimental model. But there are some data in animals showing, of course,

satellites let's get turned on with antiblock steroids, and you get these epigenetic changes, which suggests that for any stimulus that you'd have, the muscle would be more responsive in a way that it wouldn't have been had it not been previously exposed to the anabolic steroids. So there's something there that gives you probably an advantage, so being, like, truly natural versus being clean. So previous steroid user, who's now, you know, back to just maybe a TRT or nothing,

that clean person probably has an advantage in having had so much muscle mass previously. Because hyperplasia could be one aspect of that, more satellite cells in those muscles so they can grow more easily, the epigenetic changes, all those sorts of things. Oh, well, I mean, I know I have family members who blue collar workers who,

and they weren't anabolic steroid users, but, you know, people who swung hammers or I have male carriers, and they're retired, they're in their 70s now, but the muscles that they use so much, you know, for 30, 40 years to work, still develop. I have an uncle who's 77 years old,

massive forearms. Dude doesn't do anything with his hands. He hasn't done anything with his hands for 20 years. But the muscles haven't left his body because of that permanent, whatever you want to call muscle, you know, hyper pleasure or whatever. Yeah, and some of that can be too, is they've developed that pattern of use with the hand.

So just in day to day, they've had a lot of muscle mass available for doing things in the forearm because they had've had a lot of muscle mass available for doing things in the forearm because they had to have that because of what they were doing occupationally or what have you. And then they go in the use that they've developed sort of a neurological preference for using that muscle they once had and that helps them hold on to that muscle mass in those places. Interesting.

And it makes it. So here's another good question for you. Years maybe six or seven years ago now, I came up with a concept called trigger sessions. I didn't invent it. I don't think I know other people have talked about similar things in the past, but for me it was new. And what I did with these was basically,

I did my normal workouts, so my normal intense weight training workouts. But then throughout the day, I would do these very light low intensity kind of pumping sets with bands on particular body parts Not super intense wasn't getting sore, but just enough to give me a pump and to feel the muscle work And the reason why I did this is I observed People who had muscular body parts who didn't work out but just used them all the time again like the male carriers of my family

I had uncles and aunts who The rest of their body wasn't developed at all But have these really muscular calves, of course, body part that's supposed to be so difficult to develop, all because they walked so much as male carers. So I said, I wonder if I did this kind of low level of very frequent stimulation on the rest of my body, what would happen?

And it blew me the fuck away. I grew and responded incredibly, and it blew me away because it was so low intensity. What do you think's happening with something like that? So there is some, you like to research data, so I kinda give you my research. So one of the, there's some interesting parallels, if you look at how much muscle people put on

with resistance exercise, it actually the rate of muscle gain is comparable to that which you see in rats. They can actually do resistance exercise training in rats. They can put backpacks on them and have them go up and train them to go up and down ladders and the muscle grow at a certain rate. They've actually done with cats, the Ganyae person down in who Hosantonia work with in Texas. They train the rats for a food reward to do like wrist flexion and like the flexure carbuloneros muscle, and they saw some maybe some hyperplasia there. And you can also take rats, and I actually developed a model when I was in Texas and grad school, where you can train the planar flex like a little calf press. And you see that the animals grow at about the same rate as humans do when you have them

do resistance exercise. But then there's something else you can do with animals that you really can't do with people, but there's one study that I found which is kind of equivalent to it. As they'll do a, it's called a compensatory hypertrophy model. So in the calves and rats, you've got a solius, a gastroc, and a plantarous. Plantarous is pretty big. Some humans have plantarous in both legs or maybe just one. Not everyone does.

It's sort of a variable thing. It's not a very big muscle in people. But they'll cut, like, prints of the sol soleus and the plantarist and the rat, and those animals, after a couple days, will walk around normally. No training, no resistance exercise, no high-intensity, just walking around, and you can increase that muscle by like 50% to a matter of a couple months. That's just compensating for the loss of muscle mass from the other muscle-dermin eclipse at the Achilles. So I did find a study and it actually can get I think I've seen about a hundred percent Increased in muscle size and the gastroc so I'll cut the gastroc with the other muscles. It's very sweet. You can do it

There was a study where they had they had people who had torn their Achilles and for what a reason they couldn't repair it So they take the flexor hallucis, some muscle woman that kind of let's you flex your big toe and they would connect that at the calcanius to take the place of the planter flexors that normally would be there. And when they did a comparison of the normal leg versus the leg that had been surgically fixed, they got, the range was like 30 to 100% increase in size or difference in size.

And it's not intense work, it's just just freaking around. Yeah, just walking around. Yeah, so there is something to say for the extent to which muscle can grow if you just continuously load it throughout the day with normal activity. The thing is, you don't get that kind of muscle growth

in the whole body, even like over a lifetime of training. People just don't increase their muscle mass by 100%. You can get 50%, pretty substantial 70, extreme responders maybe better, but your nervous system just can't handle. You couldn't go in the gym and train for like eight hours a day. No, I wish. Just wouldn't, that's the limitation.

Your nervous system would fail. Your under-consystem would fail. Your immune system would fail. You'd just be sick and tired. And if he's also never happy. Sure. But the muscle can adapt to that. And that's the cool thing that you're doing

with these trigger sessions is that you were going in and just doing something that sort of simulated that chronic overload. The mechanical signaling. The mechanical stimulating. But only in a muscle or two, not the whole body. Right. Wasn't like squattled day long.

No, no. But if you did squattled day long, it would be, you could do it with a very low intensity because you have to be careful for the CNS. And that's the thing that I noticed. And it really blew me away because, you know, gosh, when I first got into working out, I was under the impression you blast the muscle

and then you leave it alone and let it rest and recover. So I used to literally, it's what I used to do. I'd go to the gym, hammer my legs, and I'd sit on the couch and watch TV. And just, no, got to let them rest and recover. And then I remember one summer, I worked with my dad, who's a blue collar worker, and we were just working.

I was mixing cement, carrying buckets, and whatever, and my muscles grew. I was like, what the hell's going on? I'm moving more and I'm building more muscle and that's when I started kind of change my ideas around maybe what's going on and I think if you adjust intensity, those frequent levels of stimulation make a big difference. Now along those lines of changing your way of thinking, you know, when you get somebody, what are the most common things that you have to change in like a competitor?

Like if I were to come to you and I'm like, okay, take me to the next level, Scott, what are like, are there specific areas you typically look at that are common offenders in the average lifter that's lifting? We actually kind of address this already. I will look at what they haven't done that may work for people.

So I had one person come to me not too long ago who wanted to actually wanted to train him in person and his legs were his weakness. And I said, well, we're going to train. My system is a high frequency training system and you train legs three times a week. You don't do 20 sets each workout, but I said, you know, you'll go in, you'll do a heavy loading day, you'll do some what I call pump sets, and you do a cluster set configuration that call a muscle round.

And you train legs three times a week, and he's like, well, you can't train legs three times a week. I'm like, no, no, it's not gonna be like an hour and a half of legs three times a week. It's just maybe you know, you're warm up and then you'll be done literally in like 10 minutes. And one of the days you're, that's it. And he wouldn't do it, he literally,

he just would not, not go and do it. He couldn't wrap his mind around that. And I said, well, I'm not going to bring you into the gym and just push you through once weekly training sessions. Even though that was something he probably could have benefited from because he just didn't like to train legs. I want to optimize what's going to possibly work. So I'll look at the things the people haven't been doing. And that could be all sorts of things.

I would agree with you on that. I think for us, we talk on the show a lot. When I look at the common person that's lifting, I think frequency is probably one of the most underutilized tools out there. And we speculate that a lot of that has to do with the old body parts split mentality of just hammer the shit out of it one day a week. And a lot of that has to do with the old, you know, body parts split mentality of just hammer the shit out of it one day a week.

And a lot of people would just greatly benefit by hitting that muscle group two or three times in the week consistently for a while and they're probably responding like crazy. Yeah, and that's that's maybe those genetic differences and responders and honor responders when it comes to satellite cells can explain that. It's also, I think psychologically, especially when it comes to legs, to know like you're gonna go to the gym five times a week and three times a little week, you're gonna have to do squats, or that people don't wanna do that. You have to have some screws loose

to wanna go and train that way. But a lot of people do that with smaller muscle groups. Caves, for instance, I can go and train calves every day. John Meadows was here, he would train calves every day unless his feet hurt. That was sort of the rules of them. If the feet started to bother you, you want to get plant-of-fascity

so you would not train calves. Or biceps, you could do that. But no one wants to do it with squats, or leg presses, what have you. So some of it's just the mentality, but there are those systems like milking squats, or super squats. Well, your milking squats hold on. Is this where you drink a gallon of milk and then?

Yes, this is the gov'ad. Yeah. I've read about this. So this will literally drink a gallon of milk every day and squat every day. Right, yeah. I don't know if I can remember how it, there's various variations on that.

I put on 15 pounds, it's weird. Well, yeah, you're drinking 2,000 calories of milk and squatted. Right. Yeah. Excellent. Here's a good question for you. We've observed and it's widely understood in common knowledge, although it's disputed,

that free weights tend to build more muscle, especially in beginner and intermediate than machines do. Is that true? And if it is, why would that be true? Why would a back squat build more muscle than a leg press or a deadlift more than a machine rail or something like that? Could be a couple of different reasons. For instance, there's one study that I cite in my Fortitude Training book where they looked

at muscle activation. I think it was in the biceps or the elbow flexors. And of holding a weight that required a given amount of torque or a given amount of force versus pushing on a dynamometer and holding the weight requires some balance. And because of that balance, you've got those accessory muscles that are involved and this would go for any free weight versus a machine. You've got, you get greater activation in that muscle

so the EMG was actually higher. And one of the things that probably is involved with muscle growth, I could almost say without a doubt, is that, and we talked about this sort of indirectly, is novelty of stimulus. So, if you go and do, you'll see this with the repeated bout effect. If you go and do an exercise you haven't done,

this could be someone who's been training for years. Let's say you haven't done full dead lifts. You've been training all those muscles really hard, as hard as you could, which is to have a done full deads. And then you go in, you have a big dead day. You'd be sore, it's great. Oh yeah. It'll just whack you.

But if you start doing deads every week or every other back there, what have you, you're not nearly a sore. One of the ways in which that might be occurring is a shift in your nervous system. Learning how to activate those muscles with a little bit of a cleaner activation pattern. So those on and off rotation amongst motor units, turning on them at a certain frequency, which is best for producing it smooth to tannic contraction in those fibers.

Those sorts of things you get better at. Whereas you can imagine if you had a nervous system it was just really shaky, and so many of you'll see this, of course. Oh yeah, when you take time off the gym. Yeah, yeah. So that shakingness is indicative of this nervous system not quite knowing how to activate

as best as possible we could. That's the type of thing that's gonna produce muscle soreness. Cause those fibers being turned on and off, the contractile lattice is sliding back and forth on itself. Cuzing damage. Yeah, you're going to cause damage. So free weights in that sort of subtle way could potentially cause more muscle damage. Not that you want to damage the muscle per se, but if you look at like pure eccentric

and training versus pure concentric training, they've done some meta-analysis, we looked at this, you get a little bit better growth from the eccentric, you get more sort of some of the eccentric, you can still get growth from isometrics and concentrics, but there's something about the free weights in terms of maybe getting greater activation and potentially causing a little more damage,

which initiates that whole remodeling response, where you get more myocybils, etc., etc. Yeah, see this, I'm in the same camp as you, that's what I think as well. But then it starts to break down when you go extreme balance, like, oh cool. So if balancing things, then require, you know, builds more muscle, then why don't I stand on a physiabolic and you know, hold one dumbbell up in the air. And that's just because the load isn't enough.

Well, then the activation goes down. they've done those studies. Oh really? Yeah, because then you've got such a balanced task that you can't activate the your mind muscle connections gone. You're trying to do like a dumbbell flying on a on a Swiss ball and you're like rolling all over the place and you can't you can't lift the same load you can't come close. I mean unless you want to like potentially burst the ball then you cut it out of the ball but someone who could use a hundred pound dumbbells is if they've got a really difficult balance task, is not going to use a hundred pound dumbbells. And that's going to tell you to some degree, they're not going to activate the pecs in the

same way. What you're saying. The other thing with free weights that I think psychology is such a big deal. Exercise physiologist sometimes, which is say, the brain's just a big black box. You know, we don't really worry about it. But if you think about the people who are and the mentality that comes with free weights, just think about your average guy goes in the gym, you know, who's thinking about what do you bench?

And he's comparing himself. Everyone knows what's on the bar with free weights. People don't know what's on the machine when you put the pin in there. There's no comparison. So if you got, you know, 135, you see the young kids are going to get 135 in the bar They won't they don't want to do 95 because they know that makes them look like a wimpy They want to do have your loads so free weights. I think just from a sort of a psychosocial perspective lend themselves better to training harder and

The people that have them in tally like like Peters, for instance, they want to move the biggest loads they possibly can. And the people that want to make get the most, most of the growth often realize that the hardest, the harder way there is often going to be the most productive. It's not always the case. The counter, the counterpoint to that is that sometimes, and I did this with squats for years, squats never did much for my legs.

I trained, I got it to do it in a 500-85 pound squats for reps. I just got a big glutes. I didn't get the leg growth I wanted. Just the biomechanics and everything I possibly could. You just glued dominant with that. Which is a really, really glued dominant in my low back. Actually, I got good back growth from it. Everything can be Kinney models dream, right?

Exactly, exactly. So you can get a bit of a mind muscle connection if you find a nice loading curve, a good biomechanics in a machine. Some machines just feel phenomenal. It's like this chest press. This particular converging chest press with this cam on it just has a phenomenal loading curve.

I don't feel like I'm using my triceps or my anterior delts at all, it's just brilliant. That's gonna be a great machine if you progressively overload on it. Whereas for some people, okay, every time I warm up on the bench press and I feel my rotator cuff, just both sides, just one who's like dripping half, probably not a good exercise.

Yeah, and the other thing about free weights too, is when you use a machine, you have to move based on the way the machine moves, whereas free weights follows the person. So whether you're five, five, or six foot, the bar follows you versus the other way around. Right. What about advanced training techniques? Things that we wouldn't necessarily recommend to the average person, but things you might utilize in advanced training. For example, four straps or partial reps or weighted stretches in between sets or, you

know, those types of things. Like, where do you do see lots of value in those and which ones do you use as a higher arc? Yes. Gosh, there's so many bits and pieces. There's all those intensification techniques have to be used very carefully because the way I look at things is that the limitation is your nervous system to some degree. The muscle can handle all sorts of things that the nervous system can't, like we talked

about with the comparing animal muscle growth with humans, resistance training versus those special compensatory hypertrophy types of things. I like to use, you didn't mention this one, but cluster sets. I have a muscle, this is what DC training, dog out training is, rest pause sets. And those rest pause sets, actually, each of the segments of a rest pause

that would be taken to failure. I like to use a muscle round. I modified this, I took this from the name from something called Titan training that was very instrumental in me developing for the two training as it does it now is. And it's a way to bring yourself closer to failure and accumulating those high quality

one or two reps in reserve contractions with only one failure point. So in the case of a muscle round, you're doing sets of four on about a one-to-one work-to-rest ratio with a load that would, for most people, be about a 15-wrap max if you just did a normal straight set. So give me an example of an exercise

and what that would look like. Let's take a biceps curl. So let's say you could do 100 pounds for 15 reps. You just did a normal straight set with this control. So in this case, you take that 100 pounds and you do a set of four and you can either watch your watch or you could take five breaths. So you do a set of four, five breaths, set of four, five breaths, set of four, five breaths, and maybe in that fifth or sixth set, you would reach a failure point.

So let's say you go five sets of four and then you get into the sixth set and you fail at your second rep. So you've now completed 22 reps of something that you can normally only do 15 with. Right. And you only had one failure point. And the way I said, yeah, it's five breaths or five seconds. 10 seconds. About 10 seconds. Usually that's it. If you're training legs, counting your breaths as a no go because you're just going to be breathing like a lump of my head. You only want to do that.

So you have to watch your watch. So you do four reps, take 10 seconds, four reps, 10 seconds. Is it always four reps? That's the way, yeah, that's how we had it in Titan training. There's nothing particularly magic about the four reps per se. It just seems to work out nicely. I play with different numbers. There's another system called Myo reps and Dante Trudell system. He's a little bit different because he takes each of those segments to failure.

So he goes failure, rest, failure, rest. Now, when you run a full cluster workout like that, where you are doing every muscle group like that or what would a workout look like with that cluster set in there. Yeah, so I have different days. I utilize a daily underlating periodization scheme. So one day, let's say for legs, you would do what I call loading sets.

These are like six to 12 rep range. The next day you train legs, you do pump sets and these are fun. They're brutal, but they're fun. It's anything like about a 15 to 20 to a 30 rep range. But you do all sorts of partials. There are various ways you could do reverse 21. Right. We're just chasing the pump on that. Yeah, but it's metabolic stress. And it ends up giving a great pump. And then the next time you train a legs, you would do muscle rounds. And I've got the system. I've set up is I have three different volume tiers. So depending on how someone recovers, they would pick the volume

tear that they're going to use for that day. So someone who just can handle a ton of volume, or that maybe they've decided to set up a mesocycle where they're going to go up in their volume and come back down to their volume because they like that. Or they're just completely auto-regulating. They go in their particular week. They've I feel great. I got a week off of work.

There's no stress at home. I'm sleeping. I'm eating great. They might do the heavier, the higher volume tier. And they might do like two sets of like a leg press and a Smith squat for a muscle round each. And then maybe like a knee extension and then a hamstring curl as some sort. That's it. So you're really only doing, you know, you get the two cluster sets you just said and then maybe one a knee extension and then a hamstring curl with some sort. That's it. So you're really only doing, you know, you get the two cluster sets you just said and then maybe one other one after that.

And then on that point, but you've also done more, that's also the third time you train legs that way. Right, right, right. So you're doing it once a week, but the cluster sets are once a week, but having trained legs traditionally or more traditionally the other time.

So there's a heavy day and a light day and then the muscle round day Right, right so the muscle rounds the the idea there is to accumulate training volume and make use the fact the muscle can adapt Much more readily than the nervous system and the other systems by getting 22 reps as opposed to just 15 So you get 22 reps of Loading on that muscle for a given muscle round in that example as opposed to 15, but only one failure point. Well, now when you apply this to athletes,

do they see crazy results from just applying these cluster sets? Why have people do the whole system? Everything's kind of integrated. So yeah, I've said, I mean, my favorite example is a guy, he was a math teacher from the UK's mathematician. And so, he taught calculus to gifted students,

he was very mathematically inclined, logged everything. And he also could eat like none other. I used the nutrient timing approach. And so he was pushing down 1,000 grams of carbs during his post workout period some nights. And but he was okay with that, because on training days, he was a little bit hungry, given how I had time the nutrients. And he went through one blast which would typically take about maybe six weeks.

You do a D-load, a cruise is what Don Tatredo called it. I got a way of doing that based on the research too. And he came back in and he looked at his logbook to see what weights he was going to use. And he picked the first day was loading set day and he picked the weight that he figured, I think he was getting like eight or nine reps with, so he figured he'd just stick with that because he hadn't gotten to the top of the 12 rep range. And he did like his set, and he got like 24 reps. And he was like, what the, he was pissed

because he's like, I'm a mathematics teacher. I can't, I can't count weight, what I do wrong. And he kept on doing like that. He had really de-loaded so well that he was like almost doubling his reps. He just timed it really well. He was really quite upset. He went through a couple workouts like that.

And finally, that was happening universally. And that was because some of that was just the novelty of training. There's various things that I think are going on there. One, he was getting used to training hard with those heavier loads and maybe a way that he hadn't. Also, when you do the high rep, the pump sets can be some of the most brutal aspects of the training. Yeah, you don't need to convince me. Yeah, they're really, really hard. So, like you do a set like that, where you're saying hello to God at the end of the set. And then you when like you do a set like that where, you know, it's like you're saying hello to God

at the end of the set. And then you when you just do a set of 12, it's heavy. Well, it's not nearly as hard. So you develop sort of a different mentality allows you to push harder in those loading sets and the way you did. And so those things, I think they interact in a certain way. Then the thing about the cluster sets as well, the muscle rounds is probably that you get to really realize what failure

is for you. If they've done studies with untrained people and have them try to estimate how many reps they can get with a given load and they're way off, they'll underestimate you. I even find that with myself. I don't train to failure very often at all. And when I do, I'm always shocked that I'm like, oh, this is the next rep. This is the only one I'm going to build. This is the last one. I'm like, oh, this is the next rep. This is the only one I'm going to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be

able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be from the nervous system with the muscular system in terms of intensity and volume. Muscles can take a lot. The CNS is the one that you got to kind of watch a little bit. What are some techniques that you use for your athletes on allowing their CNS to be able to take more? Because theoretically, they could just work out their muscles all the time, but you got to get them to manage your CNS.

Do you use techniques like sauna, cold, you know, rinses, sleep, are there supplements that you use to help them out? Sauna can be phenomenal. Yeah, absolutely. I'm rebuilding my house now and I want to get a sauna in there. If I can squeeze it in, I can get my contractor to kind of do what I'm hoping he'll do. Just for clearing all the chemicals that are in our environments, I know you guys are talking about everything from, you know talked about everything from Zenoestrogens and things in our water supply. Tampa has horrible, horrible water. So that can be phenomenal.

People get a nice, anxiolytic effect. I'm really big on sleep aids. Sleeps, like we sleep horribly in our society. It's really, really badly. So I will sometimes dip into Chinese medicine and try to help people with sleep. We sleep horribly in our society. It's really, really badly. So I will sometimes dip into Chinese medicine and try to help people with sleep in that regard. Are there some good herbs that you typically will recommend?

Kind of depends on the person and what's going on. There's different reasons why someone might, there's probably about eight different diagnoses that would just sound like Albany group of, if I told you what they are, but One is a zissey fuss. Okay is Swans out end is the name of a the herb and you can buy that it's one of those ones that it does have kind of a A sedative like effect for many people I had a client come in once who

If I recall she was young, she had a sugar daddy and she didn't have anything to do with her life. And she would just stay up and play video games and she came in and she wasn't sleeping at all. And we gave her this herbal formula that she came back the next week for her next visit. And it was like, how'd you sleep going? She's like, I'm sleeping all the time.

It's like, oh, it's awesome. How much sleep are you getting tonight? She's like, 22 hours? Whoa, no, It's like, oh, it's awesome. How much sleep are you getting at? She's like, 20, 22 hours? Whoa, like, no, hold on, please. Like, what do you mean? It's like, oh, I sleep all the time. I just take the herbs and I sleep all day long. I don't even play the video game.

So she could do that, because she had nothing to do. So that was too much. That was a little excessive. But that's a great one for many people. And it's one of those ones. Normally in Chinese medicine, you do a diagnosis if you get a pattern differentiation, and then you apply that paradigm of Chinese medicine

very specifically to the person. That's one that helps a lot of people. So. What about Ashwaganda? I know that's a considered adaptive genocurb. I've used it myself. I really like combining it with caffeine when my favorite combinations.

How does that affect the CNS? Or is that one of those supplements that can help that? Yeah, that's a phenomenal adaptor. It's been used in Ayurvedic medicine for years and years and years. Yeah, and I actually use that myself. Oh, do you? Yeah, and I suggest that to people.

How do you use it? Just in the morning. It seems to have kind of a nootropic effect. Okay. It doesn't impact sleep in me, but sometimes people will notice that too. Chinese men, for instance, Jinxing is one in Chinese men. You have to be careful. Some of those will. See, I can't, I can't do Jinxing. I saw an acupi, I used to go to an acupuncturist

for a while and she did the test some, and she's like, Oh, you have too much yang energy or whatever. And so red Jinxing was wrong for me because, and I told her this, I've taken ginseng in the past, and if I take it once, I'll feel stimulated. If I take it again, I start to feel feverish, and I almost start to feel kind of depressed and like I have the flu almost, and she said it's because it's strengthening your yang,

which is already have too much. Right, okay, yeah. Okay, so she was selling the truth. Yeah, yeah, that's that. Yeah, definitely give people a saw me with that. People, it's a, it's a lung-cheat tonic in Chinese medicine. So some people have undergoing a lot of sadness when sadness impacts the lung and the lung energy.

So people look through, the side. Really sad, yeah. So you wanna give them that, but then they can't sleep, that doesn't help. So that was a mistake, that was like a beginner's mistake we'd always make. And it's like, no, no, no, no, you're gonna to give them that, but then they can't sleep, that doesn't help. So that I was a mistake. I was like a beginner's mistake we'd always make. And it's like, no, no, no, no, you're just

going to give them insomnia. It's not good. Find another way around that. Yeah. You're the perfect person to ask this. I did some experiments a few months ago, and I've replicated a few times just on myself. And I was really blown away by how my body responded.

So what I did was, as I had a whole day where I had nothing to do other than write content for our business. So I was gonna be home all day long and I have a home garage. And so what I did was I picked three exercises and I did not really heavy load but heavy enough to feel.

And I did three sets of five reps of each of those exercises every other hour all day long. So I must have done about seven workouts. And I theorized that I would start to feel and I did three sets of five reps of each of those exercises every other hour, all day long. So I must have done about seven workouts. And I theorized that I would start to feel stronger as the day progressed and then I would start to feel weaker as the day progressed. And that's exactly what happened. I got stronger by the third or fourth workout.

Doing that, I noticeably built muscle and each time I've done that, those all day workouts, it's not failure, not going day workouts, it's not failure, not going to failure, it's not super intense. But if you add up the total volume, I'm doing an incredible amount of volume and sets. Have you ever experimented with all day workouts like that, or what do you think may be happening there? It's this chronic overload thing we've talked about.

It's almost like an extended version of your cluster set. Oh yeah, I guess you're saying. I'm not really, but yeah. It's just like the mechanic who's constantly doing the work or when you were starting working with your dad, you know, it's a group. It's probably like late afternoon is when you saw the strongest. Yeah, that's what the research really suggests.

The performance is enhanced at that time point. Yeah, it was really weird, you know. And I could feel myself almost building muscle doing this. And you add up the total volume. And it was just, I don't remember how many total sets I did, but it was insane. Oh, I can absolutely believe it. It's funny. I just did a charity event this last weekend with Paul Carter, he writes for Teenation,

phenomenal guy. Paul has a going brother. And we talked about one of the questions it was asked was a woman who was working with working out with another woman who wanted to gain weight, where unusual, she wanted to lose weight, how should our work outs differ? And it points back to this idea that people, we've created the workout as like this one hour period of time where you do everything you're going to do to try to get muscle growth.

And we ignore the idea that you're pointing out there is that literally throughout the day, if you had a lifestyle that would allow you to do that, you could train that way. It's not something like you're an unusual person, I think, in this regard, and that you want to experiment. This is your curiosity is almost limitless. I'm guessing. So you're willing to do that. Plus, you don't mind the pain and misery of picking things up repeatedly.

I'm staying at home and working out all day. Nobody wants to do that. People don't. People don't, most people don't want to go to the gym. That's why exercise adherence is so poor. But yeah, that's a perfectly viable way. Again, we're just trying to get the callus to develop in terms of the muscle size. I think of it, I've used, there's very so many analogies, but I think of it if you wanted to get a good suntan, would you go to the tanning booth and just blast yourself for an hour and you just get burnt? You go out in the sun every day.

I used that exact analogy, probably like 10 times. Yeah, it's great, it's perfect analogy. It is, it's all adaptation systems. Yeah, repeated exposure. That's sending the signals, like hey, by the way, we need browner skin, we need browner skin skin we need browner skin We need bigger muscles we need bigger muscles again, and again the system gets it like once a week So there there's so many ways that muscle can adapt and the nervous system can adapt For that in frequent type of challenge the nervous system can sort of figure out

You know how to affect the muscle better you can just increase enzymatic capacity to improve fatigue. It's just not enough, in my mind, to, it seems like at least to warrant for most people really much of an adaptive response, because it's so infrequent. I agree. It's just, it's interesting when you examine all the different training methodologies, how they can be so, they can be almost at odds. Like you had, you know, like Mike Menser and heavy duty style training where you're hitting a body part once, absolute failure, leave it alone.

Arnold doing 20 sets per body part three days a week, you know, high volume, high pump. You still have bodybuilders on those two extremes, but I think rather than highlighting which one is the ideal, I think it's more just highlighting the difference in genetic variances with my opinion. Yeah, well, like, as I said before,

there are people that can do well with the once a week thing. Some of that probably there's, there's at some point in time, you're starting just to accumulate junk volume. So the recovery ability is gigantic. One of the things that kind of comes out when you, if you talk to, there's a number of different things we talked to high level pro bodybuilders. They know I trained with Dave Henry, I coach Dave for years. Every time Dave would do a new exercise,

I could always just tell from his biomechanics that he could activate the muscle in a really good way. He's very, very strong. So he didn't have any ego that made him want to do sloppy reps to move weight around. He also was just, was really hardy. Just could recover for things really, really well. And I've run into this again and again and again.

If you talk to high level bodybuilders, pros, a lot of them are very, very relaxed people. They could go in the gym and they can push themselves really hard, but they're not stressed. They're just chilling out most of the time. They're not like frantic running around, like, oh my gosh, oh my gosh. You will run into bodybuilders sometimes

who are just the body that's morphe is off the charts. The constant looking themselves in the mirror. They're freaking out. Those are the ones a lot of times too, in order to get where they've gotten have gone to absolute extremes and drug use and various other things. They're not the best.

So Ronnie Coleman, I love, I think it's the only way. He was a cop for years while he was doing professional bodybuilding. Right. And you see, like in the, in the, in the, one of the videos, he just goes in, he's just totally relaxed, like nothing's bothering him. He had a, one of my favorite,

I can't remember what it was who's saying, he's driving along in his car and he's, he's trying to, the car's supposed to recognize what he's saying, like, he's dialing a number with, with the, uh, talk to text. And he has to say it like five times, you know, in his thick text, they have a five, seven, one, four, three, and he gets it wrong every time.

It doesn't bother me sometimes. It's just by one bit. Jake Cutler's just as nice and relaxed as they get. Ben Pekolsky's a good example. You sit with that guy, he's like a yogi floating off the kids. I was just down to Ben's place a few days ago from Tampa to, yeah, he's great a yogi floating off the kitchen. I was just down a bench place a few days ago for Tampa too. Yeah, he's great.

Dexter Jackson, just laid back chill. Sean Rodin, like you go down the list, a lot of those guys are so that behooves really good recovery. There's other things that are involved. We don't talk enough about the stuff you don't do or the stuff that you do when you're not training and not eating that impact muscle growth. And I think that makes a, what you're saying

makes a huge difference. Absolutely. I know when I went through some of the most difficult stressful times of my life, for sure my body was not responding to exercise. And I never stopped working out. Right, you know? You can drop muscle really, really quickly

when things have gone awry in your life. So I have a question for you. Let's say you have somebody who's been working out for years and then they go on their first anabolic steroid cycle. Should they change their training and if they do change their training, what would they change? What should they do? Well, my big thing is always get the most from the least so The idea would be that they don't all of a sudden go into some monstrous cycle that requires them to change a whole bunch of things.

I'm big on auto regulating. That's how fortitude training is set up. Listen to your body, based on your body. Choose the volume, choose the exercises that work for you, et cetera, et cetera. And when I just diet, it's based on the progress the person is making at the time, whether they're trying to gain muscle or lose fat So if for instance that person goes on like a moderate cycle which would make sense Because you play all your trump cards as far as the chemistry goes Chances are you could this is just sort of theoretical, but you would you would lose that sensitivity in the future if you just someone

Just goes like a two gram per week cycle sure you can only gain muscle so fast Some people will just grow like wheat, and it don't really matter. It seems like in the long run, but you'd want to get as much as you possibly can from the initial slight stimulus. And so do all the things you possibly can that increase food to match that.

If you can handle more training, then do so. But the other thing that the recognize is that now if you are stronger and you do have somewhat of a toxic load coming from those drugs, you might just keep the volume the same. Because now you're lifting heavier loads and during Eats is the kind of the quintessential example of this where he found that he had the train with lower volume over time over the years, the stronger he got. Because- It's more damage on his body, just the weight alone. Yeah, just everything.

And we've talked about, it's been kind of a hot topic. He probably talked about Brad Schoenfeld's volume study. No, I was bringing that up though. Oh, okay. Yeah, so it came out in this past year, and he, they found a dose response for training volume in terms of muscle growth, not for strength, ironically enough, which is kind of a standout situation because that's not typically what you find, but they had

in their highest volume group, they were training for the lower body, I think it was 45 sets per week to failure. In like the 8 to 12 range. Something like that. So that was like those workouts where like they were going in and doing like five sets of squat to failure, 8 to 12 rep range and then like 90 seconds between sets and then two minutes rest they go to five. They start doing 90 seconds rest between sets of 8 to 12 on a leg press. It was if you read through the methods which a lot of people don't do, they just read the

abstract, they go, okay, the more, the more better I can do this many sets, it's just, it was diabolical. It would have just been, I would have had a rabidomyel that's just been hospitalized myself trying to do that. Because, you know, I would have been doing, you know, just crazy loads, which just can't happen. Now, there's gotta be, so that's, those were people who were resistance trained,

but there had to have been a good number of reps and reserve really for them to accomplish that. So that kind of volume is not something you can handle when you already become pretty strong or you're getting stronger. The main thing is that the stimulus needs to be balanced by recovery. So if you want, in my opinion, if someone gets on and they start making better gains and their gains are coming at a reasonable rate, just allow the recovery to help with that.

Don't bite that urge, like, okay, now I'm Superman. I got a turbocharger. And now I can just go bonkers. Yeah, it may not be the case, you don't know. And with Annabalabolic, you talked about how the people stopped responding because they've just been on and for too long. Is that receptor down regulation that's happening?

Yeah, so the literature there, the receptors don't seem to down regulate in terms of the receptor density. They may even go up, but there's some desensitization that's obviously happening there. There also seems to be, like if you look at like that, the study by Jose Antonio we talked about, and if you look at other studies looking at highly

hypertrophied muscle cells, there's some limit to how big the muscle cells can get too. So there's probably something in the muscle cell such that as it's growing and growing and growing, it's just going to slow down that rate of growth. It can only become so large so quickly. So I don't know what's going on exactly in terms of the molecular mechanisms that would cause a desensitization, but it's like, gosh, because I've been online since the beginning, literally the beginning of the internet and people will always say, well, the receptor density doesn't go down.

It's like, well, if there's no desensitization, this would be a really phenomenal by lack of biological negative feedback. It's like, well, you could just keep taking drugs and you would just, you know, go to the size of the Michelin man, you know, right? There'd be no limit. You know, everyone would look like big ramy and then bigger.

There has to be some limiting by negative feedback, putting things in to a stop, or bringing things to a stance. I don't know what it is though. Yeah, interesting. Interesting. Well, shit, man, fascinating and fun interview. Yeah.

You're a full of information. Yeah. I could talk to you for another two or three hours. I get to say, the questions are slowing down. No, no, no, no, no. No, I really appreciate you coming on the show, man. And to some of these questions, definitely. I mean, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You're welcome. Thanks, guys. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbumble at Mind Pump

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