7 Dazzling New Studies For Serious Lifters [2025]

Chapters:

00:00 1: Hardgainer no more

02:45 2: Lengthened bias training

04:55 3: Eccentric training

06:09 4: Food logging errors

08:03 5: ChatGPT is horribly inaccurate at estimating your calories

09:37 6: Priming

11:08 7: Post-workout stretching

12:19 Bonus: Combo sets

Transcript:

Many lifters are worried that they are hard gainers because they have a hard time gaining muscle. Even in studies, nonresponse to exercise is formally often determined based on not responding to exercise. The idea, then, is that these individuals are just not genetically wired to be top tier bodybuilders. However, a new study shows that this is completely misguided. The researchers had a group of study participants perform a ten week strength training program, and then determined which of those were the hard gainers, or the Non-Responders. Then, after a certain phase, they had them repeat the ten week program another time, and they tested again, whether there was a correlation between their gains in phase one and their gains in phase two. So you could see if they were really genetically screwed, you would see that the people that had poor responses in phase one should also have poor responses in phase two.

While there were correlations between the phases nobody was in fact a complete non responder to exercise. While some of the lifters didn’t gain a measurable amount of muscle mass in one of the phases, none of the lifters didn’t gain muscle mass in both phases. And this was true for both measured muscle groups, the biceps and the quads. These results show that it was not genetics, but something else that made them not make gains in one of the phases. And if you logically think about it, there are a number of reasons why somebody could make shitty gains in one phase. Maybe it was their genetics, but maybe it was that they were just not training hard enough that phase. Maybe their mind wasn’t in it. Maybe their training volume was not appropriate for them.

And indeed, I previously posted on a study showing that some individuals don’t respond to a certain training volume, but then they do respond to a different training volume. In my 15 plus years of coaching I have coached numerous individuals who had tried everything and couldn’t gain muscle or lose fat, and in every single case it was not true. Successfully transforming your physique means paying attention to your lifestyle, your diet, and your training. And there are so many things that could be suboptimal in these regards. Now, some individuals have a very easy time gaining muscle. They get their protein in, they go to the gym, they train hard – Boom! That’s it. They get good gains. But for other individuals, they need to pay attention to the smaller things like nutrient timing, micronutrient intakes and the finer points of training program optimization.

These individuals may think that they are hard gainers and they are genetically screwed, but it is very often simply not the case. They just need to figure out what works for them. In the ten or so years, I have run the Henselmans PT Course not a single student has managed not to make gains if they successfully implemented all of the recommendations of the course. Absolutely everybody can get lean, that is physical law, everyone can gain at least a decent amount of strength, and basically everyone can also gain at least a good amount of muscle mass. Some people can certainly gain more muscle mass than others, but nobody is doomed not to be able to transform their physique at all.

The second new study I have for you today is about lengthened bias training, which is all the rage right now. The researchers had the participants do a program consisting of reverse flys, chest flys, lateral raises and multi-hip glute kickbacks. All of these exercises were performed with one limb at a time, so unilaterally, and performed to failure. All of the exercises were performed in a machine with a cam system that makes the exercise harder during either the lengthened part of the movement, when the muscle is more stretched, or during the shortened part of the movement, when the muscle is at a shorter length. So one of the limbs had lengthened bias training and the other limb had shortened bias training.

After ten weeks there were no significant differences between the limbs in either strength gains or muscle growth, as measured by gold standard MRI. These results align with previous studies on lateral raises and biceps curls that if you do go through the full range of motion, emphasizing one part of the movement makes a best a small difference in muscle hypertrophy, especially with machines. The machine provides some resistance throughout the entire range of motion, and the range of motion is the same. So it seems based on the totality of research that we have so far that increasing the range of motion to greater muscle lengths is a much more reliable way to increase muscle growth than to simply add a little bit more tension in one part of the movement. And the current trends that some people have of really going all out to maximize the tension only at long muscle lengths is probably not necessary.

It’s also possible that the glutes, the delts, and the pecs don’t benefit as much from lengthened bias training as other muscle groups due to their length tension curves. This is especially likely for the glutes, which, based on the limited research we have, seem to be able to produce the most muscle tension at relatively short muscle lengths. Lengthened bias training is most likely to increase muscle growth when it increases the total tension area under the curve. So most of the research we have is for the quads and the calves, and in those studies is actually both active and passive tension, and especially the sum of active and passive tension that is higher when they are training that longer muscle lengths, at least for the quads up to a point until you get into a super deep squat position. And indeed, we have a study showing that leg presses to full depth actually don’t induce more quad hypertrophy than to already a pretty good depth. So if you’re squatting for parallel, it’s not entirely certain if squatting to ass to grass is really much better.

Study number three found that the long held belief that eccentric exercise is inherently more muscle damaging than concentric exercise may not be true. When the muscles are lengthening under tension this is called an eccentric muscle action. This is usually when you are lowering the weight if you are holding a free weight, like a dumbbell or a barbell. These eccentric muscle actions are widely believed to damage the muscle more because they are essentially tearing it more apart. Indeed, you can produce more force, so I would expect, despite the results of this study, that eccentric muscle actions, doing these cause a little bit more muscle damage than concentric actions.

However, the difference is likely not nearly as large as commonly believed, because in a new study, they had untrained women that were equally unfamiliar with concentric and eccentric exercise. Trained one biceps each with concentric and eccentric contractions. 75 maximal contractions, to be precise. This make them hella sore, but over the next four days there were no significant differences between the groups in markers of muscle damage, muscle soreness, or strength recovery.

These results suggest that in many studies, the reason that people experienced more muscle damage from eccentric exercise is because they were unfamiliar with eccentric exercise. I mean, who is familiar with eccentric exercise? Nobody trains that way. So when you remove this unfamiliarity effect, then we see that the differences between concentric and eccentric exercise are much, much smaller than commonly believed.

Study number four found that the world’s most popular calorie and macro tracking app, My Fitness Pal, is neither valid nor reliable. Two scientists input the food logs of a group of Canadian athletes into My Fitness Pal, Cronometer, and the CAF, the Canadian Nutrient File, which is kind of the official database for Canadian foods. My Fitness Pal had two problems.

First, when different users input the same food they often select different entries, especially when you’re using their database and not relying on your own food labels, which you definitely should be doing, then it’s very difficult to know which of the ten types of chicken cutlets is the right one for you. This report is in an average difference of daily reported calories between users of 226, and a 95% confidence interval spanned from -326 to +776. That’s a huge error margin for trying to select the same foods, but simply using a different entry in the database.

Problem number two is that the My Fitness Pal database is simply not reliable. Even the foods that are marked as accurate or tracked do not correspond well with official databases like the CNF. The difference was not nearly as large here, only 94 calories on average per day, but that’s still fairly substantial. The researchers therefore concluded that: “My Fitness Pal provides low reliability and validity.” And they concluded that Cronometer performs a lot better in both regards.

I will also, of course, note that my own app, the Menno Henselmans Physique App, which is currently close to finishing its Beta phase, and you’ll hear about a lot more soon, of course, is also better in these regards because we use all the official databases. And you can now still get a two week free trial for my app. Link is in the description. However, you can also use Cronometer or MyNetDiary that are entirely free. And even if you are using My Fitness Pal, which I wouldn’t recommend, but you can use it well if you simply use all the actual food labels that you yourself put into the app. Then there isn’t really a lot of room for error, because you’re essentially just using My Fitness Pal as a spreadsheet. The app also doesn’t do much for you then, but you should be accurate.

Speaking of tracking your macros, study number five found that ChatGPT is not very good at tracking your macros for you based on photos. I know that a lot of people these days would love to just send AI a photo of their food and have it tell them exactly how many calories are in the meals. However, this resulted in a mean error percentage of 36% for your daily calorie intake. That means that when you’re planning to be in a 20% deficit, you might in fact still be bulking. And in fact this is very common. Under-reporting is very common in people, dietitians, and even the ChatGPT and other large language models alike.

The primary reason for that is hidden calories. If you go to a restaurant and there are two extra tablespoons of oil in the food, that’s 200 extra calories that are hard to foresee. The same goes for butter, sugar, and in general, all types of sauces. And I would note that the researchers used photos here in which cutlery was visible, which the AIs could use as a frame of reference for what the portion sizes were. If you don’t do this, then the AI is even worse.

One caveat is that the AIs used in this study are already dated at this point, due to the rapid development of AI. They specifically looked at ChatGPT-4o Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Gemini 1.5 Pro. Newer AI models are already a lot smarter, but I don’t expect, based on the research I’ve done for my own app to try to make this work, that in the near future they will be able to do this accurately. It’s just simply not that accurate to just look at a food and be able to tell how many calories are in it. The bet gold standard is still weighing the portion sizes and inputting the actual food labels, or using an official database to know exactly how many grams of every food you have and how many calories are in those foods.

Back to training, study number six looked at priming effects. Many people are familiar with fatigue effects, meaning that performance decreases after exercising because you get tired. However, not many people are aware that there are also potentiating effects. So in a new study, a group of trained men were more athletic in the sense of sprinting faster and jumping higher, six hours after a heavy squat workout. Specifically, 4 sets of five at 85% of 1RM.

There are multiple studies now that show that after a certain time ranges after a high intensity workout, your neuromuscular system is primed for higher performance. In these time periods the potentiating effects overshadow the fatigue effects resulting in higher performance. This specifically applies when going from a higher intensity to a lower intensity. In the very short term, up to about a minute, there’s something called post activation potentiation, and then over the course of 3 to 5 minutes or maybe a little bit longer, there’s something called post activation performance enhancement, and the new study found that even across the day as a whole, there may be certain phases, like six hours later when athletic performance improves after a heavier workout.

There seems to be numerous mechanisms at play here, and it’s not entirely clear what is going on, but there may be biorhythm effects, there are certain nervous system effects, and there are also effects in the neuromuscular tissue itself, especially for post activation performance enhancement. They have to do with temperature and the cross bridge formation process. The researchers also found a trend that cluster sets seem to have a higher potentiated effects than regular straight sets, but this effect was statistically super weak, and I wouldn’t put a lot of stock into this yet.

Study number seven is a meta analysis of 15 studies that concluded post-workout stretching has no significant effects on muscle soreness, strength, or performance. Basically, it’s useless and you don’t have to do it unless you are specifically stretching for a certain cause. Other research has also found that stretching in general, especially post-workout stretching, does not influence injury sensitivity.

Stretching primarily just makes you better at stretching, and most of the adaptations don’t even increase muscle length, and they don’t do much in the muscle tissue itself, especially not long term. What they mainly do is that they make you better at stretching in a neuromuscular sense, so they relax the nervous system, and they teach the nervous system by decreasing pain sensitivity, in large part, that it’s okay to relax the muscle a little bit more. But these adaptations are primarily neural, in fact, not muscular, not morphological.

So you don’t increase the actual muscle length, which is a common misconception in people that stretch. And the end result of this is that the adaptations to stretching are extremely specific to the stretch that you’re doing. So if you are stretching for a certain purpose, like doing the splits, then doing the splits will of course make you better at doing the splits, but just stretching just for the sake of it, for recovery or injury resistance or something like that doesn’t work and is not necessary.

As a bonus, study number eight is a review that concluded you should be using super sets in your program because they save a ton of time and they don’t make your program less effective. Because they save so much time they also allow a lot of people to increase their training volume and thereby get better gains. Specifically, the researchers looked at agonist-antagonist super sets like bench presses and rows and upper-lower super sets like squats and chin ups. The researchers concluded that on average, these do not impair muscle activity, long term strength development, or muscle growth. However, if you’re doing them really close back to back and you’re literally so gassed from your squats that your chin ups do suffer, then they can impair your performance.

The solution here is combo sets. Almost everyone should be using combo sets. They are primary reason why I don’t recommend push-pull-legs or upper-lower splits. You forgo the massive time saving advantage and also the ability to increase your rest intervals, thereby increasing your training volume, thereby increasing the amount of tension you can put in your muscles and thereby improving your long term gains. I already did an extensive video on combo sets here, so if you haven’t seen that yet, definitely check it out. And if you’re interested in learning absolutely everything there is about your physique and how to take your gains to the next level, then check out my PT course. It will teach you absolutely everything a serious evidence based lifter is interested in.