Avoid these 12 myths & build more muscle

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:11 1. Fancy periodization models

01:38 2. Confuse your muscles

02:55 3. Training to failure

03:33 4. Cardio will kill your gains

05:45 5. Lifting weights will make women bulky

06:43 6. Follow a monotonous and strict diet

07:48 7. Eat every 3 hours

08:50 8. The anabolic window

10:17 9. Spot reduction

11:17 10. Fasted cardio

12:43 11. Muscle turns into fat

13:41 12. Creatine is a steroid

14:27 Outro

Transcript:

A new scientific review has outlined 12 very popular ideas about how to build muscle, that have been thoroughly debunked by science and in many cases are actually hurting your gains.

Myth number 1 is that you need fancy periodization models to maximize muscle growth. Some of the most popular forms of periodization on YouTube are volume ramping, followed by a deload week. There is zero scientific evidence to support that. In general, block periodization, where you have different blocks where you focus on different things, is not necessary for muscle hypertrophy. It only makes sense for athletes that have concurrent training needs in the form of strength training, endurance training, in-season, off-season…

For most recreational trainees periodization is overkill. Even daily undulating periodization, which is the model that I most commonly recommend to my students and I use in my app, mostly benefits strength development. That might over the long run, also start benefiting muscle hypertrophy, but the evidence for that is quite slim, and most fancier periodization models have completely failed to actually deliver increased muscle growth in the research that we have. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should literally be repeating the same workouts over time.

Progressive overload is well established to improve muscle growth and strength development, so you need a smart way to incorporate progressive overload. That’s going to incorporate reactive deloads and probably some form of auto regulation. These things, at a minimum, have been found to improve strength development and fatigue management. However, most of the popular forms of periodization that involve changing up your program every four weeks or fancy volume ramping with deload phases and then high volume and low volume weeks, these actually have no scientific support behind them.

Myth number two is that you need to confuse your muscles to maximize muscle growth, otherwise the muscle will adapt to your program and you will stop making gains. Muscle tissue does not get confused. Okay? The only one being confused is the people promoting this idea.

Adaptation is the very goal of training and progressive overload is there in particular to make sure that the training stress stays at a certain level. When you increase the weight or you increase the reps because you are now stronger, that’s preserves the same relative training stress. So the goal of progressive overload is actually normally to preserve the same relative training stress over time as you get stronger. In that sense, progressive overload is also best seen as a marker of your progression, a measure that you are getting stronger, that you are improving, and that your body is adapting, which is the very goal rather than a technique in itself that stimulates the muscle growth or the strength development. So you need a structured plan in your training to get stronger over time, but you don’t want excessive variation.

Excess variation, which you often get with muscle confusion ideas, has in fact been found to be harmful in some studies. Excessive variation increases muscle damage and makes you do more work to get similar gains. This is also why switching up your program every four weeks or so is usually not recommended, because it makes it harder to implement progressive overload over time.

Myth #3 is that training to failure is necessary to maximize muscle growth. It is not. Muscle growth is benefited by training to failure only to the extent that it increases total training volume. So if someone is simply not training hard, and you have another group of people that do the same program, but they just train harder, getting closer to failure and therefore doing more repetitions, they gain more muscle mass. However, when you equate to the repetition volume between the groups, there ceases to be a difference. I discuss this in detail in a recent video, so you can check that out for more details. But it’s very clear that training for failure is not necessary to maximize muscle growth. It is just one of many ways to get additional volume in, and it is the volume that drives muscle growth.

Myth number four is that cardio will kill your gains. There is something called an interference effect or a concurrent training effect, whereby adding cardio or some form of endurance training and bodybuilding type training, or some form of resistance training reduces the adaptations to both, or at least the adaptations in terms of strength development. Many people in fitness have taken this idea to extremes, and they avoid walking to the gym or doing even moderate forms of physical activity in fear of this killing their gains. This is not the case.

The researchers, in fact, argue that the interference effect may be more of a measurement artifact and a myth altogether. I would certainly disagree with this. I think the interference effect is real, and it has been demonstrated in multiple studies, including for muscle growth. But it is certainly the case that it is overrated and just a low volume of cardio for health reasons, walking to the gym, bicycling and commuting to work by bicycle… None of these things are going to materially impact muscle growth. However, when you increase the volume to a certain level, or when you do the cardio before a workout, it is clear that muscle growth can be compromised and performance can also be compromised by the endurance training.

The argument against the interference effect relies heavily on studies on untrained individuals, where anything leads to improved muscle growth. Indeed, if you have untrained individuals start a program with bicycling, they will gain some muscle mass. We see that over the course of some eight weeks or so, the cellular adaptations and the anabolic signaling pathways between endurance and strength training starts diverging. You will no longer gain muscle mass from bicycling. You actually have to do some lifting. Only at that point do we consistently see evidence of the interference effect, and only when the volume of cardio is high enough to induce significant endurance training adaptations that actually sabotage the strength training adaptations.

So overall, the interference effect is certainly overrated, but I do think it is very real and there’s only so much cardio you can do before it starts compromising muscle growth. I think this is a real concern for bodybuilders, because bodybuilders traditionally rely on very high volumes of cardio. If you add an hour of cardio every day, that is very likely to actually start interfering with muscle growth, especially when you’re in deep contest prep, in a very big energy deficit, you have limited recovery resources, and it is already very hard to maintain muscle mass as is without doing a lot of cardio that might also add an interference effect on top of that.

Myth number five is that lifting weights will make women bulky. This myth is honestly just flat out a little bit disrespectful to serious lifters. It takes a lot of work to build muscle mass. It’s a bit like saying: “I’m not going to save money because I don’t want to become a billionaire.” or “I’m not going to eat healthy because I don’t want to become 200 years old. Like, who wants that?” Building muscle is very hard. It takes a long period of time. So lifting weights is not going to make you wake up one day looking like the She-Hulk.

If you objectively take the ideal physique of many women and where they currently are, then strength training is almost universally one of the most efficient ways to get from where they currently are to their ideal. So most women should be lifting weights. And this is not just my bias talking. It is the official recommendation of almost all public health institutes and governments to lift weights. Resistance training is incorporated as a default in almost every health guideline, meaning the official advice from almost all health organizations in the world is that most people should be lifting weights at least 1 to 2 hours per week.

Myth number six is that to get a good physique, you need to follow a monotonous and strict diet. Research is very clear that almost all dietary variables, regardless of what food choices you actually make, ultimately come down to energy balance. So as long as you get your protein in, your energy balance is okay, you’re not woefully deficient in carbohydrates or fats, then almost any type of diet can result in a good physique. In theory, you can get shredded eating nothing but junk food and getting some protein shakes and some multivitamins in. In fact, this is what the guy from the Twinkie diet basically did.

Of course, in practice it doesn’t work so well because you’ll probably get nutrient deficiencies, and you’ll be hungry all the time because the food is very unsatiating. Most people in practice benefit from some compromise or a form of flexible dieting, where they learn to manage their energy balance without feeling deprived. I usually tell my clients to focus on satiety and satisfaction. The two S’s. Make sure all of your meals are satisfying and satiating. You are no longer hungry afterwards, and you look forward to eating the meal, at least when you’re hungry. It doesn’t have to be Michelin type dining every time, but it should be something that you actually want to eat when you’re hungry. So please don’t try to live on chicken breast, broccoli, and white rice diets. That is so 90s.

Myth number seven is that you need to eat every 3 hours. This idea comes from the thermic effect of food. Every time you eat, there is an increase in your metabolic rate. This is called thermic effect of food or dietary induced from agenesis. Now, whether you eat one big meal or multiple small meals, the area under the curve or the total thermic effect is the same. So you don’t need to eat every three hours. In fact, for most people, this is gruesome and horribly time inefficient. Most people are best off in practice, eating 3 to 4 meals a day. However, you can fit this largely to your personal preference.

There is data that you need at least 3 meals per day to maximize muscle growth, spread somewhat across the day, but beyond that, there is no further advantage to higher meal frequencies as long as your meals are whole food based. They have some fiber, they have some fats. In that scenario you’re going to be covered for most of the day in terms of muscle protein synthesis, because the absorption and digestion of the food actually takes a long period of time. Even a normal protein shake or an a Kaju shake in particular, will cover you for over 6 hours. And larger meals have been found to sustain muscle protein synthesis for over 12 hours.

This leads us to myth number eight, the idea that you need to consume protein immediately after your workouts in order not to miss out on the anabolic window. The anabolic window is, in fact, more of a meteor crater than a glory hole. It is a very long period of time in which muscle protein synthesis can be elevated to much higher levels than ordinarily. This is basically the period in which you build muscle mass, and it’s kind last days. So you don’t have to consume a meal directly after the workout to benefit from it. It’s also not about when you consume the meal in the first place. It’s about when the amino acids are available for muscle protein synthesis.

As I just discussed, this is actually a long period after the meal, not right when you consume the meal. A good default recommendation, which is also the recommendation that my Physique App gives, is that you want to have your pre and your post-workout meal within about a five hour window. This means that if you train at, say, 12:00, then you can have breakfast at ten and your lunch, for example, at three. That’s a five hour period between the pre and the post-workout meal, which is not directly pre and post workout, it’s just a meal before and the meal after the workout. In this scenario most people are going to be completely fine and you don’t need to have protein shakes immediately in the locker room or something. That is just something that protein supplement manufacturers desperately want you to believe, because it’s the only practical thing that you can do in that scenario. You would need to rely on protein shakes. And I would in general actually say that most people are best off not relying on protein shakes, but exclusively eating whole foods primarily because it’s more satiating.

Myth number nine is that you can target specific areas of your body to lose fat. This is also known as the spot reduction myth. For example, many people do a lot of sit ups or crunches to remove the fat on their abs. It doesn’t work like that. Most research has found that we essentially have a genetic blueprint of where our bodies store fat, and at each body fat percentage we have a certain body fat distribution. If you want to get rid of the fat on your abs or any other area, you just have to lose fat, period. The fat on those areas will go off as well. Some areas are more stubborn than others, which just means you need to lose more fats to get there.

Now, I would note that there are two studies that have found spot reduction, under certain circumstances might be possible, but these studies have significant methodological shortcomings and they require a combination of strength training and cardio, leading to a marginal spot reduction effect. By and large, for most individuals, you just need to lose fat over the body as a whole to get that fat off the areas where you want it to come off. You cannot choose where your body stores fat.

Myth number ten is the idea that fasted cardio burns more fat. There is a confusion between acute fatty acid oxidation and long term adipose tissue loss. When we’re speaking of losing body fat we are referring to adipose tissue. This is distinct from which energy the body is burning right now to meet energy demands. This can be fatty acid oxidation, and indeed is more fatty oxidation when you are performing fasted cardio, however, this doesn’t matter because if you do fasted cardio and you do burn more fatty acids right now and you burn less of the food from the meal before, for example, that you didn’t eat, in the end, you’re just burning more fat now, but burning less of the meal that you would have had before.

So in this scenario that you had the meal, you may be burning off the meal. In the end, it doesn’t matter because you always return to total energy balance. Whether you’re burning fat or glycogen, or the meal that you just ate, or a meal that you ate yesteryear, it doesn’t matter. All that matters in the end is your total cumulative energy balance over time. This physically dictates energy losses from the body as a whole. In that’s perspective it actually doesn’t make sense to do fasted cardio because fasted cardio can reduce energy expenditure by reducing training performance. So if your cardio is very intensive, you most likely want to eat before it’s to fuel performance. More performance means greater energy expenditure, means given the same energy intake you might actually lose more fat if you’re doing your cardio in a fed state. Most research, however, has found that the differences are trivial and fasted and fed cardio result in very similar rates of fat loss over time.

Myth number 11 is that muscle turns into fat when it is not used. Okay, these tissues can not convert into each other. That’s like saying if I don’t like my car, I’m just going to turn it into an airplane or a computer. It doesn’t work that way. Of course, if you’re not using muscle mass, then you will lose it. It’s use it or lose it. So you will lose the muscle mass, and in that period of time, because your energy expenditure is lower, you might also gain fat. Simultaneous fat gain and muscle loss is very possible. On the bright side, it’s also very possible to gain muscle while you are losing fat, especially if you’re not very well trained yet or if you have higher levels of body fat. In most of my clients, though, and our App users we see that even intermediate lifters can benefit from positive body recomposition up to a pretty high point. Much, much higher than most people in fitness realize. And that’s because these processes -fat loss and muscle growth- are largely independent of each other. Muscle growth does have an input essentially of energy balance, and an energy deficit is a catabolic stressor, but you can still build muscle mass if the total stimulus for muscle mass is great enough.

Myth number 12, and the researchers saved the dumbest one for last, Is that creatine is a steroid. Creatine is not a steroid. It’s that simple. It’s a nitrogenous compound. You know what is a steroid though? -Vitamin D. And that tells you it doesn’t matter if something is a steroid. When most people talk about steroids they are specifically referring to androgenic anabolic steroids with the idea that those are harmful. This goes to show just how much misconception there is about these topics. Most people just have some negative visceral reaction about creatine seeming unnatural, even though it is actually also found in your food, and therefore they think it is bad. That’s actually what happens with many of these misconceptions. People have a certain feeling, they try to rationalize that, they come up with some bro-science explanation, and then, fortunately, we have scientific research to come out to determine what is actually true or not.

So if you’re tired of all of the misinformation, the seeming contradictions that you see on social media, then I highly recommend my online PT course. It is my Magnum opus, my Baby. It is the most comprehensive work I’ve ever done about how to build muscle mass, how to lose fat in an evidence based manner that also works in real life. In support of scientific research we also use at least 10% of our income to donate to scientific research or fund it internally for not-for-profit scientific research. The link to the course is in the description, and if you just want more free content I’d be honored if you like and subscribe.