3 Epic New Studies to Build More Muscle [2026]

Chapters:

00:00 1. Myo-reps vindicated

05:34 2. 30 Sets in 40% deficit

08:43 3. Optimal proximity to failure

12:21 4. Bonus study

Transcript:

The first study found that compared to the way most people set up their sets, myo-reps allow you to make the same gains with 29% fewer reps in 62% less time. This deserves scrutiny. The researchers had a group of strength trained men perform barbell bench presses, barbell incline bench presses, and cable flys two times a week. The traditional group did 3 sets of 6 to 12 reps to failure with 2 minute rest intervals. The myo-reps group did the first set the same way – to failure, 6 to 12 reps, and then with 40 seconds rest after set 1 and 20 seconds rest after the next mini-sets. They did sets of 2 to 3 repetitions until they could no longer do that, and if they hit 5 sets, then they just went to failure on set 5. So basically it’s 5 mini-sets of around 2 to 3 repetitions, reaching failure on the last set.

The idea behind myo-reps is that you first do an activation set, which gets you to a high level of muscle activity and a high level of motor unit recruitment, basically allowing you to recruit all of your muscle fibers already, and then you do mini-sets subsequently while staying at that level of full motor unit recruitment. So you keep engaging all of the muscle fibers every repetition, and therefore the idea is that your reps are more efficient and you can do less volume and spend less time in a gym, while still getting similar gains. At face value hat is exactly what the researchers found.

After 8 weeks there were no significant differences in pec muscle thickness or bench press 1RM strength gains. Moreover, there were also no significant differences in ratings of perceived exertion (RPE) or perceived recovery scores (PRS). Crucially, the myo-reps group achieved these similar gains with 29% lower volume load, meaning they did 29% fewer reps. Moreover, they saved 62% time, at least based on an acute workout that they did before the long term study. At first glance, this sounds like complete vindication of the myo-reps theory, and the researchers portrayed the results as such. However, this is actually a classic inferential fallacy. I’ll spare you the details, but under the type of statistical significance testing that they do, failure to reject the null does not equal equivalence. There is something to actually do that, and it’s called equivalence testing. That’s not what they did.

Moreover, in more intuitive terms, they had 22 strength trained men in an 8 week study. And this is a between subject design. This has very low statistical power. Now the authors claim that they had 82% statistical power, and that’s based on post-hoc power analysis, which is basically just getting you the results that you want, because the power analysis came out with exactly their sample size of 22 to justify more than 80% power. Very convenient.

Now usually this is how it goes when peer review is like: “Hey, you have low statistical power, a very small study, short term… Look at the variance here in the graph of their muscle growth, it’s all over the place…” Then what they do is you get a post-hoc power and you can put the math the way you want it. And you see, oh look, there was actually adequate power. Clearly there was not adequate statistical power to actually find real differences. You simply won’t find real differences when you have 11 subjects per group in an 8 week study this way. So a null result, similar gains, is what you expect in the vast majority of studies that would be done this way. Meaning they made similar gains. Yes. But we can absolutely NOT say that their gains were identical.

If we look at the majority of research on rest redistribution protocols, which is the formal term for the category of advanced techniques that myo-reps fall under, then we see that you have to equate the total repetition volume, or total tonnage, to actually get identical gains. So overall, these results are definitely a win for myo-reps, but I would be very cautious and skeptical of the idea that you can actually do 30% less volume and get 100% of the gains.

I think myo-reps usually are an extremely efficient compromise, but to actually get your full results that you would get with traditional sets, you probably do have to get basically the same repetition volume. Mechanistically, the primary driver of muscle growth is not muscle activity, or fatigue, or recruitment, it is mechanical tension. So in the end, you still have to get your reps in, you still have to get the tension multiplied by time under tension to get the same growth stimulus. My skepticism aside, this is a big win for myo-reps because there is not a lot of research on myo-reps yet, and this vindicates that myo-reps are indeed a highly time efficient way to get at least similar gains as you normally do. Being able to do your workout in less than half the time is absolutely huge for people that are constrained on time.

If you want to incorporate myo-reps into your training, I recommend you do it the way that Børge Fagerli, their creator, originally intended, which means that you do not go to failure like they did in this study, which would basically make them rest-pause training instead of myo-reps, and you stay at that sweet spot where you have your full recruitment and you’re not getting access fatigue, because that just limits your work capacity. So regardless if the original myo-rep explanation of full recruitment matters, or if it’s just mechanical tension, not going to failure preserves work capacity and allows you to do more reps in your subsequent mini-sets, which should be even more time efficient.

This is also the way that my MH Physique App incorporates myo-reps when you enable that option. You can get a free program with myo-reps in the link below. Also, if you’re looking for ways to save time in the gym and get equivalent gains, there is an even more efficient and proven method for this, which is doing full body workouts with combo sets. That’s also incorporated in my App.

Even wilder than being able to save half your time in the gym and doing a third less volume without any loss of gains, is what they did in study #2: The researchers had a group of trained individuals perform 30 sets a week in a 40% energy deficit. The more fortunate control group was prescribed 12 fractional sets per week per major muscle group. Unfortunately for us, but fortunately for the people in the 30 sets group, the study was restricted to 4 weeks, presumably to keep the mortality rate below 80%. This meant that the body composition results should be taken with a huge grain of salt, because you can’t expect a whole lot of difference in 4 weeks in trained individuals.

For what it’s worth, though, both groups managed to hold on to their lean mass, and they lost a significant amount of fat. Nitrogen balance also didn’t significantly differ between the groups, so it seems like for muscle mass, there was no significant difference between the groups. But again, in 4 weeks you won’t be able to see any difference here. What they did find, however, was a significant difference considerably favoring the higher volume for strength gains. The 30 sets group gained more strength on all lifts and progressed significantly faster in total volume load. Strength gains were 15 to 27% versus 7 to 14% in the lower volume group for presses, rows, and leg presses, respectively, and three out of four of those were actually statistically significant.

So overall, this is quite compelling evidence that the higher volumes improved strength gains. This study fits with a large literature that many people can handle a lot more volume than they think, or at least their muscles can. I think most people are constrained by motivation and time, and secondly, most serious lifters, willing to do high volume training are constrained by their injuries. While your muscles can handle a lot of volume, connective tissues may not. Many people that try something like in this study, 30 sets a week per major muscle group in a 40% energy deficit, would get injured when they try this for more than 4 weeks, at least.

There’s also some important context to put these findings into perspective. First: this study is not yet officially published, it is still in peer review. Second: they trained with only 90 second rest intervals, and they left 1 to 2 reps in reserve. If you train closer to failure and you train with longer rest intervals, then you probably don’t need to go quite as high in training volume. You can get similar results with fewer sets. In addition, average body fat levels were in the 20s. Now, this was pulled up by two women in the sample, but still, leaner lifters will likely not do as well with a 40% energy deficit. Still, the overall body of research on training volume is quite consistent.

While many people have the idea that studies are all over the place and they contradict each other all the time, that is not the case at all. With one exception, every single study so far has found that higher training volumes produce significantly greater or equal results versus lower training volumes. So purely from a statistical perspective you can expect that higher volumes produce either better or equal gains, with a very low likelihood of actually inferior gains. Then again, for many people, it’s also wasted effort. If you want to get an estimate of how much volume you can productively recover from and actually make better gains from, you can get a free estimate and a program in my App. The link is in the description.

Even more big boy numbers than 40% energy deficit and 30 sets a week are found in study #3. In fact, I have to pull them up because I have too much Instagram brain rot to remember more than five seconds. The researchers had 158 strength trained men… 158? …divided over 12 groups, differing in training intensity, and they used average training intensities of 48, 63, and 78, and differing in proximity to failure with velocity losses of 0%, basically a control group not really training. 15%, 25% or 50%. 50% for most people being very, very intensive. And they did a bench press specialization program.

Now, if you ask me, if you have this many strength training subjects for a study, you should just do one thing really well. But unfortunately, we see that researchers overreach all the time, and they try to investigate the effect of training intensity and proximity to failure, and then you have all of these different groups. So the differences between these groups will often not turn out statistically significant. But we can look at the general trends here. For strength and power higher training intensities resulted in better gains. This is consistent with most literature. If you want to train for strength and power you need to go heavy, potentially even doing 1 rep maxes, especially if you are a powerlifter. In terms of proximity to failure they found an inverted U curve, basically an optimum shape where around a 30% velocity loss seem to produce the highest increases in 1 rep max. So going even closer to failure did not seem to produce better gains, and even had some trends towards worse gains.

This is also consistent with many studies, although many studies find that it doesn’t really significantly reduce your gains if you go very close to failure. But actually going to failure can significantly harm your strength progress compared to staying a little bit further away from failure. The reason for that is that you lose work capacity, technique goes down the drain, and there is no significant neural adaptation anymore that occurs when you go to failure, like that last rep you do where you actually fail the repetition -it doesn’t contribute much to our strength gains, it just induces a lot of fatigue. So the cost benefit of that is poor. In contrast for muscle growth, the data were clear that the closer they train to failure the more muscle they gained.

This is also consistent with most research. It is not because you should train close to failure necessarily, it is because you get more volume. Volume drives muscle hypertrophy, and you can get that volume from doing more sets, but you can also get it from training harder or resting longer in between sets so that you can do more repetitions per set. All of these achieve more time under tension with the same weights, which means that the integral of tension and time under tension increases, which is the primary driver of muscle hypertrophy. Muscle is just a slab of meat, and it responds to how much tension you put on it for how much time. In practice, if you want a good blend of strength and size, a good general recommendation is to simply perform as many reps as possible.

For most people, honestly, the whole reps in reserve, RPE values, all of that is needless over complication. If you are a powerlifter and you are training primarily for strength it might be beneficial. But in my App I also recommend you simply do as many reps as possible for the majority of individuals. It is the most reliable, it is the most simple, it introduces no performance or tracking issues with whether you did 2 reps in reserve, 3 reps in reserve… Nobody’s that accurate with these things. And it is the most time efficient, especially for hypertrophy, you simply get the most reps per set. I know many lifters love to geek out on reps in reserve and the like, but honestly, it simply doesn’t matter for most people. Just train as hard as you can and you will get better gains if you train harder. For most people in practice, that’s what it comes down to.

I know I only promised 3 studies for you, but I have a bonus one. This one is on the house. It’s that swearing improves physical performance. Across 3 very high quality studies the researchers found that swearing improved pushup performance. This fits a now large body of evidence that swearing… Yes, swearing can improve performance across a wide variety of physical tasks. The effect seems to be mediated by state inhibition. Basically, it just allows you to train harder and it makes you physically aroused.

The researchers, interestingly, had the following quote that swearing may not just improve your lifting, but also your life in general: “In many situations we hold ourselves back and, in doing so, limit our opportunities for success. Here we propose swearing as a cheap, readily available intervention that appears to encourage us to “not hold back” and instead “go for it” a little more, with positive benefits on physical performance. This study shows that swearing can improve physical performance, and it works by helping people feel focused, confident, and less distracted.” F*ck yeah! PS. Buy my f*cking App.