50% More gym time for NOTHING? 2 New studies

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:22 New Training Volume Study

06:30 New Rest Intervals Study

08:53 Conclusion

Transcript:

A new meta analysis concluded that lifting weights is the most effective form of exercise to get smarter. The researchers concluded: “Resistance training was found to have the greatest impact on overall cognitive improvement and inhibitory control.” This proves once again that there is no problem in life that cannot be solved by more biceps. So here are two new studies to help you get better gains.

The first study is about training volume. It comes from a famous exercise science lab, but the paper, the write-up at least, is as disappointing as Conor McGregor’s recent return to the Octagon. The researchers had 27 strength trained male athletes, so clearly serious lifters, perform a 10 week run-in program with relatively conventional training for male athletes, and after that for six weeks they were divided into a group that either increased their training volume by 50%, so a dramatic increase in training volume, or they kept their volume the same. Why or why didn’t they just have a 17 week study in serious lifters comparing higher to lower volume? – I don’t know.

The researchers noted that the high volume group was the most extreme training volume ever documented in the literature, saying it was a comparison between 40 versus 60 sets. However, the researchers conflated volume in terms of total sets for the lower body with the actual metric of interest, which is sets per muscle group, and this was actually not nearly as high.

So I used fractional volume counting to get the actual volume for the muscle groups that were measured. This means that exercises that target a muscle group very well, like leg extensions for the quads or squats, they are counted 100%, but exercises that are not as effective, maybe a clean or power clean for the hamstrings, for example, are counted as half. So I use some discretion here to get the exact figures, but these will be ballpark correct.

Based on this more evidence based way to count the training volume the training volumes were 25 sets for the quads, specifically the vastus lateralis, so 37.5 sets with the 50% higher volume. We don’t actually know because the training volume was only reported for the base group, and they didn’t report the actual training program for the 50% higher volume group. So I’m just going to go with a 50% increase. And for the hamstrings it was 13.5 for the lower volume group, so not extreme at all if you ask me, versus 20.3 sets. Improperly counting training volume is a mistake

I see so often on social media and even in exercise science papers. Many people, for example, underestimate the extent to which they get volume from compound exercises for ancillary muscle groups. This leads to very weird distributions of training volume where they overtrain one muscle group a lot, but other muscle groups, for example, get very little volume. For example, for the hamstrings, bodybuilders notoriously undertrain them because they train “legs” and assume that exercises like squats train the hamstrings, which is not the case. Here you can see the results.

Muscle growth was substantially higher in percentage terms, at least, in the higher volume group. However, strength gains were a bit worse, specifically for the deadlifts, and this was the only finding that was actually statistically significant. So if you were just to go by statistical significance, you would conclude that higher training volumes are bad for strength development but neutral for muscle growth, meaning they are clearly a net negative. However, this is called the P fallacy. In exercise science when you have a short study like this with a trained sample, who are not going to gain that much muscle mass over a six week period, you have very low statistical power, which is the ability to detect an effect if there is one.

The researchers did say they conducted an a priori power analysis, but they actually tested the wrong thing or did the wrong analysis because they looked the pre-post effect rather than the between group difference. And we’re not interested in whether the study could detect if there was muscle growth. We’re interested in if the study could detect the difference between the lower and the higher volume on muscle growth, and this is very difficult to detect in such a short term study.

When new evidence is relatively weak it’s very important to look at the prior evidence. The best evidence we have to go at the moment is the latest meta analysis in the literature on training volume. The findings here actually fit pretty well. They found that higher training volumes generally lead to more muscle growth, but the effect becomes very unreliable at high training volumes. So up to ten sets is relatively clear. 10 to 20 sets generally also more muscle growth, but the effect becomes a lot more marginal.

This study, even for the quads, the higher volume muscle group, went from 25 to almost 40. And there you know that the effect is very, very small. So even if there was an effect which is suggested in the absolute percentage increase, it wasn’t actually likely to be significant either way. So overall, I think this analysis confirms what we know so far on training volume. Yes, there are generally benefits to higher training volumes, but they are slim. And specifically for strength they are very inconsistent. So the benefit on muscle growth is a lot more consistent than the benefit on strength development.

If you’re puzzled by the difference in strength and muscle growth I recommend you watch this video where I explain that in more detail. While these data are very interesting for people that want to find the perfect volume and want to know one figure of how many sets should I do per week, there is actually, unfortunately, no such figure that I can give you that works for everyone. We know that recovery capacity is highly individual. A given workout can take twice as long to recover from in a high stress situation.

For example, research has looked at students doing the same workout during their exam week and out of their exam week. During the exam week, when they are a lot more stressed, they take approximately twice as long to recover from that workout. Similarly, research has looked at the effect of sleep deprivation and finds it as massive effects on nutrient partitioning and recovery capacity. Then there are the effects of biological sex, training advancement, and probably one of the most underrated factors of all of them is energy balance.

Most of these studies are conducted around maintenance intake or in a slight energy surplus. If you’re cutting you can probably not tolerate nearly as much volume. Research on wound healing and some studies on Ramadan fasting, for example, show that recovery capacity is heavily impaired when someone is in significant energy deficits, or in general, when their diet is just not that good. And studies that look at the effect of different training volumes within individuals, so one leg doing higher volume, one leg doing lower volume, find that some individuals actually respond better to lower volumes, while other individuals respond better to higher volumes.

So these overall studies on the averages are definitely informative, and they form a good prior or a baseline for a recommendation. In the end, you have to tailor your individual volume to your individual recovery capacity. If you’re interested in getting a free estimate of your ideal optimal training volume based on the best available evidence, check out the MH physique app in the link in the description. You can get a free trial with that link.

The second new study also looked at the return on investment of spending more time in the gym. However, instead of training volume, they looked at rest intervals. Specifically, they looked at whether it’s worth timing your rest interval. 40 trained lifters completed a lower body training program with either a fixed 2 to 3 minute rest interval averaging at 2.4 minutes, or a self-selected or auto regulated rest interval where they rested you until they felt ready to perform the next set. This resulted in an average rest interval of 3.7 minutes.

I would note this study is still in preprint, so it has not yet been peer reviewed.

After eight weeks, there were clearly no meaningful differences in muscle growth or strength development. Muscle growth was measured in the calves and the quads, as muscle thickness and strength was measured as one rep max on the squat and isometric force in the knee extension.

These findings support our earlier conclusion from a review from Brad Schoenfeld and me, in which we concluded that there was probably no need to strictly time your rest intervals, and most lifters can simply auto regulate their rest intervals based on when they feel ready for maximal performance in the next set. You don’t have to actually have maximal performance in the next set, but you should be ready to give it your all, rather than still being completely out of breath and being limited by other factors than muscular exertion. However, resting as long as you want comes with the downside of spending significantly more time in the gym. Their workouts went from 56 minutes to 79 minutes, meaning they were 29% less time efficient. And importantly, the self-selected group here was supervised and they were not allowed to use their phones or hold conversations.

I know that there’s at least one of you watching this in the gym and sitting on a leg extension machine, and you rest interval is now like 15 minutes, so other people can’t use the machine while you’re watching YouTube. F*ck you! Okay?

Another very important point is that this study is absolutely not proof that resting more than two minutes doesn’t give you any further gains. One of our previous studies compared rest intervals of one minute versus three minutes, and we found significantly greater strength gains and a strong trend towards more muscle growth as well. Subsequent research confirmed that resting longer can improve strength and size gains because it adds total volume. If you rest longer your muscles are more recovered, you do more work. The extra work is more mechanical tension on the muscle and therefore you get more gains.

Just like with training volume, however, it’s clear that the marginal increase you get when you start resting a lot longer, or when you do much higher training volumes, becomes very slim. After about 90s of rest, the latest meta-analysis found no more clear evidence that there was actually still further muscle growth. In conclusion, if you’re not constrained by time, you can just autoregulate your rest intervals. Rest as long as you want until you feel ready for maximal performance in your next set. However, if you do value maximal time efficiency you should probably cap your rest intervals to 90s or less. In the end, the total repetition volume is what matters the most.

If you are going to rest a long time in between your sets – for God’s sake, make sure you let other people join in on your equipment, and definitely don’t hog multiple pieces of equipment with very long rest intervals. Okay?

Since timing your rest intervals is a pain in the ass, in my app I recommend that you auto-regulate your rest intervals. There is, however, a stopwatch function if you do want to time your rest intervals, and for maximal time efficiency you could employ something like myo-reps. Myo-reps are also supported in the app and they have been shown to be extremely time efficient. You can get a two week free trial with the link in the description. See you next time.