The most important things for max muscle – Brad Schoenfeld

Categories: Videos & podcasts

Chapters:

00:00 Stretch-mediated hypertrophy and lengthened partials vs full ROM

06:20 Mechanisms of muscle hypertrophy: do muscle damage and metabolic stress still matter? What about the pump and soreness?

13:36 What’s most important to build muscle?

17:28 The application of the super high-volume research

25:33 The minimum meal frequency for maximum gains

32:43 Alan Aragon crocodile dilemma

33:21 Final thoughts

Transcript:

Currently one of the hottest topics in fitness, especially evidence based fitness is stretch mediated hypertrophy and in particular the application of lengthened partials. Do you use lengthened partials in your training? To some extent, but certainly I don’t think it’s the be all end all I. What I think is and what I think we can infer from the literature is that the length and position has particular importance in hypertrophy. I am still skeptical that that dismisses the effects of the short position. We have very limited evidence that length and partials are necessarily better than full range of motion training. But I think there’s at least a logical rationale for the implementation of at least some length in partials. And for me, I think that like any other advanced training technique, it can more in place of routine, but I think it’s more of a minimalistic aspect of it. And what would be mechanistically the benefits of the shortened position?

Well, you know, whenever you talk mechanisms, it’s always highly speculative. So it’s really not not clear what from a mechanistic standpoint. I would just say that from the longitudinal evidence that we have, most of it seems to show that there’s we don’t have a lot of good evidence with length in partials versus full range of motion. I was involved in one of the studies which actually showed some benefit, at least with some some of the sites, the hypertrophy sites. But, you know, look, there are different mechanistically the stretch does we’ve published on this has hypothetical benefits from a mechanistic standpoint through tightening through other mechanism, stretch mediated channels. But there’s other first of all, with we’re still in the very initial stages of understanding mechanisms. So when you try to, you know, really piece this together in itself is just a very difficult task. But I would say that at least hypothetically, there could be a rationale where combining the short position with the lengthened position may have beneficial effects. I think certainly from a strength standpoint, that’s the case.

We do know that in general there is a range of motion specific effect on strength. So you’re going to get generally benefits within about 15 degrees and isometric contraction 15 degrees either side of the of the angle that you’re training at. And that would seem at least to apply to dynamic contractions as well. So if you’re really shortening, I shouldn’t say Sure. If you’re leaving out that the shortened position shortening the shortened position, you may reduce your ability to maximize strength at those angles. Yeah, definitely. And as you say, the studies on our motion leg extensions and catchphrases, those are the really compelling studies. The other studies are really flimsy, I would say. And that’s probably also not exercises that are necessarily representative of every exercise. So I think that’s out of a good perspective. Well, I would also add that. How deep you want to get into this. But they’re all the way. There are some who are claiming that it’s all sarcomere a genesis that. So I do want to make you feel about that argument. Well, I don’t think it’s there’s any basis for it. I’m not saying it may not ultimately play out, but I think that we have virtually zero evidence that that’s the case. The evidence that we have is in muscle thickness or a cross-sectional area. Right. There’s disconnects between cross-sectional area and SARCOMERE.

The genesis of where we’re seeing the increases in cross-section, where you would infer that those were from parallel hypertrophy. I would also say I’m actually collaborating on a paper on this right now, but it’s questionable whether there actually is Sarcomere genesis, whether it actually occurs in resistance training. So we know from the animal models with extreme forms of of either casting a muscle limb or a joint where the muscle is in a shortened length and position. That’s not what happens. Or certainly it’s there’s a disconnect between that and resistance training. Well, what a lot of people are doing is they’re inferring, inferring research based on the farcical lengths and farcical ends do not necessarily equate to SARCOMERE genesis you can have because the fact is is getting or you see an increased fast clip. It could be that there’s just a stretch of the SARCOMERE itself that the SARCOMERE is adapting to a greater length rather than having addition of soccer moves. And I’d also say that I’m somewhat suspect even of the farcical length studies themselves, or at least the modes with which it started, because you have to remember that a lot of fast cycles terminate intramuscularly, that we’re not seeing the actual fast scores going from Origin into insertion that they’re terminating within the farcical. So I think these are all things that need to be passed out. And I think the claim that this is it’s or the the thought that Lynch and Parcells are just sort of mirror Genesis, There’s no basis for that. And in fact, the basis that we have is based on muscle fitness and cross sectional studies, which the inference would be that it would be from in parallel hypertrophy. Exactly. I think that’s a super good point that if you look at the research that measures hypertrophy, that in itself measures the muscles becoming thicker. Correct. And if the hypothesis is that the muscle is actually not becoming thicker, it’s just becoming longer, you would have to have some very questionable mechanism of how that increases in the length. I’ve seen some some model of it. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but it becomes longer and then it becomes kind of bunched up and therefore they are thicker. Right. Right. But yeah, it’s a bit it’s a great question. Exactly.

So I’m not again, dismissing completely dismissing the possibility, but I think it’s a leap to assume that. And, you know, look, if you if you’re looking at muscle volume, I think then you might have a greater if you see that. But that’s not what the studies are looking at. So if we’re looking cross-section and thickness to extrapolate the fact that the Ensor’s hypertrophy would show up as a greater thickness or cross-section or is, in my opinion, is a leap. And speaking of mechanisms of hypertrophy, one of your early super influential papers in 2010 was, I think it was your Ph.D. dissertation on mechanisms of muscle. It’s actually my master’s capstone project. Your master’s? Yeah. So that was, I think, the publication that really put you on the map of a lot of people because you were one of the first to bridge the gap between the research on mechanisms and applying it to program design and really hone in on, okay, what are the things we have to target in our training? And you came up with tension, metabolic stress and model muscle damage as the leading potential candidates of to stimulate muscle hypertrophy. Now, tension has been well established for a very long period of time. Metabolic stress and muscle damage have remained more, more questionable, I would say. Some people have taken this to mean that muscle damage. They essentially equate it with muscle soreness and metabolic stress with the pump. Is that correct? Is the pump the same as metabolic stress? Well, first of all, no, those are that’s kind of a layperson’s take in trying to simplify things like that. But no, and I would say that I just mentioned people again, this is my opinion that people speculate about other mechanisms and they are doing so with very minimal evidence one way or another. So I think we can say with very good confidence that mechanical tension, which I don’t even think a lot of people fully understand what mechanical tension is, the ramifications of it. But that I think could you briefly summarize for for like a lay understanding what is mechanical tension is the force that’s act on a broad term. It’s the forces acting upon a muscle, but it can be met. It can manifest either as as a contraction across manifest as passive stretch. So you can passively stretch the muscle and you’re putting tension on that. So people. My point is, I think a lot of people think of mechanical tension and think about one rep, Max, as your max tension. But again, it goes way beyond that. It’s it’s way beyond it’s certainly that’s a factor, the magnitude. But there’s also the the mode. So whether it’s essentially a isometric concentric and there’s also a time tension integral. So there’s been some interesting research on this and you can’t just look at it. If it was all about tension due to five one rep maxes and you should be cute, it should be maximal hypertrophy and that’s not what happens. So there is a time tension integral where having a certain amount of tension for a given period of time. And if you’re going to ask me what that is, we have no idea.

Like that’s where there’s just so much uncertainty in this information. We do know that when I say no, there is good evidence in my opinion that there is this time tension integral, but where that manifests for maximizing hypertrophy still needs to be determined. In terms of the other mechanisms, I still think we’re far away from understanding them. I I’m less when I wrote that paper, I think I was more I don’t even say confident, but I thought was at that point I think there was more hope for evidence on that, which I don’t think has manifested, but certainly I wouldn’t dismiss that other mechanisms are are involved. I recently collaborated on a review paper on Lactate, and there’s, I think, literature on both sides of the equation showing for and against. There is so many metabolites. So this recent paper showed I think there was several dozen metabolites were produced just with resistance training alone your or your age plus your hydrogen ions. There’s at least a rationale where the acidosis may in some ways enhance the hypertrophy, the anabolic response and muscle damage. Again, I think that’s the jury is still out. I’d say this, that there’s quite good evidence that muscle damage does initiate a satellite cell activation. We know satellite cells are highly involved. Now, does that mean so if you just look at it from that standpoint, you can then conclude that, yeah, you need muscle damage, but it might be redundant. These are things, again, that we don’t know. And one of the big problems with studying mechanisms is that when you try to manipulate one mechanism, you inevitably will manipulate another in a different way. And this makes to tease out the results from this can be very difficult. And in practice it’s also very difficult to because if there’s tension, there’s probably going to be some metabolic stress and there’s also probably going to be some muscle damage. No surprise to tease them out. I was just going to say and it’s questionable if you can have any training stress that does not cause some mild muscle damage after the bout that there’d be some perturbations of the structural integrity of the of the tissue and how that manifests. And again, it perhaps can just be in the extracellular matrix, which the ECM has been shown to have very relevant influence on the antibiotic response. So again, this is still we’re in the Wild West in terms of really understanding this. And I think there’s some people, particularly influencers, who don’t have really don’t have any background in the field and they can make things very. So they want to oversimplify things without really understanding the complexities of these topics and the difficulties in studying them. And from an actionable point of view, do you think soreness and the pump, do you have a lot of bearing on optimal program design? Does it mean much? Is it useful to look at them? So I think soreness there is a correlation between soreness and damage, but it’s certainly not a there are other factors that can get involved. Like I said, the weather, the damages to the actual tissue, the fibers themselves or the extracellular matrix is different types of damage. Even Usually you’re going to get the soreness and some damaged by novel. It comes about through novel prescription. And generally once you’ve become a trained individual, that’s mostly through different exercise selections. So varying exercise selection.

If you keep your exercise selection quite similar, you’re probably not going to get much soreness. Does that mean you’re not growing? No, I don’t think there’s good evidence. And we see in our studies all the time, which again, they’re not in highly they’re not in the bodybuilders, but they’re in train subjects for the most part have been training quite a while and and they grow and we’re doing the same, basically the same program over an eight, ten week period. And they report virtually no soreness. By the end of the day. They get sore at the beginning of the study and then several weeks in they’re not sort of more. And I don’t think all the even though we’re not testing out virtually every week, I don’t think they’re getting all their growth in those first two weeks. what does really matter what what do we know? What are the fundamentals, the absolute essentials? If someone asks you, Hey, Brad, I want to get big. I want big biceps. What do I do? Well, the most important thing is to what the most important thing is. Consistency is to train you to do it over and over again at least several times a week. Training hard is is the ultimate. I think that we the one thing we can conclude from the literature is that training in a fairly close proximity to failure is going to be the requisite factor in terms of making progress over time. And that was what is fairly close. Are we talking for them? I think that’s probably right. I think that’s pushing it, say five or ten, but I think 2 to 3 maybe. Yeah, we don’t have good clarity on this, but we did a meta analysis on this. I’m aware of a study coming out with the last I spoke to the person that seemed to show that within a couple of reps of failure, you’re getting just as good results as going to for failure. So you need to be training. I would consider that close proximity to failure. I think when you start getting below 2 to 3 RR, you’re probably not stimulating the muscle sufficiently at the beginning. So again, if you’re a newbie, yeah, you can be even further away and still get these gains because you’re a newbie and that’s a it’s a new stress. It’s a novel challenge to the muscles.

After that. Volume is a has been shown, I think to be a driver of hypertrophy, an important driver. I think all the variables have certain factor, have certain influences. Part of the issue again, when you’re when you’re looking at variables in terms of studying them, is that when you manipulate one variable, you’re often manipulating another variable. So I mean, it gets to be difficult. Let’s see, you see you want to manipulate rest intervals. So if I’m going to do, one person is going to have a woman at rest of one group is going to have a one minute rest and for the other group is going to have a three minute rest until you’re going to reduce if you’re going to try to keep them in, let’s say a ten hour m, you’re going to have to lighten the load a lot more. So you’re you’re now influencing load. And how much is that a factor? So trying to again tease some of these things out does become difficult in itself. But I think other factors then some training hard I think volume then and then I think the other variables can in some under certain circumstances be important. Like you want to talk about load. I think there’s no topic or no variable that I would say with greater confidence that you can get similar results across a very wide spectrum of loading ranges anywhere between, you know, 3 to 5 reps, up to 30 to 40 reps. If you’re going in close proximity to failure training really hard, you can get very similar whole muscle hypertrophy. However, I do still think there is the possibility I’m less optimistic than I was probably five years ago on this, but I still I still think there is some evidence and some blood flow restriction evidence has been coming out that seems to suggest this as well, that there could be a fiber type specific effect by perhaps doing some training at lighter loads and some training at somewhat heavier load. So again, that would suggest that combining different loading ranges may optimize if your goal is to optimize. Again, I want to emphasize to that this is important for you or me or people who are just looking to maximize every morsel of their genetic potential. For the vast majority of people get in the gym, train hard, even fairly minimalist routines, you’re going to get the majority of your gains. And then with volume, volume is need.

In research, I would 100% agree. One of the bigger drivers of all the training variables supported by number is meta analysis. Now, if you look at the results of individual studies, they vary wildly. And you had a famous infamous study on showing that up to 45 sets and not the only study. There have been multiple studies now. Yeah, that’s why I don’t know. It’s infamous. I mean, if replicated by numerous different independent labs. So yeah, it became very popular and controversial, let me put it that way. In which scenarios do you think which is what you put, for example, a clients. Would you give them 45 sets for a muscle group per week? What are we talking? I’ve never done that. So again, this is, I think, one of the gaps in terms of people’s understanding. So the study that we carried out, how did the total number of sets in the week, weekly sets was 105 hundred in fact. So that’s for all the muscle need, that’s all the muscle groups. That is a real modest you know, it’s certainly not a high volume routine if you factor that out. Let’s say you talk about nine, ten major muscle groups. You have your chest, your back, your shoulders, biceps, triceps, quads, hamstrings, glutes, calves and arms. It’s like tens on that if you want to average that out. If we did it for every muscle group, it would be like $0.10 per muscle group. That’s which is really at the lower end of what the data seemed to show. So. So you think there’s a difference between systemic and local maximum volume? Well, yeah, exactly. So what I certainly I don’t what I don’t think you can do is extrapolate out that you do 45 sets that if we were to give 45 sets for every muscle group that it would have, you know, panned out the same. I would certainly speculate it wouldn’t have I think we would have ended up trashing the individuals. First of all, it would have been impractical. You’d be in the gym 18 hours that the old Arnold routines were pretty close to that. But what I would say to me, I think where you look at some of these studies and I think the instrument is the interesting aspect is they lend credence to the theory that there may be benefit to specialization cycles that you can employ these types of volumes within a11 muscle group, generally perhaps two. But to me, I think you need to look at the total volume of all the sets because you’re going to drive systemic. The systemic response ultimately is going to drive nonfunctional, overreaching. I hope we could agree on that, that it’s not you don’t get localized overtraining like if you do 100 sets for your biceps or whatever and then do nothing, you’re not going to be overtraining per say. So I would hope that we can at least come to some agreement that the overtraining or nonfunctional overreaching is a systemic response. It’s more often seen in in cardiovascular exercise where it’s just a matter of a lot of volume, duration lives.

Yeah. So it’s also incredibly rare, I think the likes of, for example, Milo Parker, maybe not so much Milo that they kind of argue that, well, maybe everyone can in fact go up to much higher volumes than we’ve been considering so far. Well, that’s a different argument, but I don’t think you can extrapolate that. You can’t extrapolate that from the studies. You can make that case and try to do a study and see I would I would disagree with that. But that’s a barthes’s that’s worth testing, I think. But I do think that well, I should also say I do think people are capable of higher volumes and they think but I don’t think I think that to me would be a real stretch to say I think if you’re pushing it from the 20 sets, you know, in total when you’re maybe 180 cents per week, that would factor out. I think that’s a lot of sense. But with that said, I do think that the volume studies that we have would suggest that if you then say, all right, let’s say we’re going to look at 130 sets and $0.40 for all of the major muscle groups, that would be kind of a volume budget that you would look at, you look at and say, all right, here’s the volume that I can apportion between all my muscle groups. How do I want to apportion that? It’s kind of like a you make money, you want to you decide what you’re going to spend your money on. If you want to spend it on a fancy car, you might not be able to buy the fancy house that you want or go out to restaurants all the time. So I think then apportioning it where you’re more well developed, muscle groups get less volume and you’re you then specialize and and I would also say from a frequency standpoint that it to me would be beneficial then to try to space out that volume when you’re doing these quite high volumes.

Let’s say you went up to 30 I think would be real difficult and I’ve never gone up that height of 40 plus. But let’s say you 30 and I have done that with a high level bodybuilder and it worked quite well on a short term basis, but we spread it out over over a nine day period. So every third day he would do ten sets for the given muscle, which was hamstrings, ten sets for his hamstrings, first in the workout and then work to split around that. Yeah, it would make sense. That’s the benefits of high frequencies become more apparent or even only relevant when you are dealing with very high volumes so that you can spread out the session. You have better stimulus, the fatigue ratio is diminished, the marginal extra returns you get off another set of bench presses after you’ve done 20, it’s probably not great. Correct. And do you think there’s also a time component in the response? So it might there might be a limitation of total body volume. There might also be a limitation of how long you can sustain a certain volume for you think that would make sense? Like this would work for eight weeks, but not for eight months. I do. So again, it’s purely speculative on my part, but I think there’s certainly a good logical basis for it. So there’s the. Sure You’re aware of the general adaptation syndrome, which was coined by Hans Cilia, an Austrian physicist, and basically it’s the it’s this kind of a basis used for periodization, but it says that the body undergoes a stress response. And we know that the body is extremely resilient. So we can handle a high amount of stress for relatively short periods of time. So I do think that is another volume strategy that you can start with, let’s say on a total basis, total body basis, a somewhat lower volume, then build up to a more moderate volume and then have a peaking phase where you have a higher volume and then restart that again. We have no, no objective data on this so that this is just the hypothesis in mind that I have used and I think it works well, but we need we need to definitely study that. What about cycling, the volume essentially just for the sake of it in a paralyzed aspect, you think it makes sense, Do you think for bodybuilding purposes there’s a big need to produce the training volume and the question coming in, let’s say you want you want maximum hypertrophy.

Can you just stick with the same volume? Let’s say we find the optimal volume and we just stick with that. You need to cycle it well again, to say need, we don’t know. But my speculation is that there could be a benefit, that it could help to enhance that. If you then basically pushing your body for a short period of time to promote a functional overarching response and then having a devote or whatever, some type of recuperative cycle that goes in there, short cycle could help to enhance the process. Now, I if you’re asking me, is there evidence of that, look, there’s no objective evidence and we have some and I have some anecdotal evidence of that, but that is something that needs to be tested. I’ve used that when working with high level bodybuilders to good effect, and it does not. I’ve never had a time where someone has said they really needed that load where we basically factored it out and they were just trashed. So. let’s switch topic to diet. You had a very influential paper on the optimal meal frequency to build muscle. It’s actually debunking the old idea that you need six meals a day, but positing that you probably want about four for maximum hypertrophy based on the available data at the time, which suggests that there are very sharp returns to every individual meal In terms of muscle protein synthesis, you’ve got a relatively short response and also in particular a capped response like 2040 grams seems to be pretty much where you maximize muscle protein synthesis. And then just putting in more protein doesn’t seem to do a whole lot. Now, we recently had a study that you’re also familiar with.

You posted about it by tonal and it all showing wildly different result compared to some previous studies at face value that even a 100 grams protein can be used effectively to synthesize muscle proteins for up to 12 hours and probably longer. How have your view shifted on the minimum amount of meals someone would need to maximize muscle software atrophy? Yeah. So I think the paper that you referred to that I collaborated on with Alan Aragon, I was more leaning towards three. We talked about four, but I think two, even three would have in my opinion, like if you had breakfast, lunch and dinner that were evenly spaced out, it was more about the spacing and for my maybe have optimized it, but I’m not sure how much difference that would be 3 to 4 if you’re going, let’s say seven in the morning, one in the afternoon and seven at night and then going around. So a couple of things. First of all, excellent study by Zorn. And like you said, it did show that 100 gram bolus of protein was just as anabolic as is exceeded the antibiotic effect of the 25, which again goes against the fact that the body can only utilize a certain amount of protein. A really interesting study. One study never changes my opinion on anything. So I think, number one, we need replication of that. But I mean, it was first of all, you know, it’s an excellent researcher in his lab is an excellent lab from the Netherlands. And but I’ll say this, I’m still not throwing flowing out the idea that it might still be best if your goal is maximal. An ableism that having a portioning it over more meals may may somewhat enhance. But I will say this I think it shifted my thinking to think it probably is less than than what I would have thought. It does kind of line up with some of the intermittent fasting data. Now the intermittent fasting data overall does not show much longitudinal data when we look at actual hypertrophy does not show much of a difference between traditional meals that are spread out over the day. There’s a lot of issues I have with those types of studies.

Trying to get your training study is one thing when you’re trying to get people in doing dietary when they’re not in the gym and trying to have them know how they’re actually eating across a day, I’m skeptical as to the quality, as to the actual accuracy of the data. They end up getting the research into what they can do. But unless you’re locking them up in a metabolic ward, which they’re not, I think you have to take some of that data with some degree of skepticism. But overall, I think it does. I think a couple of things. I think, number one, for the general public, I don’t think there’s any difference at this point. I would well, again, within the context of a single study that I think needs replication, but based on this data and taking it at face value, I think for the average person you want to eat it, say, one meal a day, if they can get 130 or whatever it is, their optimal protein intake and they did count, but they did say that they thought it could go higher than 100. That’s speculative. You have to also remember, I think the one thing that’s important to realize is that this was not a longitude. They didn’t look at muscle growth, so they were looking at muscle protein synthesis. And you you cannot necessarily take what happens in an acute study like this and extrapolate that it would continue to occur over weeks and months at a time. So the body may there may be a refractory effect where ultimately the body would not do as well. So it could have been just a novel response to getting that. But we don’t know. And I think that it bears more study. But really interesting results that I do think at least has shifted the thinking to skepticism on the topic. Yeah. Another big limitation is that it’s indeed an acute study of people consuming a meal after an overnight fast after a workout, and essentially showing that if you’re only meal of what is a 24 hour period, 26 hour periods is that 100 grams protein, your body can use it, right? Correct. That’s that’s different than saying, well, a bodybuilder with multiple meal space across a day, they’re going to get the same results with four as with one. Well, and this is an issue again, when you’re talking about these acute studies is they so there’s a tradeoff between being sterilized to try to take out confounding issues and then the real world effects, ecologically valid effects, which is why, again, you need to study these things on a longitudinal basis and actually look at hypertrophy to get a sense of how people are in the real world. But you’re able to isolate and make sure that the people are doing what they’re supposed to do in the lab. If you’re going to have a study, you say, All right, I want you to eat just one meal a day and have 190 grams of whatever, 160 grams of protein in that meal. And then not eat for the rest of the day. You got college kids or whatever. And nerd, how do you know what they’re going out to McDonalds at night and saying, yeah, I have my just my protein shake in the morning. All So if you had to put a number on it. Advanced Bodybuilder seeking to maximize every ounce of muscle, what would be the minimum meal frequency? Let’s say everything’s optimized spaced out. Are we talking to 3.3 to 4, Right. I think 3 to 4. And again, I think with when you’re talking bodybuilding, it’s really difficult if you’re especially if you’re looking for maximal muscle growth when you want to be in at least a small surplus and you’re somewhat bigger, you know, bigger bodybuilders, let’s say you weigh 90 kilos getting all those calories in. I mean, you’re talking 4000 calories a day or so usually to support your growth phase, try getting that in one or two meals a day. I mean, you could, but it’s gets to be tough. And I generally not the best use of your calories.

Next question is by Alan Aragon Do the crocodiles in the moat around your house where we are now, Do they eat only organic food or do you also feed them conventional? Sometimes I think Alan is projecting here because Alan is the one with the mouth you really have. The next time you see Alan, ask him about that. You can see I do not have a moat. We have a pond with a little fish in there. Yeah, I we have some issues with Alan’s mention and the airport at the heliport. Yes. Yes I would, so we couldn’t get in there but I’ll definitely interview at some point. Let him know. All right. All right. Thank you so much for the interview. Are there any things that you’re currently working on that you think are very interesting and you’re interested to share any details on? Yeah, got a bunch of things. So one of the studies we cut, we just finished, it’s currently in review now. It was a within subject design, so we randomized subjects legs and these are trained individual men and women and we thought we did exercises for the thigh and the calves, the quads and the cats and one leg did was randomized. So the quads we were looking at leg press versus leg extension. So one leg was doing the leg extension, the other was in my press and for the Cavs, one was doing seated and the other was doing straight leg. And we found which actually was pretty mostly confirmed our initial hypothesis. But the leg extension had greater RECTUS for more growth. We looked at the individual growth of the hands, the leg press had greater versus lateral growth. So it basically would show that if you want to maximize hypertrophy, don’t just you can’t just do squats where we didn’t do squats, but we would assume that from a multi joint standpoint, if anything, I think my press I would have thought, would have somewhat greater effect than a squat because of the degrees of freedom that you have. But anyway, you’d need to do both a multi joint and a single joint move to optimize results. And for the Cavs, the medial gas stroke showed much substantially greater growth in the straight leg position. The lateral gastric really was not affected. Too much of it is slightly greater hypertrophy for for the straight leg, but much, much less than the medial gastric. And the Soviets had. We were expecting putting, you know, teasingly greater growth in the seated. It was a little bit, but really nothing that I would say, wow, that you really need to do the seated to target the Silvia. So it’s quite interesting results and it did really give some insights into programing. So that was a good one that should hopefully be published soon. We just should be.

We just received acceptance on our paper looking at Dillard’s and I know a few we did a pre-print on this, but basically now when we did the deal, it was a nine week study. We had one group train for the full nine weeks, the other group did four weeks training, took a week off and then did another four weeks of training. So our Dillard was not the somewhat traditional devotes can be done in multiple ways is no this is the way you have to do the dialog. And what we did was the reason we did it was based on evidence that you can sensitize muscle if you took a short period off, didn’t happen. So there was no sensitization in terms of I perjury, there was actually a slight detriment to strength, which we least preliminarily of attributed to maybe the kind of some of the subjects reported feeling a little off that they felt they had to come back in and they were not because I guess we didn’t do the traditional, let’s say, just a reduction in volume and and Well, but anyway, it was interesting and I think this the one thing that I would take home from that I had previously been in favor of prescribing, I felt that people could not generally lifters were not good enough to ought to regulate the loads and that they didn’t they might not realize that they needed one. It was better to just take one. Every four weeks or so. I’ve shifted my opinion in that I don’t think four weeks that and we train them really hard. I mean, there was 20 sets for the quads, 20 sets for the quads and hams and 20 sets for the calves. So it’s just a lower body, a volitional failure. Right. And every set to volitional failure per week, this is a weekly. And then we had them doing an upper body. Now the one of the caveats, the upper body we had them do on their own. So it’s a two day a week lower body that was supervised. But we we got their training diaries and, you know, they they swirl train subjects. So we don’t know. I’m assuming they did not push quite as hard on their own as that when we pushed them. But we know we pushed them really, really hard and and all of them at the end of the study said, I don’t think I need to do it. I’ll definitely be reviewing the new studies that you publish for sure.

And I wanted to get you on the podcast because I think you are literally one of the best things that has happened to evidence based fitness. The amount of research you put out of a super high quality that is relevant for both practitioners and from the scientific property point of view is probably unparalleled. Currently in fitness. So I want to thank you very much for both the interview and everything you do. My pleasure. And I’m a big fan of yours, as you know, and it’s always great catching up, right?

Brett Schoenfeld Everyone, where can people go if they want to find out more about you? Google me.


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About the author

Menno Henselmans

Formerly a business consultant, I've traded my company car to follow my passion in strength training. I'm now an online physique coach, scientist and international public speaker with the mission to help serious trainees master their physique.

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