> Healthy, recreationally active but untrained young males
Yeah this is why. Anything you do as an untrained person is going to get you newbie gains. It's just really easy to improve initially. Doesn't mean it'll work after the first 6 months
I thought it was already well understood/researched that it's not the weights that matter, but effectively taking your sets to muscular failure. While one might think "I can do 50 reps with low weights" there is practical aspects to this - you don't wand to spend hours at the gym, and doing heavy weights at 5-7 reps is sufficient as long as you are close or at muscular failure.
There are a few issues with taking every set to failure, the most important being that it will substantially increase your risk of injury. It sounds great until you consider compounds like the deadlift that can ruin your back if your form is bad, and by definition, going to failure means your form will be imperfect at some point. There are lots of macho powerlifters out there with permanently ruined spines who will probably die earlier than they would have otherwise, due to mobility degradation.
Particularly as you get older you become more injury prone and your recovery time slows down. This necessitates being cautious about how quickly you increase weight and how often you go to failure.
The better goal to target is increasing volume, where volume is defined as Sets x Reps x Weight. The literature doesn't conclusively establish that any one of these is "more important" than the others for hypertrophy. The only real caveat when you follow this rule is that at a certain extreme of low weight / high reps (like 50 reps) you wouldn't actually be doing resistance training anymore, it'd be cardio.
2 reps in reserve is fine and far less painful, but you need to go to actual failure often enough to know where failure is on each set. I’m nerdy enough to suggest rolling a 20 sided die for each set, and on a 1 take it to failure it’s not that complicated and keeps your predictions honest.
As I understand it taking a set near failure works reasonably anywhere between 5 to 30 reps, but 30 well controlled reps with good form * 3+ sets for each muscle group gets really boring.
Boring is subjective though. For some like me the ideal weight gives endorphins where as too much feels like cortisol. Too light is sort of nothing. So I aim for that "yeah I pushed something" feeling. Which isn't failure.
This is key to recognize. Even when you don’t “feel” it you still go and do your program. But, when you do feel good, you go and push.
Yes guess it depends on your goals. Whether you are doing it for health, vanity, work or competitions will adjust the calculus.
I mean if you're going "until I can't maintain proper form" is there seriously a risk that you're too far from failure to make real progress?
It’s a nuanced topic.
If you actually can’t use proper form that’s already failure of one of the muscles you’re trying to train. However many people resort to improper form well before that point.
Further the risk isn’t just injury, using excessive weights you can’t properly train with can mean failure to provide proper stimulus to a muscle you’re targeting.
What about longer rest periods? For example if I wait 1hr between sets I can do full weight again without dropping down weights with a 2-5min break. In fact I can get multiple more sets in and significantly increase my total volume if I spread a workout over a day (which is easier with WFH). Any thoughts on this? Is there not enough muscle fatigue with this approach?
Hard to stay warmed up that way. What you’re describing is how people tend to get big without the gym (lifting heavy things through the day) but they also tend be pretty active in between (think farm work).
But as long as you’re not going so hard you risk injury, it might be great overall. Could be really good for your mental state.
You might also be interested in reading about Pavel Tsatsouline's "grease the groove".
That's why I always get as close as I can until I feel my form suffer, then stop that set. I've hurt my neck a few times, and it's always been from "oh i can push ONE more..." then suffer for it. It's never been worth 100% optimized gains. A few people I know did the same with deadlifts and paid for it, right now one's awaiting back surgery that's basically cost her all her savings.
Perfect form isnt a thing, its all a matter of what joint positions you are adapted to produce or reduce force in. So the problem with form breakdown isnt that the position you end up in is dangerous (no, rounding your back some is not bad), but that you are not prepared for the stress in that position.
Its unfortunate that people say deadlifting "wrong" causes injury, while the evidence does not support it. People should not be turned off from lifting heavy by such statements.
Your point about the injury risk going up is valid. That being said going to failure and beyond is extremely effective way to train.
As I mentioned in another comment a possibile way to mitigate the risks is to reduce the load and make the exercise harder and increase the time under load by slowing down the exercise.
Also it's a good idea to swap from a higher risk exercise to a safer one to crank out the last reps. For example from squat to leg press.
I think the total volume idea is more flawed than you realise. Pretty much everyone would be able to achieve greater volume, on any exercise, just by decreasing the weight, so your high rep caveat is covering up for quite a lot. This is true mathematically for an Epley style model for example.
> Pretty much everyone would be able to achieve greater volume, on any exercise
I’m not sure this is true and it might be the opposite. Lactic acid will build up with light weight while trying to hit a volume number that will make it hard for people to finish.
Great point. Personally I find lactic acid build up way more limiting for me than muscle fatigue. It's why I gravitated towards power lifting.
>While one might think "I can do 50 reps with low weights"
The caveat is that you need anaerobic training. Low enough weight and it’s cardio, you don’t get giant legs by walking to failure for example.
Has anyone really ever walked to failure on a regular basis? I typically have to stop because of blisters not muscle failure. (The furthest I've done is 12 miles with +10% weight.)
I backpack often (usually 8-13% bodyweight in my pack) and during long summer days I can comfortably push well into the 30 mile per day range if there isn't too much vert to slow my pace down. My feet get sore, brain gets tired, and I run out of daylight well before any sort of muscle failure in my legs. If you aren't used to walking from sunrise to sunset doing so would build muscle, but your time would be better spent on a progressive overload leg routine in a gym.
Yup, I have never gone that far (but my summer hiking is entirely at high elevation with lots of climb) but I have never found anything like a failure point--I wear out because of time (not even daylight--I've made navigation errors that left me out there well past sunset), not muscle failure.
I used to persistent hunt to failure, ended up with bulky calves and tibialis.
Right? Where’s the well written blog post on this I want?
Third. Tell the story!!
Answers inline. Had to break this up into two comments.
All of which I have done is legal, I do not hunt native animals, only introduced species. I apologise for anyone who may find the following details grotesque, the damage that these animals did was often quite nasty.
> Where were you doing this?
Central Queensland, Australia. I had to get permission from farmers and national parks and wildlife if I was to go on their property. I started this when i was around 5 years old , doing walk hunting which is just the same thing but for a full day. I think this prepared me as a child to 'long distance' the tracking. Knowing what tracks looks like, mud and fur on trees, how animals traverse rivers, where to start and stop looking for tracks so that I don't waste time looking at the wrong spots.
I have also done this on properties in Daintree, in far north Queensland (tropical). I found rainforest hunting much harder because finding tracks was a challenge and I had to spend time worrying about crocodiles and snakes and poisonous trees, being prey myself.
I might be doxing myself, however I don't think many of the kids I went to school with end up on HN, but I've been wrong before, if you know who I am, please stfu.
> Were you ever successful?
Regularly, almost every time that I found tracks I was able to catch at least 1-2 animals, largest take down was about 13 animals, I would say less than 10 times over the course of 5 years I came home with nothing. I would hunt almost every other weekend.
I followed the steps taught by my father, who is a australian bushman who seems to know every tree and animal, can see and hear animals hiding in the bush that I can only see after trying to look for 10 minutes, my mother is equally as good in the bush but with less hunting and more capable when it comes to the people side of things.
> How did you do it.
I hunted with my brother and father and sometimes mother.
Basic equipment: - Knife - Arm guard(s) - Water - Dried meat - Backpack - Matches and lighter. - Tourniquet - First aid kit (not always)
I did use a modern knife, I don't know if that is cheating or not, but I feel like strangling or bashing an animal to death was a bit cruel. I have hunted with dogs a few of times, but you can't bring them on national park land so this limits the success.
I sometimes wore leather guards (leather vambrace ? made by my mother) on my arms and ensured i had some kind of leather scarf around my neck because cats get scratchy, dogs get bitey and pigs will try to gore you with tusks. I once used a kickboxer arm guard but it had holes and I was bitten through the holes, so not doing that again.
I did not wear shoes when hunting in the central Queensland, it seemed safe enough and I didn't impale myself too often, feet adapt.
I mostly hunted pigs, dogs (not dingos), large cats, or deer. I have successfully only caught deer less than handful of times.
> like what were your tactics?
This is the 'ideal' situation, it doesn't always work this way but it's what the goal is, one needs to adapt to the changes as they happen.
Tracking phase:
Walk an area that had prints, track the prints, follow the freshest ones. These paths you can use later, because animals will frequently go back to an area they know if you lose them.
Usually the best place to start tracking is around crops and other large animals, pigs and cats will separate the young offspring from the group and kill them for food.
By paying attention, you can get a good idea of their behavior, the animals will repeat successful behavior that gives them food and water.
This usually, but not always means that they will be going for water at dusk and dawn. The first step is denying them that water, wait near the place they get water.
Hunting phase:
GOLDEN RULE: NEVER UNSHEATH THE KNIFE UNTIL YOU ARE CLOSE ENOUGH TO GET THE KILL. (I have had friends come hunting and cut themselves slipping down an embankment with the knife drawn, infuriating!)
SILVER RULE: DRINK WATER, ALWAYS HAVE ENOUGH FRESH WATER SOMEWHERE.
BRONZE RULE: If you get lost, do NOT just start wondering, you idiot, relax, don't panic and listen, drink some water, look for smoke and light.
You (the first) will need to be there before they get there, so this often means being there well before the sun rises. Stay downwind so that the animal doesn't smell you and not come to the water.
Ideally you want to be running them east so they are looking into the rising sun, not the biggest deal but if you have this option, take it. next best option is to have them running 'on the plain' , aka not in trees, this allows you to track them by sight.
If it is a herd animals (aka, everything in my list but cats), a small group will typically test the area first and the full group will join them when they consider it safe.
Check anybody that has done the AT.
You think they hike to failure??
(And you should be looking at the CDT, anyway.)
I don't know. All cyclists I know seem to have massive thighs. And these are amateurs who don't do any kind of strength training, just hours and hours of cycling every week.
There's a difference between the guys who cycle Tour de France vs the ones who go around in the velodrome.
The former group is endurance athletes with skinny legs and the latter group is more focused on maximum power. Similar to marathon runners vs sprinters.
The pro velodrome cyclists do tremendous leg training programs specifically to develop the muscles. It's not the cycling that builds that muscle.
>All cyclists I know seem to have massive thighs.
Yeah uphill cycling or sprints probably go anaerobic at times, you can tell because you need to stop from the muscle burning/refusing to move, rather than going out of breath or general tiredness.
Squat training is a must for cyclists. Heck, there are youtube videos of a German competition (squat as many times as you can with your weight on the bar) with high-level competition (powerlifters, strength athletes, OLY lifters). It was overwhelmingly won by the cyclist.
Well you’re not applying much mechanical tension to the quadriceps when “walking to failure”. This is nowhere near analogous.
The weight does matter. You will never get bigger if you don't add weight to the bar, and you will never get bigger if you only train at 1% of your 1 rep max, no matter the number of reps. Producing a training stimulus requires placing the muscle under sufficient tension (enough weight) enough times to be at or near failure.
Well understood, but not widely known. The myths and superstitions around anything health related are frustratingly durable.
Novelty of stimulus is a huge factor, especially as training continues over years. Failure from a set of 20 is very different than failure from a set of 5, and bodybuilders will periodize their training to cycle through the different flavors of stimulus. I think a big contributor might be neuromuscular adaptation. Cycling through those different intensities over training periods measured in months will make this apparent anecdotally.
> bodybuilders will periodize their training to cycle through the different flavors of stimulus
Some will, many won’t. It’s clearly not necessary.
They mostly cycle for health (injury prevention) and sanity (not to do the same damn thing).
There's also the risk of injury.
At very low reps and high weight, particularly for highly coordinated motions (squats, dips, pull-ups, Pulver press back-extensions), there's a much higher chance for injury due to insufficient support at one or more positions within the entire range of concentric and eccentric efforts by all activated muscles. We all have, at the very least, minor intrinsic asymmetries that need explicit addressing.
There's also intra-set recovery. Roughly (very roughly) speaking, your endo-neuro-muscular system "adapts best" where there is a refractory period for a reset-to-quiescence between exertions.
There is real truth to "muscle memory" and the exclusive way to achieve that (and avoid injury) is through a sufficient amount of well-formed repetitions. The only way to achieve those repetitions is by using a resistance that's sufficiently low.
Asymmetry is normal and you cannot address it (outside of repeatability of movement, aiming for no form degradation during high load).
As long as your movement does not degrade horribly, asymmetry is fine.
Even before strength training, your one arm is dominant, more precise. But this has an effect on your leg as well.
Doing unilateral work will never change that asymmetry. As you get stronger, due to drastically different activations of the nervous system between the sides, you will get slightly different adaptations.
Looking at powerlifters, most of them have visibly different sizes of hip, leg musculature between sides. They even have drastic flexibility differences where one hip goes deeper, or the musculature makes the barbell sit skewed on the back.
To be clear, by "addressing" I did mean altering form and training to lessen the risk of injury due to asymmetry. FWIW, I wear a heal-cup in my right shoe and do additional rotator cuff warm-ups to due minor leg asymmetry and an old injury.
Even Smolov has clear discrepancies in the way his feet are positioned.
What about the old gym adage "training to failure is failing to train" - is there any physiological basis for this, or is it mental, or just a myth?
That’s a Pl/Oly mindset rather than a BB/hypertrophy mindset. Totally valid advice in the right context.
Long story short, failed reps get much more risky and problematic as the weight you’re lifting approaches your 1RM.
Exactly this. When I was in my best shape my deadlift and squat were in/on the way to 2.5-3x my body weight. You don’t want to fail that without a lot of help and safeties.
Note for the uninitiated: That figure is not even impressive or competitive with competition lifters. This is just “guy who put in the time and work” numbers.
Yeah, for sure. It is in line with someone who went to the gym 4-5 times per week and had a coach/trainer. Just hard work and help from an expert.
Yeah I was doing fine for the usual people going to the gym. I’d be last in a competition. I’m neither on steroids or an elite natural athlete. My point isn’t to say I’m weak, only that I’m not unusual for someone who went to the gym 5x per week and had a personal trainer/coach.
Be sure to not take strengthlevel.com too seriously.
It holds true, but with some caveats.
Generally training to failure is completely fine for say a set of tricep extensions. Generally safe.
However, training to failure on compound lifts like a deadlift or benchpress, or involving sensitive muscles like a shoulder press, isn't.
Technique generally suffers at the point of failure. Making a habit of doing thousands of repetitions in the next decade at the point where technique fails, on an exercise that can mess up your back permanently, or your shoulders, is bad advice.
For these exercises it's better to stop 2 reps short of failure. This is more safe. Also it requires moderate recovery getting you back in the gym quicker, meaning you can compound more incremental improvements in a given training period (say 5 years).
Even then, some still cautiously go to failure to keep an understanding of what their failure point really is. You could go for a PR once or twice a month for example and go to failure, with a proper warmup, spotter etc. But purely for hypertrophy there's not really a point, this is more for strength training.
Generally people that say they train to failure mean 2 reps in reserve. Training to absolute failure on all muscles is very rare and generally advised against.
True. Generally, the more isolated the exercise and the smaller the muscle the "safer" it is to train-to-failure at a higher duty-cycle.
Put another way, you can do crunches to failure every single day, but you'll want to keep some reps in the tank for squats and you'll want to plan on at least 12-24 hours of recovery between squat sessions.
not an expert, 2 years of serious lifting, but this is probably a good adage for the average person from my current understanding
training to failure puts you at higher risk of injury and there are diminishing returns as you approach your 1 rep max and/or failure
hypertrophy can happen with more reps or more weight
strength gains are usually just focused on progressive overload
though, of course, hypertrophy will happen either way and contributes to increased strength, but this seems to be further confirmation that you can gain muscle size either way
It's definitely way more nuanced than that. You have to approach exhaustion to get the body to eventually build strength. But you need to carefully time your rests/deloads and handle plateaus with more volume.
i definitely agree it is more nuanced! might not have communicated it well that in the context of untrained people and beginners that these guidelines will work for quite a while and most of the nuance applies much more once you get past the easy beginner gains
for example, if someone new starts with low weight to work on proper technique and form, and adds weight each week they will continue to both get stronger and to gain muscle
i'd imagine the average person who is casually lifting might not even get to this point and could easily spend a couple of years before really hitting a spot where the nuance is more important
Where could I find more information on proper set timing?
I like Mehdi's description over here as a good starting point:
https://stronglifts.com/stronglifts-5x5/intermediate/#rest-p...
Has a paper from 1976 but this seems in line with what I've read elsewhere
basically, 2-3 minutes is probably good for most of your lifting, you could go to 5 minutes if you are doing your heaviest lift of the day
this is also a reasonable way to make sure your workouts aren't going to take 3 hours at a time
some people really mix max this though if they're focusing on super heavy lifts. i remember being at the gym and watching people take 8-10 minutes between sets when they were putting up 400-500lbs on a squat. they also arrived before me and weren't done when i was leaving and, i'm assuming, they were interested in powerlifting competitions
i've actually started looking at reactive training system with mike tuchscherer who has a lot of interesting things to say about training, rest times, etc. been startin to build his stuff on RPE and fatigue percentages in to my training and it has already been super insightful and helpful
https://store.reactivetrainingsystems.com/blogs/default-blog...
This guy has a PhD in exercise science and is a very evidence based dude and breaks things down very nicely.
Honestly from a personal training/lifting coach. When I could spend serious time in the gym there’s a lot to just having someone with expertise for 30 minutes to give perspective. You can do a lot of it over video today as well.
In general YouTube is a good resource. There are a lot of respected coaches that also produce content.
It ends up being personal, but you want enough time to catch your breath and be “ready” to go again, but no more.
I’ve never heard that, it’s usually the opposite- people do strip sets and the like to reach failure
Failure also taxes your nervous system and joints which don’t take as kindly to stimulus as muscles do and take longer to recover (or accumulate damage in case of joints)
Brad Schoenfeld Has been on this body of work for a long time, and he is "Mr. Hypertrophy" in the field. So yes
Training to failure for me personally only brought injury and set back my progress by weeks.
If you were a newbie just getting started.. the ligaments and tendons take much longer to strengthen than the muscle. So the muscles getting stronger will outpace the connective tissue.
Second potential issue is too much training vrt recovery.
A good way to add safety margin when training to failure is to reduce the weights and slow down the exercise and increase the time under load.
For example bench press, do 5s down (eccentric), 5s pause (isometric) and then (optionally) 5s press (concentric). Your weights will go way down because this exercise will be so hard. But the stress on the joints and ligaments will be reduced.
Fifty is excessive but you’re better-served doing 12-20 reps more than fewer, heavier reps if you’re pushing hypertrophy and already well-trained.
That matches what I've been told by various personal trainers. 6-8 reps if focusing on strength, ~12 for all round, and 16-18 for size/endurance. Do three sets, weight should be enough that the last couple of reps on the first set are a bit of a struggle. Subsequent sets just push through as far as you can.
Your trainers clearly never read Starting Strength.
No idea, I certainly haven't. This was decades ago, though, so it's entirely possible that established best practice has changed.
What do you recommend?
This is a common myth that came out of nowhere and has been debunked.
1-5 reps for strength. 5-30 reps for hypertrophy.
This article claims that's false, that 8-12 at higher weight leads to the same result as 20+ at lower weights.
The research is studying young untrained men. Everyone puts on muscle at mach chicken when untrained.
Not being able to do a rep with proper form is the definition of failure.
How about making muscles fail by stretching them under load?
Depending on what you mean by "fail" and "stretching", that sounds a lot like eccentric training [0] (a.k.a. "negatives"). It's effective but notorious for causing delayed onset muscle soreness.
I trained myself to do pull-ups using this method, repeatedly lowering myself in a controlled motion from the top position while I was too weak to actually pull myself up.
There has been a lot of "long length training/partials" information/research in the past couple of years. A very useful information, you should research more (or ask more specific questions).
thats a different thing tho. the term "stretch mediated hypertrophy" is used loosely in many places and i think originally refers to really just hypertrophy caused by the stretch. iirc the lengthened partial gains are not thought to be caused by this mechanism.
You are correct. SMH is used incorrectly in most places, but you explained it well.
But after that people started experimenting and researches started publishing a lot of interesting findings. And found a lot of applicable things that are based on the original SMH research and that is partly/fully explaining new findings.
Like is was found that it having only the partial range of motion, training the one when the muscle is lengthened is clearly better than training in a position of a shortened muscle.
Moreover, some research even found that doing such "lengthened partials" is better that doing the full range of motion.
Therefore, people try to utilize more of the lengthened portion of the movements (especially if it is impossible to work the muscle in both the lengthened and shortened positions, so one has to choose anyway), while some go as far as getting rid of the shortened portion altogether.
akshually theres quite some interesting data on this. it has been shown that stretching alone can indeed produce hypertrophy (in birds and humans), but the required protocols are so intense that you wont want to do them (i think its hours in incredibly uncomfortable positions), so dynamic exercise still wins.
One would also expect it not to do as much for strenght, since adaptations are somewhat specific to the training.
Sounds like a great way to injure yourself, also would only work for eccentric motion
To me it doesn't sound much different than "taking your sets to muscular failure".
i don't understand what this means. the stretch feeling is an involuntary muscle contraction that is happening to resist extension on the opposite side.
> Loads for each set were adjusted to ensure that volitional fatigue was reached within 8–12 and 20–25 repetitions for the HL and LL limbs, respectively
I would argue both categories of the study are about low reps. I don't see how the body would tell the difference between 12 and 25 reps. If you said between 5 and 500, like it has to meaningfully take much longer, otherwise why would doing something so similar have any meaningful difference?
The way I think about it is that nature mostly reacts to order of magnitude changes. 12 to 25 is the same thing.
Like why not make a study to see if its more nutritious to eat dinner in 15 or 20 minutes?
This is spoken like you've never done any reps at all?
There's not much difference in hitting max at 12 and at 25, from anecdotal experience. The study corroborated that as well, even though with small n.
Well of course you change the load, but the stimulus is interpreted the same way by the body. I didn't think the question was at that level.
I feel like I would definitely notice if I went from 12 to 25 reps on any exercise I do. Although typically I max out at 8 before adding more weight.
> I feel like I would definitely notice if I went from 12 to 25 reps on any exercise I do.
To be clear, the implication is that 12 and 25 have different weights so they tire you the same amount. Do you think it would be a very strongly felt difference in that situation? What would the difference feel like?
Well the idea in the earlier comment is that a 2x rep difference isn't very much to be the difference between "low" and "high". It's not disputing that you can get a difference, but saying the study didn't try very hard to probe it.
Of course you would personally notice. But the parent was talking about the effect on muscles. And it has been long estsblished that 5-30 reps (perhaps even highter) will cause the same hypertrophy.
Obviously, for practical reasons the optimal range for each exercise will vary. For squat 5-10 is definitely better than 10-20 let alone 20-30. For DB side raises highter reps would feel better than the lower rep range.
You consciously notice of course, like what kind of argument is that. The point is the stimulus is the same for the body unless you change it by orders of magnitude, the study agrees that this is the same also.
Why is this article showing up on New Year's Day like the flock of newbie gym customers attracted to the gym only to quit 30 days from now? Every year without fail.
Let's ignore this article for a moment.
Overall factors that REALLY matter building muscle: 1. Consistency - Working out each muscle group at least once a week....every week. 2. Diet - Making sure you are consuming enough protein in your diet, approximately 1gram/pound of body weight...or near it or even best you can. Total calories consumed a day should match any online calculator for your age and activity level. 3. Sleep! 4. Sleep! 5. Vary your workout - some weeks high reps low weight and some weeks low reps high weight. Why? Never let your body know what you're doing and shock it as best you can. Always try to exert yourself enough to be sore within 48 hours of a workout.
Now multiply this over a few years.
Stop reading these studies thinking there is some optimal way! It's just hard work over time.
BTW: In winter I bench press 350 pounds or 159KG. I run 10KM or 6.1 miles twice a week and increase it a little bit in summer. I pull my body in two different directions because I love both.
This is a physiology research article published in a physiology journal, not a Tiktoken influencer peddling "get ripped fast" schemes.
In an ironic twist, you then proceed to peddle your own. In a single paragraph you added more contentious "advice" than in the entire article you're dismissing.
> Stop reading these studies thinking there is some optimal way! It's just hard work over time.
"Hard work" and "learning new things" are not mutually exclusive. Stop presuming you know what I think while I'm reading these studies.
To be charitable to both the article and the OP - his advice of “hard work over time” is still good advice.
I think many people tend to get stuck in premature optimization, which can take the fun away and thus you end up quitting. I did that a few times, so it might be a me-thing.
Nowadays I exercise 4x/week without really worrying about a strategy or about optimal protein intake etc.
But then again, nowadays my goal is just to live healthy rather than gain strength.
Going further, you don't even need to count your reps or track how much weight you're lifting. Literally just do any exercise with any weight per muscle group to near failure for 2-5 sets. Rest the muscle groups you targeted the next 1-3 days, and be consistent every week. Bodyweight, free weights, machines, bands, kettlebells, etc. are all fine. That gets you 80-90% of the benefit with no stress.
Still, a "given all else, this optimal thing giving +1% growth" is negligible percentage, when all the other mentioned factors are several orders of magnitude more important.
My point is, simply doing it consistently, even if slightly less optimally, will trivially surpass anything else in the long run and there are no "silver bullets" in training.
The only importance is safety, avoiding injuring oneself.
Also, the article also states this: "RET-induced hypertrophy is mediated to a far greater degree by inherent endogenous biological factors"
>1. Consistency >5. Vary your workout
The muscle "shock" broscience has been disproven many times:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35438660/ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349502442_Does_Vary...
> The muscle "shock" broscience has been disproven many times:
Variety isn't to shock or confuse the body, it's just to make sure you actually hit all the muscles in as many ways possible. Take your average push/pull gym rat to a yoga class or a climbing wall and they'll be more sore the next day than they've ever been before, because they'll activate muscles they didn't even know they had.
Yes, because the stimulus is novel if youve never done yoga before (e.g. a bunch of isometrics). That is not an indication of it being useful exercise for the outcomes of interest.
In many ways those are the same thing up to a point. Although strength is probably more predictive of health than muscle size.
Indeed. It is really just tension x time under tension within a sensible rep range (probably around 5 - 30 reps or so). Menno on Youtube has a bunch of videos on this, the link below being the latest one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmOBmTZARq8
Basically work the muscle harder and get more jacked. It isn't that hard. Full body workouts are also great for this reason: you can hit a muscle more times per week and be fresher when you hit that muscle, so both the tension and time under tension can be higher vs a body part split.
Time under tension is an imperfect measure, it's just less bad than other measures we could use. Sort of like lines of code in software engineering. Given that, saying it's "just TUT" is misleading.
It could turn out to be that the brain is coordinating hypertrophic biochemical cascades in muscles, and TUT is just a fairly reliable method for inducing this.
I was a competitive powerlifter and trained around pro bodybuilders for years, and in my experience, the only commonality between them was the intense all consuming drive to be absolutely monstrous (and they ate a lot). Some would train for 2 hours a day, some would train for 45 minutes 3x a week, some would use high volume in the 50-70% range and others would focus on 70-85%, some were explosive some were slow and steady, really it was all over the map.
Well... I didn't say "time under tension". I said tension x time under tension. It's the integral. So high volume 50-70% can equate out to medium volume 70-85% for hypertrophy, all other factors being equal.
I'd guess that drugs come into the equation if you were training around pro bodybuilders and that unlevels the playing field between each person because of how much they might have been on. And amongst the pro's, you're going to hit those genetic Mentzer-like freaks that can somehow grow on 45min 3x a week.
100% agree that drive and intensity is key, and there is more than one way to get big from a program POV.
The reason for varying your workout I have heard is to avoid injury, not to be stronger. Of course it may turn out that is false too.
This is what I've found after 15 years of working out and athletics. Think of it this way: doing the same thing over and over again is what is proven to lead to workplace injuries. Doing the same thing over and over again in the gym is no different.
I like to do a weight training as the consistent foundation, with a mix of heavy lifts, calisthenics, volume (bodybuilding) training and mobility training. Add in some yoga, rock climbing, biking, soccer. I feel this sort of mix balances movements out which helps with injury prevention and also makes sure you always have something active to do that you enjoy, which is definitely #1.
I’m mostly talking from personal experience. I imagine an actual well powered study on this sort of thing would be hard to do, for similar reasons a lot of fitness / nutrition studies are not great. I agree that a good diverse full body routine would help mitigate injury risk vs a less diverse routine. Obviously diminishing returns but expanding outside of the weight room is IMO also helpful for injury prevention if not quality of life. Pertinent video: https://youtu.be/rb2DPHi39FU
It doesn’t really affect hypertrophy but it matters because imbalances will get you weird injuries and/or mobility restrictions in the long term.
Not true, no one is symmetrical or fully balanced in strength. outside of extreme cases, so called imbalances arent a problem on a population level, at least as far as we know today.
I live in a population where 90% of physical therapists will do placebo manual treatments and susbcribe to unscientific ideas about imbalances and "moving wrong".
All this advice is mostly harmless and not contraindicated, though some of it is incorrect, but point 5 in regards to soreness is harmful advice. Soreness is not a goal and does not indicate anything other than that you did a lot of eccentric lifting to which you were not recently adapted. Soreness means you waited longer than what was necessary to exercise that muscle group again. If you are getting sore beyond the first few workouts, it is a sign that your programming is suboptimal.
Progress is the weight on the bar increasing. Progress is not you being sore. Excess soreness is counterproductive during training, and should only be sought after if you are exercising as a penance for sins instead of training for some goal.
For more information read "Practical Programming for Strength Training".
+1. Point number 5 is probably the worst part of their post.
Beginners should focus on form, consistency, and linear progression of weight. If you can stand the boredom do the exact same program for a year. Probably 2-3 full body workouts that hit each body part twice.
For intermediate+, hitting a body part once a week is suboptimal for most. People who care about results and progression/growth should be progressing from 5 up to 20 hard sets per muscle per week across the span of a few years. (Compounds hit multiple, so it's not necessarily 20 hard times the number of muscles!) What's "hard"? in the 0-2 RIR range, ideally some to failure. Most people do not know what 0RIR is until they actually go to failure on a weight, compute their 1RM and start to use the computed reps/weight load. For many people "0 RIR" is actually 3+ RIR because they stop themselves short. This is why I mostly only trust studies that take people to true failure (either an inability to move the weight any more, or a coach saying the person significantly broke form and must stop)
For advanced, as i understand it, they need to focus on weekly periodization like hitting 3RIR, 2RIR, 1RIR, 0RIR (test new 1RM), Recovery week kind of cycles. Plus more that advanced coaches can teach.
RIR: Reps in reserve.
<https://blog.nasm.org/reps-in-reserve>
0RM: One rep max. This is the (actual or theoretical) maximum weight / resistance which can be moved on a given lift. ExRx has a good calculator as well as several tables for calculating resistance at specified reps:
"approximately 1gram/pound of body weight"
I believe this should be lean mass, not total mass. I think people tried to calibrate this metric since most people don't have scales that can measure composition... but if you're obese, you're going to be consuming more than you need to, which is counter productive if you're obese.
It's actually not, because nothing provides as much satiety as protein.
Every calorie you get from protein reduces your cravings for food significantly more then the equivalent carb and fats.
You still need to get over the initial insulin normalization though from reducing sugars. Nothing reduces that pain, no matter what you try.
I truly believe that satiety is dependent entirely on 1) what you're used to eating and 2) what you expect/culture. Years ago I was watching a video that interviewed a guy who owned an international fast food franchise somewhere in Asia, a burger place, like a McDonald's. He was saying a big difference between America and wherever they were was that they absolutely, positively MUST serve rice because in their culture most people don't find that burgers produce satiety, you need the rice otherwise you're still hungry.
I've never had rice with burgers nor do I have an "Asian eating expectation/culture", but I absolutely do avoid McDonald's and the like because I feel hungry and lethargic shortly after eating there.
However, after a nice home-made burger I won't feel hungry again until the next meal and am full of energy. This isn't a tiny burger, either, I'll usually slap an egg on a 150g patty with some cheese for good measure. Since this is an "I'm too lazy to actually cook" meal, this tends to go with some kind of potatoes. I think the only difference between the two is the quality of the ingredients (added sugar in ketchup = bad, tomatoes are plenty sweet).
I think the difference absolutely comes down to what I eat. I don't put sugar syrup or whatever makes the McDonald's sauces so sweet in my burger, just basic boiled tomato sauce (so that it's thicker and doesn't make a mess). And I think that not only typical fast-food places are guilty of this. I've had similar outcomes after eating in "regular" brasseries around Paris what, on the face of it, wouldn't be considered "fast food".
I think there was a study last year or so that investigated whether protein rich meals actually made people consume less calories, and i think it didnt really, despite the fact that it feels more satiating and the TEF is also higher than for carbs.
So i think for long term weight changes it doesnt really help, at least not via its satiety response. Probably more through displacing other stuff from the diet and improved body composition.
Protein is more satiating "if and only if you are not getting enough protein for optimum body recomposition" which Menno in another video puts at 0.8g per lb of body mass.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHLXank1PPk
Menno's videos are exceptional: science based and backed up by common sense.
Fiber is better for satiety than excessive protein (and has other benefits).
If that were true, then protein powder would be satiating (it's not) and potatoes wouldn't be the most satiating food.
This is just more bro-science chained onto bro-science.
I do two scoops of greek yoghurt and a scoop of protein, and that's like eating ice cream :-P
https://mennohenselmans.com/the-myth-of-1glb-optimal-protein...
Yep it’s the most broscience myth that simply won’t go away.
Practically speaking it doesn't matter. Just use your healthy (men 15-20% fat; women +8%) weight and calculate based on that.
If you are healthy fat percentage, just use your own weight. If you are a bit highter, and can financially and practically afford it, just use your weight as well. Won't hurt and might actually help a bit.
So it is only a concern for severely obese people. If you are 50+kg overweight, you can scale it down a bit.
Similarly, these obese people shouldn't use the "my current diet - 500kcal a day reduction" which is sensible for already lean bodybuilders. They should just use the "my maintenance diet if I were of healthy weight".
Yes! The "lean mass" caveat is oft ignored by bro scientists, and even LLMs have incorporated the error due to training on bro science forums.
I use this as a bit of a canary. If you see somebody making this basic mistake (like the post you're replying to did), you should be highly skeptical of their other claims too.
Why you’d actively argue to ignore a study with interesting outcomes and peddle platitudes that i see on a daily basis about everywhere is one thing. But for it also to be the top comment in this thread is a real pity
I just got back from the gym and it was surprisingly empty. Actually, more empty than normal.
My experience from lifting now for 30+ years and seeing thousands of people lift is it is: 1. Genetics.
Everything else is a distant second or third. This was actually something that was widely understood in 90s bodybuilding magazines. Lifting is mostly a display of genetics. That worked when you could sell magazines of genetic freaks working out. Without the magazines you have to sell all this nonsense like 1 gram per lb of protein. Even though I know the early research was 1 gram per kilo and then Americans just changed that to 1 gram per lb. I mean it is just such obvious nonsense that the optimal amount would happen to be the exact integer amount vs body weight that is easiest to remember, how convenient for people who sell protein lol. duh.
It really is just mostly this, and social media has tricked people into thinking otherwise.
I was looking at some photos of myself about 10 years ago. At the time, I had been hitting the gym hard, consistently, and intelligently. I had a huge bench press, squad, and deadlift, and was lifting 4-5 days a week, and managed every facet of my diet.
Now, I'm older, have kids, don't sleep as much, and definitely don't make it to the gym as much. I might lift twice a week - and don't try very hard or do progressive overload at all - and try to get in 3-4 days of cardio.
And I honestly don't look very different. Muscles are roughly the same size. In clothes, most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
Counter argument, muscle maintenance is a lot easier than muscle growth. Of course you don't look that different now, you have done enough work to significantly change your physique, but done plenty to maintain.
Muscle memory is a real thing.
Gaining it is hard and slow, but once you do it, you can easily maintain it with very low volume (1 time a week with very reduced volume/weights). And even if you don't train for years/decades, you still rapidly get it back once you start again.
That's why one of the best investments in people health should be weight training during the teenage years/20s. Getting muscles and strength is the easiest at that point of life, and you will reap the benefits for the rest of one's life.
You've lost your sense of perspective. You might lift twice a week and try to get in 3-4 days of cardio? You're in the top <1% people on this planet by fitness.
Genetics play a factor, but you can still look pretty good, feel great if you consistently go to the gym, lift heavy weights and eat your calories.
You won't look like Arnold as there are genetic factors at play but people shouldn't be discouraged in thinking they won't be able to achieve a good body.
Another factor, that I think many men forget (I can't speak for women), is their testosterone levels. If you are following everything and have no results I recommend that you have your levels tested. Many men are suffering from Hypogonadism without realizing it. I had this issue for years and when I did my tests, I was at 7.6 nmol/L !
My doctor put me on HCG and it was like night and day.
>social media has tricked people into thinking otherwise
I assume most fitness influencers on social media are on steroids.
Can sort of confirm. I wouldn't say so much "genetics" as "constitution". That is, you're born with a set of attributes, and those can also be affected by circumstances outside of your control. Those come together to determine how you respond to exercise and whether you can exercise consistently at all. Someone with active and athletic parents who was affected by undiagnosed childhood diseases and poorly managed injuries (*cough*) is going to have health and performance problems that keep them out of the gym. Someone who builds muscle very slowly but who can just keep at it for 10, 15 years is going to be jacked.
We also don't account for the role of money in these things. Do you make enough to buy good food, afford a decent gym that you can visit regularly, afford a good doctor who can help you manage issues (such as, ahem, low testosterone)?, afford a low-uncontrolled-stress lifestyle? You're good. It's a lot harder when you get hit by roadblocks and don't have the money to resolve them before you've detrained.
> My experience from lifting now for 30+ years and seeing thousands of people lift is it is: 1. Genetics.
Also in first place: steroids.
The bodybuilding magazines loved to talk about genetics because they didn't want to say the quiet part out loud. Nowadays people are more willing to talk about it.
Steroids, the main excuse of lazy people who are searching for excuses, without realizing that the main problem is their own attitude based on the mistaken pattern of comparing yourself to unreachable elite instead of to ordinary folks and to your former self.
1. Compare only to former yourself (you can't even know your genetic potential until you start training). Did you improve? Yes? Great, continue. No? Change something.
2. Go 2-3 times a week consistently for years, hitting major muscle groups 2-4 times a week.
3. Work as hard as you can (with safe technique). Consistency and effort is the biggest problem why people don't see results. Most people in the commercial gyms are not training hard enough.
4. Progressive overload. Once you get stronger, your weights/reps/sets should also increase.
5. Eat enough protein. Eat calories according to your goal (gaining muscle or losing fat).
6. Reduce stress. Recover. Sleep, sleep, sleep.
It's really quite simple. Tedious, but simple.
Looking at the genetically elite people in a magazine, imagining that self can become just as good if only by using steroids, is beyond dumb.
Imagine thinking that the only thing stopping self of become a new Michael Jordan is lack of access to dynamite attached to feet (in order to jump higher).
The dynamite aspect is not the biggest stupidity, even deciding to compare self to elite athletes is moronic. Use celebrities as inspiration, not as a manual.
Ordinary people thinking that they need steroids to look like celebrities is wild for many reasons. For one, no amount of steroids in the world is going to help an average ordinary person to be like people in magazines, let alone compete against elite (with or without steroids).
spectralista says >",,it is: 1. Genetics."<
I learned this young. Our smallish high school had several exceptional athletes who achieved all-state level in their freshman years. They were great but they had to work for it. In basketball we had the usual mix. But one day Dan showed up:
Dan was short but extremely muscular. He was "recruited" by our all-state level fullback who lived in the same neighborhood (circa 1960's). Dan worked at his dad's gas station and didn't want him playing basketball b/c that was one less worker. but Dan loved basketball and played every chance he got, even though his dad would beat the crap out of him regularly for being away from "work". Coach didn't have to be asked again once he saw Dan play - he was a fricking Bob Cousy on the court. Nobody could lay a hand on him - a truly phenomenal player. Coach talked to Dan's dad, worked out a deal and got permission to try a few games.
Our first game with Dan was incredible: like being a soldier alongside Achilles as he slaughtered Trojans! "Pass the ball to Dansy" and the magic happened!
Dan showed up for two games (Dan won them both) but his dad wouldn't allow more.
So Dan was inherently muscular and strong and very coordinated, far more so than any person I'd ever met, with astonishing reflexes, and also a hell of a basketball player. I asked him if he lifted weights and he said he never did.
I concluded that people are different, sometimes very different. Other than that, maybe regular hellacious beatings can make you an incredible athlete.
What? I mean.. seriously, what? There are people with great genetic potential that lives like couch potatoes. What good is having the potential of you don't use it. Genetics is important, but there are many elements and just dropping this here is, IMO, irresponsible, because some people will read this and go... Ah, I'm out of shape because of genetics, nothing I can do, oh well.
No one claims you can do nothing, exercise has numerous benefits that extend beyond hypertrophy or even strength. i think the point is that you have way less control over the outcome than youd like, because individual responses vary so wildly. You can improve your odds by ticking the usual boxes and finding and following a custom program that works for you, but none of that is going to make as big of a difference than your genetic base.
Total nonsense. You've taken a very specialized observation and presented it as general truth. Can't do that.
Yes, once you get to the level of being able to compete with others, genetic factors will determine who will do better. This is true in any sport.
But that has no bearing on your average person deciding to go to the gym or not. Just about everyone will experience massive benefits from going to the gym regularly. Most don't have the capacity to compete, but that's not what 99% of people care about.
So the #1 factor is not, in fact, genetics, but doing the thing consistently.
As such, this is irresponsible nonsense to be spreading around.
hormones can be tweaked despite genetics
>Every year without fail.
>First published: 31 December 2025
I think the poster means that around this time of year these types of articles appear
Precisely. Also, noted yesterday the sudden appearance of TV commercials for gyms. That'll last about 2 weeks if memory serves....
The fact that you state that muscle soreness is necessary for hypertrophy shows that ignoring studies is bad advice.
Muscle soreness is not necessary for hypertrophy, but often enough (but not always) it is a good measure of the effort/volume/weight/technique (so a proxy for the mechanical tension, the thing that we want, but it hard to measure directly).
Depends, its also an indicator of novelty, and that by itself isnt useful. Once you are used to a movement and training volume, getting sore is difficult unless you ramp up the volume continuosly.
id say, never being sore at all is maybe a sign you dont do enough for optimum results, but frequently being sore means the load is too high. And for health outcomes it probably matters less.
Agree.
I know it's practically de rigeur to jump into the comments and immediately complain about methodology for any study that makes it to the front page, and I want to emphasize I don't distrust their findings, but I would like to see an equivalent study go out longer than 10 weeks. When I've been taking weightlifting seriously I feel like I don't even start to notice hypertrophy until 8-10 weeks. I feel like 6 months is the actual period where results would matter, to me, but I assume "subject compliance" is pretty difficult to get for such a timeframe, if you're really watching dietary intake and ensuring subjects go to failure (which, to its credit, this study did).
This is par for the course with exercise science. It's mostly fake. No blinding, small sample sizes, researchers with agenda, low duration, low funding etc. The good news is that doing almost anything works.
Doing almost anything works better than doing nothing.
How would you blind it? This isn't pharmacy where you can hand out sugar pills.
You're right, it's impossible to blind subjects. Researchers can be blinded by having one limb be the control and the other be the test. This design has become more popular recently and it's definitely a small improvement.
Doing almost anything works ...
... over doing nothing ...
... initially.
Progress, over time, tends to involve both variation in routine and specific methods, progression, programming, modalities, techniques, form, movements, etc.
One somewhat dubious 10 week study of newbies, as many others have commented, doesn't communicate much.
A further complication is that much of the hypertrophic adaptation is systemic, that is, relates to overall body stimulus and other factors (nutrition, rest, genetics, etc.). Among those effects is the net hormonal response (testosterone, HGH, ILG
Heck, there's a well-known phenomenon called cross education* where an untrained limb will see strength / hypertrophy gains when its opposite is trained:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_education>
(Other / similar terms: Cross-Transfer Effect, Inter-Limb Transfer, Motor Cortex, Activation, Contralateral Training Effect).
Body adaptation to resistance training is weird.
If I read this correctly the gist is that it does not matter if you use heavy weights with few reps (common body builder wisdom) or lighter weights with more reps. As long as you always exercise to complete muscle fatigue you'll get the maximum for your genetics (which itself varies a lot).
There's no way this works in practice. A lot of heavy lifting (maximums) is about neurology and mind-body training. You cannot develop the ability to deadlift 405lbs by spending 2 hours using a cable crossover machine every day. Picking up something that weighs 2x more than you do requires your brain to send an extremely strong, synchronized signal. This is something that takes a lot of practice to develop. You have to consistently push your maximum voluntary effort in order to expand this capacity.
Right, but this post is about hypertrophy (big muscles). Not about heavy lifts.
Well one thing can lead into the other over time. If you can lift 405 once, 315 for reps becomes pedestrian and 225 becomes boring. Lifting that much weight will turn you into a monster faster than if you had not pushed for that capacity. I've seen people who can treat a 225lb barbell as if it's unloaded and 100% of them look like dragon ball Z characters.
Body mechanics, leverage, and neuro-muscular connection definitely come into play. I could deadlift 430lbs for reps at my peak, and I while I was no string bean, I also didn't look all that muscular compared to the other lifters at my gym. I have ridiculously long arms relative to my height and relatively shorter legs, which gives me an advantage for deadlift. I had monstrous-looking guys watch me lift and then ask me what stack I was on. They didn't believe me when I said I was natural.
Again, not relevant.
There is a minimum weight you must use to create a training stimulus, but yes, you can increase your 1RM with higher-rep sets (again, to a limit, they can't be sets of 100, the weight is too light).
To increase your 1RM at the most optimal pace, yes you need to specifically train the movement so that you can benefit from improved technique and neurological adaptation. But if I do tricep, pec, and front delt isolation exercises at higher reps, to failure, and see significant hypertrophy in these muscles, my bench press will be stronger, other things constant.
This is very interesting and explain why construction workers can lift 200kg but when they migrate to body building they lost that ability less that a year later.
> heavy weights with few reps (common body builder wisdom)
It is strength training (not body builder) wisdom to use heavy weights with few reps. Hypertrophy (i.e. body builder) programmes usually call for 8-12 reps, which implies relatively low weights.
is "8-12" not "few" for you?
Relatively speaking, no. Strength training (as opposed to hypertrophy) calls for fewer reps, around 5 per set.
Many people advise spending about a year doing more sets of fewer (~5) reps to build strength, and then switch to fewer sets of more reps (8-12) when you want to build muscle mass.
Point being, the idea of doing lighter weights until failure is already kind of there in body building wisdom.
3-5 reps per set for powerlifting training. Competition lifts are a single rep.
No that’s definitely considered to be a moderate rep range. Roughly speaking low is 1-5, mid is 6-12, high is 12+. Above 20 is practically irrelevant.
1-3 is few
Can we replicate the process of reaching muscle fatigue/failure to spur muscle growth without the strength training or anabolic steroids? Think GLP-1RAs but for this specific biological pathway.
https://www.biopharmadive.com/news/lilly-terminate-obesity-t...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/...
Steroid use has been shown to increase muscle in untrained males by around 25-30% I believe, without adding any exercise. That doesn't accomplish too much. If you want any worthwhile results, you will still have to train, although the steroids produce significantly more results for the same investment.
Andre the Giant said he never worked out, he just wrestled. He had some kind of growth hormone disorder, if I recall.
Think about gorillas, who are pretty similar to us - they don't lift weights in the gym, do they?
I don't know much about Andre's strength feats. Was he exceptionally strong? Wrestling definitely involves lifting heavy opponents, especially in Andre's weight class. So, if he was extremely strong, I can see why despite no explicit resistance training, given his wrestling and increased HGH.
Yeah, this whole discussion is based on assuming human genetics. Every animal, without any resistance training, will develop an amount of muscle within some range. This can be massive, like for gorillas. Perhaps someday we will have gene editing that allows us to have the muscle building genes of gorillas, so we can all bench 1,000lbs with no training.
I wonder, do gorillas possess the mechanism for stimulating muscle growth via resistance training? How strong could one be with a dedicated training plan and coach?
Yeah, muscles are mostly about genetics, just like anything else. A mouse won't become a rhino by lifting. Humans are so incredibly genetically homogeneous that it can sometimes be tempting to ignore this, but even between humans the variability is quite large.
Andre the Giant was also not particularly athletic or healthy. He was just a huge guy caused by disruption in the growth hormone at some point in his life and he died of alcoholism.
It’s infuriating that this gets parroted so often. The study you’re referring to measures “fat free mass”. Anabolic steroids acutely increase water and glycogen retention. All that study is showing is that taking steroids increases your body weight due to increased muscle fullness.
You won’t gain any significant amount of muscle tissue from taking steroids without training.
The reason no one has found a better way is because hypertrophy is because it’s well understood and there’s no “better” solution. mTOR is the primary hormone pathway.thy increase the adaptation ceiling by increasing RBC, reducing protein breakdown, etc. Thereby reducing rest needed, so mTOR is heavily unregulated.
This is one of the view places where “if we could we would” is the correct answer. There is so much money in the space of anabolic cheating, the clandestine scientists would’ve already developed it.
My understanding is that anabolic steroid are somehow close to what you're thinking about? It's just that as anything taking a simple shortcut , it comes with unwanted effects
It’s worth noting that muscle is not all the same. If you’re just into bodybuilding then sure, proximity to failure is what matters. For athletics though, there still seems to be a big impact in the rep range you work in.
This. Muscles can be optimized for volume/endurance or power, or some balance between them. Taking legs as an example: Powerlifters obviously go for pure power, whereas runners need a bit of power but mostly endurance, whereas cyclists need more power than runners but more endurance than powerlifters.
All of these benefit from weight training, but depending on the sport, the programming will be very different.
I think I know where they're coming from as I used to have a similar wrong model. I thought strength = more muscle cells and endurance = just better heart/lungs to deliver oxygen and clear waste like CO2 and lactic acid.
Turns out muscle fibers mostly grow bigger rather than more numerous, and there are different fiber types (slow-twitch vs fast-twitch) that adapt based on how you train. So for the same muscle, an Ironman runner and a guy doing heavy low-rep squats will develop different fiber characteristics: you can't fully max out both.
I'm simplifying, but learning this changed a lot about how I understand exercise at the biological level.
Since I'm nitpicking let me point out that powerlifters train for strength. Power is an altogether different (though related to a degree) muscular/neurological characteristic. Power would be more closely related to olympic weightlifters or sprinters/shot-putters etc. Endurance could also be broken into alactic/lactic/aerobic capacity which makes a huge difference at the margins where athletic excellence is made. Nits aside your description is 90% there.
It is actually common bodybuilder wisdom to go for the lighter version.
Stereotyping, weightlifters who go for max numbers do 1 set of a million pounds and rest three hours between exercises, while bodybuilders do thirty exercises a day for 8 series of 15 reps each.
Unless I’m missing something, this has already been known, though the hypertrophic benefits start to reduce beyond 30 reps.
Not sure why it gets attention here. The "finding" is the long standing assumption as it is, absolutely nothing new discovered here. It could be notable if it was of some particularly high quality, but here it is 20 untrained individuals doing some dubious exercise regime for 10 weeks and finding out that on average one dubious exercise pattern wasn't particularly better than the other, and overall exercising seemed to be good for all of them, although inter-personal coefficient of variation is up to 28.3%… Like, really? That was the study that impressed 211 upvoters?
These journals keep publishing such studies, because there is nothing better to publish in this branch of, uhm, "science", and I would even argue it's not a bad thing, because something is better than nothing, and it's basically impossible today to do more impressive research in this field (because testing humans is far costlier and logistically more complicated than writing equations and running simulations on your PC). But it's funny that it gets someone's attention.
Indeed. "Science-based" lifting become quite popular in the recent years, but the actual science behind it is quite loose with a lot of methodologically weak studies, small samples etc.
This seems like an overly cynical take. Is there no value in empirically confirming an assumption? Especially in the exercise world where other long held assumptions ended up being bro-science nonsense?
> although inter-personal coefficient of variation is up to 28.3%
Why does that matter? Isn't the entire point of this study's design to eliminate the impact of the inherent variability between test subjects?
I just do light weight nowadays with my strength training. It’s easier mentally. Rather than push myself to go higher on bench, squat, and deadlift, I stick to 1 plate for bench and squat and 2 plates for deadlift. Every single time. Instead of increasing load, I increase rep amount and focus on my form. Honestly, I still find myself sore after most workouts and the simplicity is nice. I’m 25 for reference.
You won't see any progress if you won't push yourself. It shapes your mentality, and running away from work is what will keep you at the same place. Soreness is not a sign of progression most of the time. Bump up the weights, don't run away.
I find the goal of perpetual progress in resistance training strange. Yet it seems to be almost universal. If you are not lifting more today than you lifted yesterday, you are a failure. Gains, gains, gains. It is rather obvious that there are genetic limits on strength and size. Everyone is somewhere on their own spectrum of potential. Someone who doesn’t resistance train at all is likely near the bottom of their potential. Someone who works out 5 days a week, never misses leg day, eats enough protein (1g per kg in Europe, 1g per lb in the US) is likely near the top of their potential. Living in higher and higher ranges of your potential requires exponentially more ongoing effort, dedication/discipline/sacrifice, blood/sweat/tears/pain. Say my absolute maximum genetic potential in exercise X is to lift 100kg. Say I never do exercise X, so my current maximum is 40k. With some effort, like training 3 days a week for 4 months, I might get this to 60kg. Perhaps I could maintain that gain for decades by continuing to train 2 days a week. Or, I could keep pushing and maybe I could get it to 80kg in a few years. With an absolute all out effort, applying all the knowledge of the latest studies and perfect discipline, I could temporarily push it into the high 90s. Everybody can do what they want to do, but it seems to me that seeking the minimum effective dose of resistance training to look and feel good, and be strong enough to do what you like or need to do, is a reasonable approach. No need to push for more gains after that.
They're increasing reps and therefore total load. That's still a form of progression ('pushing yourself'). This style will slightly favor hypertrophy gains over strength gains.
At 40 I recently made this switch in style as well. The weight was getting so high that my anxiety was causing a mental aversion to working out altogether. Consistency is really 95% of exercise so I think this is a reasonable trade-off.
That said, I understand where you are coming from. There's something to be said about facing the fear of the weight head on. I've already done that in my younger years though. I'd much rather avoid injury and get 80% of the benefits.
You shouldn't be stressed of what's in front of you. Training also trains you for that other than muscle/power building. If you don't compete, you have no reason to be anxious. You should maybe dig into what's causing you that anxiety, if it's "I worry I won't make this weight", remind yourself that nothing will happen if you do, and if you do, it's part of the progression. I get this anxiousness also, but I always remind myself that.
I think that what you do in the gym will reflect on yourself.
I appreciate the response but I'm not sure I can agree with 'nothing will happen...'
When I have 275lbs on my back I'm very anxious that any lapse in focus could cause major injury to my knees, back, etc.
I got to 425 max on deadlift. My ego isn’t tied to being stronger, just strong enough to be healthy and fit. I think it’s unhealthy to view this as “running away” and honestly I look good and by putting less focus on it, I have more focus for other things in life I can optimize.
But you are putting focus on it, just doing it less efficiently (imo and what other people say as well). Why not use the same time and use it more efficiently.
"I will go to the gym, but will not even break sweat, will be fakingly training, just jumping from one machine to another, without plan, execution or dedication" - is the MO of a lot of people in a commercial gym. They are there, but they are definitely running away from hardness. Don't know how well this applies to you.
In life, you need to run to keep the same place. In order to advance, one has to sprint, to put effort. Purposefully slacking and easing often means that practically you are regressing, being left behind.
I understand if you were strong enough, put effort, got the results, and want to scale training down in order to maintain and to concentrate on other more important things. But:
1. You are not that strong. You can definitely build a better strength/muscle foundation that will last the rest of your life. The health retirement fund. It is the easiest to do now, while you are still young. You can do much better.
2. But even if you think that the current level is enough and are only interested in maintaining, the way you do it is clearly suboptimal. Both gaining and maintaining would be easier, faster and more efficient with highter weights and fewer reps. You can also save time because you can do fewer sets in order to get the same maintenance effect. Alternatively, you can keep the same sets/time, but actually progress (or do it faster) instead of staying at the same place. Same cost, bigger psyout. This is the result of doing the right things the right way, instead of giving up and doing something that feels nicer.
Cheers!
You do what's good for you, but in my opinion, what you suggested isn't the best progression scheme.
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I do minimal weight training but in climbing the current consensus is that too many reps increases likely hood of developing an overuse injuries in the tendons. Probably depends on the exercises (climbing is hard on the elbows), but maybe keep an eye for tendonitis
Good call out. I’m pretty lazy so I keep the rep ranges low. And not too many sets. Generally I start with a compound lift to hit everything in the muscle group I’m working then move onto accessory lifts to target more granularly. I think I’m lazy enough my risk of injury is low.
I don't intend to convince you, but for onlookers:
1. As a young male, 1 plate bench/squat and 2 plate deadlift is extremely weak. Please strive higher than this. Anyone can achieve this in 6 months of intelligent training max. Many men start this strong untrained. The majority of young men can squat 1 plate untrained.
1. Soreness is not an indication of anything other than that you did a lot of eccentric loading. It doesn't correlate to progress. It is also a sign that your programming is not intelligent; you generally should not be sore after the first few workouts ever again.
1. Yes it is easier mentally, in the sense that doing easy things is easy. This is not a benefit, because doing hard things results in mental strength as much as physical.
My max used to be 425 on deadlift back when I was taking it more seriously. Doing 5x8 of 225 on deadlift is enough to be strong to be healthy and active. You can only push yourself on a limited number of things in life so some things are just good enough.
Sure, and 400 deadlift is decent intermediate for the average man, but let me suggest a counterpoint. Strength is the greatest indication of health among the elderly. A strong old man doesn't break his hip when he falls, he doesn't fall at all actually because strength is balance, and he doesn't have trouble getting off the toilet, and he doesn't need a cane. These are serious QOL issues.
It's a mindset issue. If you're 25 and have already declined from 425 to 225 deadlift, that doesn't bode well for your decline into old age. Strength slowly tapers off once you stop lifting, as most eventually do. You want to be as strong as possible while entering middle age so that you can be a strong old man. Strength is like a retirement account in this sense, and in this sense you are advocating for working minimum wage throughout life because it's easier. For a young man, whose training is most efficacious of all age groups, I recommend getting as strong as possible, at least 400 deadlift and symmetrical equivalent in other lifts (but most can achieve 500), and then maintaining that strength as long as possible, not cutting it in half immediately. If you can lift 350 at age 55 you're pretty much guaranteed to never break your hip or have a bad fall; that entire class of osteo related issues vanishes.
The average male 20-29 in USA is 85KG. A deadlift of barely over 2x bodyweight is not remarkable at all! The average young man does not train and when they do they train stupidly; this has no bearing on the fact that they could achieve a 400 deadlift within a few years of intelligent training.
Most gyms are not serious. You'll find no one lifting heavy at Planet Fitness, and you'll find that a 350 deadlift is one of the weakest in a dirty powerlifting gym. Among people who actually do the activity, it's not impressive. The thing is you just have to actually do the activity. My metrics are only "absurd" if you think I'm saying that the average man has the willpower and interest to achieve this; of course they don't; the average man is obese and lazy. My claim is that the average man has the physical capacity to achieve this.
Please don't misconstrue my claim of what is possible for what is likely. The average man can easily learn to cook well, read a few books per year, get their chess elo into the top 30%, run a 5k, learn to draw basic portraits, deadlift 400 pounds, and many other things that the average man will never do because they don't want to train for it.
If I said the average man could practice drawing for a few years and end up drawing basic portraits, or study chess or cooking for a few years and end up better than almost anyone they know, this is mostly uncontroversial. When I say the same for strength training, it seems to anger a lot of people for some reason. My experiences tell me that these are comparable levels of goals.
To the original point, seriously, my 102lb wife squats more than 1 plate and she's been training for 4 months.
What about Time Under Tension?
"Equalization of Training Protocols by Time Under Tension Determines the Magnitude of Changes in Strength and Muscular Hypertrophy" (2022) https://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/fulltext/2022/07000/equal... :
> Abstract: [...] In conclusion, training protocols with the same TUT promote similar strength gains and muscle hypertrophy. Moreover, considering that the protocols used different numbers of repetitions, the results indicate that training volumes cannot be considered separately from TUT when evaluating neuromuscular adaptations.
So could I just do one super slow (some minutes) squat per week at like 60% and get all the benefits still?
I’m not at all a biology expert, but if the squat is actually pushing you somewhat close to your limit (it’s not super easy), you’ll definitely get stronger. Case in point: isometric exercises. Also: folks who do planks for a few weeks/months.
The group that did lower reps with higher weight, had the better one rep max at the end of the study, but they didn’t measure if the higher rep group had greater endurance. Which seems a bit odd, considering their conclusion is both groups grew the same amount of muscle which fine but if the muscle is adapted for something different in each group, you would want to capture that.
> both groups grew the same amount of muscle which fine but
The focus was on hypertrophy, so 1RM or endurance doesn't matter in their case
Age: 22+-3 AND with that weight to ffbm ratio not only untrained, but at least slightly (I’m being generous here) overweight.
With these pre-requisites it almost doesn’t matter what kind of physical activity one does- the muscles will grow anyway. It’s when you are older and/or accustomed to some kind of physical training, that you really noticeably benefit from resistance training.
And still, that ‘almost’ part does a lot of the heavy lifting here. I don’t believe it’s really possible for a couch potato without any experience to correctly assess their 1RM. People with no experience with pain and effort typically can’t push themselves hard enough, so the entire exercise turns to a half-cardio anyway.
And gauging 1 rep max in a bicep curl is especially difficult (saying nothing of a risk of injury).
I understand the complexity and difficulty of researching the subject, but this entire article is no good and is hardly applicable to most of the population IMO
Are you perhaps reading a personal advice in a paper, disliking the advice, and then finding that due to the experimental design, it doesn't work on you. And then, rather than concluding the paper didn't intend to inform your personal routine, instead conclude that the paper was badly designed? Or to put it differently. Have you considered how many people live in a way you would never consider close to acceptable?
Because your points make sense but it feels like you are arguing against a bit of a strawman, or arguing for a mostly ideal situation rather than current reality?
For overweight and understrength people, is it not very valuable to know that they don't need the extra steps of resistance training to see real improvement in strength and fitness?
This doesn’t look like a particularly charitable interpretation of my comment, although my interpretation of the article isn’t either, so it’s only fair.
And no, I am not looking for a personal fitness advice in scientific research anymore (too late for that), but am rather trying to see its applicability to others, as per my understanding of those others around me.
Most people in the developed world aren’t 22-year old males. A significant part of the population is comprised of the elderly or middle-aged, a lot of those people have pre-existing injuries due to under- (too sedentary) and over-use (blue collar work, youth sports). Approaching physical fitness in those groups has its its own set of requirements and limitations, and I believe that in many cases resistance training is a more safe and efficient choice.
Not saying that the youth and children are unimportant, but typically they are already well covered by the organized sports and pt classes in schools and universities, unlike the adults.
My opinion is that the study is both badly designed (likely in a way to make it easier to implement) and is not applicable to the majority of the population.
> I understand the complexity and difficulty of researching the subject, but this entire article is no good and is hardly applicable to most of the population IMO
Most of the population is untrained, and in many countries a majority is overweight.
I don't think your concern about "correctly assessing their 1RM" matters either - if anything that means the loads are even lower relative to actual 1RM, and their subjects were still getting results.
It may not tell us much about outcomes at the top end, but more knowledge of what advice to give "most people" is important, and if they can get good results at low percentages of 1RM, it seems a lot more likely you'll get people to try.
That is exactly the issue with incorrectly gauging 1rm- if it’s too low, than the supposed ‘resistance’ training with 70-80% of 1rm isn’t actually that.
Is it fair to compare A to B, when the A in question isn’t exactly an A, but rather something closer to B?
It is fairly irrelevant when you're dealing with a group of people who are all using the same means of determining their 1RM.
The point isn't the precise effect on a given percentage of 1RM, but the relative difference between groups.
They have to start video recording the workouts. Even veterans in this academic field sometimes design workouts that just can’t be done to failure if you’re actually going to failure over 6-12 weeks.
Even 1 workout sometimes has so many sets prescribed where I cant imagine all of them were actual failure
>It’s when you are older and/or accustomed to some kind of physical training, that you really noticeably benefit from resistance training.
Do you have any sources for that? I'm asking because that is a bold statement given the (almost non-) existing literature on pro athlete hypertophy. Especially since athletes in almost every sport don't even care about hypertrophy - unless you talk about pro bodybuilding. And there you have tons of pharmacological interventions, so it's not really easy to paint a picture either. I don't know a single good study performed on a significant set of tested natural bodybuilders regarding hypertrophy.
Studies like this are also aimed at couch potatoes, because that is the normal population, so the results will be applicable to most people, which in turn is important when you want to get funding for your research. In that sense it also doesn't matter that these people will not have reached their full neuromuscular connection compared to actual weightlifters, because most people haven't either. So the results are still relevant. Usually when scientists sell this kind of research to grant departments, they try to provide a benefit to geriatric or otherwise medically impaired people, so that existing treatments may be improved. Studying muscle building itself just for the sake of it in gymbros is not a good strategy unless you want to spend your own money. And this stuff quickly gets very expensive if you want to do it right.
What feels counter-intuitive here is that the variable most people obsess over, load, turns out to matter far less than who you are. Intuitively we expect optimization to work like engineering. Change the input, change the output. Lift heavier, grow more muscle.
I wouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. This is a single study on untrained adult males.
They use a control of the other half of a person, but that is known to have flaws. Even if you train only your left side, your right will get stronger too.
Wait for other studies to find similar effects, especially in trained individuals
As a natty bodybuilder for over 30 years for anyone aspiring towards fitness and starting at the gym my most important advice is
"Put the phone away and bust some ass"
I see way too many people (the great majority) completely sabotage their training by putting the weights down when it starts to get hard and get on their phone.
When the weights get hard is when the real set begins. If you don't do the hard reps you deny yourself the stimulus required for adapting to overcome the stress, I.e the growth.
This is why having a buddy/spotter is so important. On every lift my friend spotted me an extra 3-4 reps that I would not be able to do if I went just myself and kept going until the last rep was 95% him and 5% me. First guy to automate spotting is an instant billionaire.
Depending on the exercise you can also do this without a spotter.
Either do cheat reps and focus on the negative (works with small exercise such as bicep curls) or drop set or super set.
My personal fav is the cheat and negative and I do it a lot for example in cable pulldown. Use a bit of bodyweight to pull it down and then 5s negative.
If you're looking at safety, a power cage with the bars set will do the trick. Or swap out BB for DB for presses.
If you're looking at forced reps, you can do drop sets or add bands (assist rather than resist) to continue lifting for extra reps. For quicker drop sets, use some light plates (2.5# or 5#) which you can rapidly strip from the bar and continue a few reps.
For DB moves you can self-assist in some lifts using your other arm, or have lighter DBs to hand for additional reps.
I am afraid of trying to lift to failure. never once been in a gym, or trained for anything except marksmanship, but have alwayse been physical, with a lot of what I call "dirty lifts" in the course of getting things done,pushing 60 now. I do notice that after a stretch of realy hard work, and taking a day or two to rest and EAT, I will bulk, but nothing is by the numbers, except the day I took over the old blacksmith shop and we took the gentlmans anvil down, and lifted mine up, each of us grabing one end with one hand, my anvil weighs 460lbs, he was in his 80's and I was in my late 20's. I muscle everything around, steel, wood, round bales,but follow the philosophy of "just because you can, dosn't mean you should" which I believe is especialy true for realy big guys, because while you can build huge muscle, your cartlige and coligen is no better than an size small office guy with that florecent tan, where I have seen in the same frame, a big guy pushing 40, not moving good anymore, and foccused dweeb gettin his lunch zipps right through, doesn't even see the hulk. my point, if I have one, is that nothing counts, unless you can style it
For beginner lifters that might be true initially, but eventually weight will matter.
This is consistent with my experience.
I've had great results, and every workout I do consists of an exercise I can do at least 20 reps of for the first set, sometimes going up to 50. I can still gain strength by increasing the weight slowly week by week but maintaining a high level of reps. I don't think it takes longer at the gym -- just do 2 sets per motion instead of the more common 3-5. The breaks in between sets at the gym are the real time sink. Plus, you get lean muscle with high endurance, and virtually no injuries. Last tip: put your phone/music in a locker while you're at the gym if you want to both improve your workout, save time, and practice being more present.
The quality of evidence in exercise training is generally pretty terrible. 10 week study with untrained college students tells you very little about what happens over a lifetime of lifting. Personally I’ve found that switching rep range on an exercise is a great way to break through plateaus.
Ultimately you’re engaged in an n=1 study and general advice is of limited use. You need to learn what tools are available, how your body reacts to different stimuli, what keeps you consistent etc. Everything is context dependent, trying to find some universally “best” way is a wild goose chase.
Has this not been common knowledge for a long time? The argument for high load/low reps has always been that it a) saves time and b) will increase your strength (vs. muscle size) more. Both of which are important factors, especially if you are doing strength training not for cosmetic but health reasons. The number of 8-12 reps to muscle failure has been promoted because a too low number of reps (too high load) seems not to induce as much hypertrophy and is bad for your joints, etc..
Yep, lots of different ways to get jacked. That means if you couldn't care less about strength, you can do pretty much any decent exercise that targets the muscle(s) you want to grow in a very wide rep range. Most people want a combination of both size and strength, so you can just do some sets of 5-10 if you aren't already. If you want to have a strong deadlift or squat or whatever, you should train that movement. Not as complicated as fitness social media people want to make it seem: train for what you want.
I don't think this is true. I've been following a fairly standard progression on several of the standard exercises over the last year and half. I've seen steady progression on leg press, which is a strongly stabilized and isolated exercise. I saw the same rate of initial progression on squats but then it dropped off and I haven't really seen any progression for six months.
The issue is stability. I have to provide the stability for squats. The machine gives me stability for leg press. I won't get the stability I need for further progression, at least not at an optimal rate, just from squatting. I need to do complementary exercises.
Stability is not that important or else research would show machines give better results than free weights, and they don't.
It is vital if you are no longer in your twenties and care about health into old age more than simply results. Lack of stability will cause injury very quickly.
You cannot be strong without being big and you cannot be big without being strong.
Of course there are levels to this, variations within “weight classes”… but in general this holds true.
Also consistency trumps any program.
Wrong.
Getting more muscles leads to more strength (because the strength of the muscle is determined by the cross-sectional area).
But you can definitely be natually strong without having a lot of muscle.
And you can definitely get much stronger without getting much muscle.
In other words, any person with big pecs and triceps will be strong in bench (even without training). But strong bencher will not necessarily have big pecs/triceps to show.
That's the whole premise behind the popularity of the Anatoly gym pranks.
False.
Strength as measured by mostly powerlifting is impacted by a huge factor by the body mechanics, i.e the length of the various body parts, secondarily by tendon attachments and then finally by variations in tissues
You start off by confidently stating wallaBBB's statement is false.
But nothing you said invalidates what they said.
Thats the variation within the classes. And there will always be outliers, but even if you look at bodybuilders in 100+ kg, they are not what you’d call weak even if they don’t optimize for strength.
Relative to their size a lot of them are weak.
Again despite size it's the body mechanics that determine most the physical lifting capability of any individual in any particular lift.
Having only read the abstract... the conclusion makes sense to me. I've operated under the assumption that volume is the most important factor for muscle growth as long as you're lifting something like 1/3 or more of your 1RM. So 12 reps with higher load or 25 reps with lower load are going to be similar volumes (or at least similar enough given the other factors that the two protocols give the same outcome).
I thought hypertrophic focused routines were their own subset. Starting with a high rep, like 20, decreasing something like 2/week while increasing the weight. You technically can increase load, but in my experience it isn't strictly necessary. 10-12 weeks down to 1-2 reps then 3-4 off to reset. This isn't a strength routine, simply for size relative to lift.
The study assigned different training regimes to different limbs of the same person. If you think their measured effects do not reflect your own experience, I'd be interested in your fitness status and your result when you do the same. Otherwise it sounds a little like you are disputing the study because it showed something different to your belief.
I only scanned to article but did not see mention of the pre-trial condition of the subjects. Were they very new to resistance training? Or had they been doing it on a regular basis for a number of years? Because when you start out, doing just about anything is going to increase muscle mass
Untrained individuals. Typically University students.
It does matter. It's the only objective way to measure progress. A study doesn't negate that.
I don't think so? If last week I could do 50 reps @ 5 lbs, and this week I can do 50 at 6 lbs (or 60 at 5lbs), then that's measurable objective progress
isnt the 1RM the measure of progress?
If that's what you're training for, sure. If you just want to be strong, you can achieve that and avoid the highest injury risk by sticking with 5 reps or so.
Even if true, high rep is impractical, otherwise we'd see people doing body weight exercises only reach high levels of bodybuilding.
Even around 1900, it didn't matter if you were a genetic freak, you needed a barbell to win competitions.
You can do the goofiest workout you can possibly imagine as a young untrained male and put on muscle. You will do so at roughly max rate regardless of what you do as long as it’s vaguely productive. This isn’t useful research ngl.
Firas Zahabi on focusing on consistency over intensity in training.
> Twenty healthy young male participants completed thrice-weekly resistance exercise sessions for 10 weeks.
Not sure how much can be concluded from this.
I think the downvoters need to read up on underpowered statistics.
Summary: train to failure. Duh.
Ok this isn't a topic for HN so there is a lot of pseudo-intellectual nonsense in thread. Anyone into bodybuilding understands the following: You have two different types of muscle fibres, fast-twitch fibres and slow-twitch fibres. The fibres that get big from weight lifting are your fast-twitch fibres. Fast-twitch fibres only get get into use when you are near muscle failure (when your slow-twitch fibres aren't enough anymore to take on the load of the weight) or in explosive movement. The goal is to overload your fast-twitch fibres by lifting to near-failure as much as possible so you signal to your body it needs bigger fibres. So you want a good amount of reps and sets in. As for the specific exercise you do, this is generally an art-form. You can do pull-ups or you can do lat-pulls for your back. More importantly you want to overload on the exercise. This can come in the form of increasing weight, intensity or reps than you did in your last session after recovery. You can always change your exercise if you plateau. Beyond that it is just rest, diet (especially protein) and genetics (yes this is a big one). I have continuously gained muscle mass over the past 18 months. Consistency may be more important than anything else.
If you are just training really heavy and doing <8 reps all you are doing is training your strength which is more neurological than it is about muscle mass.
But the number 1 issue I see is that people seem to think exercise is the rocky montage where you just do a bunch of things and get tired or do 100 push ups every day. A lot of pop culture references to exercise look like this. Real world exercise unless you just want to burn calories is much more focused than that but it is also not complicated.
Lift heavy things, lightly. Lift light things, heavily.
So resistance is futile?
When < 1 ohm
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tldr appears to be that if you work to fatigue it doesn't matter if you fatigue out with high weights vs low weights
I agree with this, but for those newbies be careful at what you define as "failure".
I've f.up my MCL by not listening to my body and I have the stability of a typical 85 year old while I try and 'heal'. It takes longer as you get older (you're probably not 20 year old) and stupid stuff can really take you out.
There is certainly a difference in a slow twitch vs fast twitch muscle adaptation though
When training for muscle size atleast, but not strength. Presumably there are increased injury risks overall when lifting heavy (based on a brief search).
fairly new to lifting myself (2+ years taking it seriously) but this thing seems to jive with what I've read across different areas
bodybuilders can build muscle size with high reps and lower weight or lower reps and high weight as long as they do it close to failure with only a few reps in reserve (rir)
powerlifters, or those focusing on strength, usually go for high weight and lower reps because they might be training for a competition that focuses on 1 rep max and/or the body can really only handle so many reps when pushing it at 80-90% of 1 rep max
neither is inherently better but a matter of what goals you have in mind, plus, hypertrophy contributes to overall strength, too
I.e.
No pain, no gain.
If it's _painful_ you are doing it wrong
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bx3gkHJehRCYZAF3r/pain-is-no...
If it's not painfull you are not exerting enough effort at least that's the case in the gym. People who are refreshed and more energetic after going to the gym are the same people who won't improve beyond intermediate levels. The ones who let go of the any set at the first feelings of unease and never take a set close to failure.
It's actually fascinating how an ancient proverb could line up with modern science so perfectly.
It certainly does not need to be painful. I think most people will make a distinction between the burn of acidosis, or what you call unease, and actual pain indicating damage is occurring.
But yes, if you never train close to failure you will not grow, not past beginner gains, unless you take steroids.
I understand you, I just think there is value in using a separate adjective, to avoid beginners thinking pain caused by damage to tissue is normal and you need to push through it to get gains.
This is really terrible advice that just discourages people.
You absolutely can get significant improvements without (much) pain. DOMS during the initial stages is going to be the most uncomfortable part. Once you're past it, you don't need to push yourself to a breaking point, just to the point of mild exhaustion.
This will provide you enough resistance to gain muscle mass and improve the bone density to healthy levels.
Yeah, "no pain no gain" is probably the worst advice I've ever received. It encourages sedentary people to go hard for a week and then quit, which is the exact opposite of what works: starting with consistent easy sessions and adding progressive overload.
Dynomight has a good blog post about this[0], but applied to running rather than resistance training.
[0] https://dynomight.net/2021/01/25/how-to-run-without-all-the-...
I think propensity for Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS) must be genetic or something because I've never been able to get "past it," even after many years.
Have you tried avoiding eccentric exercises? The ones that require you to stretch? Try to do more of the "push-style" exercises.
Also, I highly recommend getting a physiotherapy-educated trainer for at least several sessions. They know _exactly_ how to make people hurt after exercises :)
Wait, why are we figuring this out only now?
Figuring what out? This low-quality study didn't find anything useful nor novel.
A paper doesn't necessarily mean the information is new, but that there is now some/more evidence to support it.
True, but this kind of information is so basic it almost fits in the "world is round" category.
I know this is not in the spirit of HN, but I feel it's my ethical duty to say something about this topic because of the impact the topic has on the psychology of young men. This study is misleading or more likely just false. I do not know what the flaw in their methodology is, but I know it is false, regardless of how many peers may have reviewed it. Please do not start lifting 20-25RM to gain hypertrophy, because it will not work well, and you will not achieve your goals.
No one in the history of lifting has ever achieved an impressive physique via light weights. It simply does not work. The literature, to the extent it exists, is wrong on this and on many other related topics. The traditional view, taken in general, is correct: lift big to get big. Strongmen and powerlifters are very hypertrophied below their fat. They do 3-5RMs. Bodybuilders may do up to 12RMs. No one successful, even moderately, does or ever has done 25RMs because that weight is too low to drive adaptation in the stress-recovery-adaptation cycle.
Brad Schoenfeld felt the same way, so he did the study on trained participants, and made the same finding: https://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/fulltext/2015/10000/Effec...
Oh that's interesting
> it is possible that the type I fibers of subjects were underdeveloped in comparison with the type II fibers as a result of training methodologies. The type I fibers therefore may have had a greater potential for growth compared with the type II fibers
Maybe a mix of both types of training would be best then?
That is a very underpowered study, only 18 participants
Is there another study with more than 18 participants and results that conflict with this study here?
You don't need to disprove an underpowered study. You can just default to ignoring it. Especially in a field as notorious for replication issues as fitness and nutrition.
Perhaps there's some unmeasured influence, but this study was looking only at the difference between growth within subjects vs between subjects. If the subjects were all "newbies", then that doesn't explain the results.
They're essentially saying that individual genetics explain the majority of the variation seen as a response to muscle stimulus in their test subjects, not the mass used, because the variation within the test cohorts was greater than the variation between them. You can argue that, if they didn't test experienced lifters the results might be different in that population, but you can't dismiss the results on those grounds.
> not the mass used.
Completely anecdotal, but when I was 18, in highschool, I trained in the gym in my hometown, supervised with a trainer, 12 reps per muscle group, very modest gains.
I move to university, start reading a fitness forum where people were saying do max 6 reps if you want big gains.
I also started supplementing with whey protein, and within 3 months the gains were spectacular, everybody noticed, I felt on fire, best time of my life, I miss so much how great I felt in my own body.
I've seen other colleagues and how they trained -- I can say there was 100% correlation that those people who were not training hard also did not have big gains. People who had enough breath left in them to chat in the gym simply did not gain as much as people I saw as training hard.
Also for me, the 6 reps to exhaustion felt completely different then 12 reps (again, to complete exhaustion) -- immediately after the training it felt amazing to be alive, the world became a comfortable place, my anxiety completely vanished, and in the night and morning after an intense training (especially the legs and back) the erections and libido boost were out of this world, something I never felt with the 12 reps regimen.
What do you consider gains? Consider that this paper looked specifically at hypertrophy (size), not strength. While they correlate, training for one or the other can be very different..
"Traditionally" the rep ranges recommended for hypertrophy has typically been significantly higher than the ranges recommended for strength, but the number of sets recommended is often also significantly higher, often translating to significantly higher total volume.
> I've seen other colleagues and how they trained -- I can say there was 100% correlation that those people who were not training hard also did not have big gains. People who had enough breath left in them to chat in the gym simply did not gain as much as people I saw as training hard.
Well, yes, but training with lower weights and higher rep ranges does not automatically translate to "not training hard".
Having gone through a period of really high rep training, including for a short period doing 1000 squats per day as an experiment, mostly bodyweight, that was far harder exercise than when I 1RM'd 200kg. But the effects are different.
I much prefer Stronglifts and Madcow but because I favour strength over size, and it's far more time efficient, not because you can't also get results with more, lower-weight reps.
It is unreasonable to talk about newbies. They grow from anything. I mean, you put newbies on the stationary bike and their pullups increase (real study!).
So we should talk about at least intermed. trainees.
And in those, the correlation does not go both ways. Getting more muscles does increase the strength, but getting stronger does not necessarily increase muscle (technique, neurological adaptations, etc).
Simply speaking, guys with big pecs and triceps are going to be strong in bench (even if they don't train it), but strong benchers (especially if they mostly train in 1-3 reps range, outside of hypertrophy 5-30) don't necessarily have big pecs/triceps.
So yeah, the parent was correct in asking what the previous parent mean by having great gains. Because getting stronger does not necessarily mean that your muscles also grew substantionally. Also, if you gained weight also doesn't mean the muscle gain. Due to leverages, the bench and squat results increase even if all you gained was pure fat.
Search for 'anatoly gym prank' on YouTube.
I'm not a fitness nerd by any means, but it's worth mentioning that your bodys ability to get oxygen to you muscle can reportedly easily become your bottleneck if you're training too once-sidedly or use performance enhancing drugs/steroids.
So the bulkier person could theoretically perform better, but doesn't in practice because their body isn't able to actually utilize the muscle effectively.
That's why farmers often outperform lifters outside of the exact niche the lifter trained
I did not at all suggest anything else. Both will happen, but not too the same extent. It doesn't take very much lifting before differences in training regime can be apparent.
It’s definitely different, but somewhat at the margins. There is a reason people call it “farmer strength” where a moderately in shape looking guy can outlift a body builder looking bro.
I know I’ve definitely seen the difference training with a personal trainer telling her I want to train for aesthetics vs strength and vice versa.
There is a strong correlation but it’s definitely not 1.
Anecdotally as someone who strength trained on a recreational basis the last 20 years (and run a marathon just to see if I could), nothing beats heavy lifting.
A Strong lifts 5x5 program build around squat, deadlifts, bench and shoulder press can always make me feel pumped for the day!
Same. Finding heavy lifting changed my life if I’m honest. The strength gains, body comp, and how I felt was amazing.
The podcast is where the real meat is, not all of it is on youtube. Best way to innoculate you against bullshit.
There really isn't much of a difference between doing 6 reps vs 12 reps, what matters is going to failure which I think may end up being harder when doing 12 reps because people maybe don't realize how much they have left in the tank.
Thanks for the recommendation!
> People who had enough breath left in them to chat in the gym simply did not gain as much as people I saw as training hard.
IDK. When I powerlifted the goal was to move the weight. I've almost passed out from heavy deadlifts, but was rarely out of breath. I also almost never chat in the gym because it's my meditative place, not because I couldn't chat :)
I think what OP is specifically refering to is the intensity level that varies among individuals. I suspect that oft times when people train with a low weight/high rep scheme, they accidenrly let their intensity levels slip. I suspect that for most people, especially newer lifters, doing a high weight/low rep scheme makes keeping the workout for intense because it is easier to focus on being intense for a short time. Just a thought....
Why did you stop? It seems you did, but since it made you feel excellent, it seems strange to “choose to stop”.
It’s not an innocent question: Gains and feeling extremely well and confident and serotonin-boosted are only useful if it can be sustained in life. The two alternatives are: 1. It pumps you but tires you very fast and you get fat down the line, and your overall life is ~obese (seems to happen to way more people than one could assume), 2. Only the change produces this feeling, and change cannot be sustained forever.
And this is incredible motivation for me. I’m in my 40ies, and have been unsuccessful with girls. Of course being in your 20ies helped because that’s when good stories start, and at 40 women are already taken, but I find it a decent explanation of the times I was successful or not and it’s worth trying again. I was very fit at 30 but never muscular, just a guy with 8 hours or random sports per week, so like you before 18. I still do 3-5 hours of sports per week, I should redirect that towards gains.
Strength Training also feels intoxicating for me. I am in my 20s.
I also feel the need to control this entity of excitement with the rest of my life, my studies, career and romance.
The activation energy or stimulus required for hypertrophy in untrained individuals is so low that it’s hard to differentiate the results. Studies like this absolutely need to be done in trained individuals if you want reliable data.
Most people are untrained so this is useful reliable data for most people. However for those who actually care about results: they are trained, or soon will be andthis data doesn't apply.
exactly. when you're new, virtually any type of lifting you do is going to create sufficient stimulus to trigger maximum muscle growth, because you're going from 0 to 1. unfortunately, since the only people that researchers can usually convince to participate in their studies are untrained, this has led to an enormous amount of junk studies where they try to extrapolate the results to people who are not untrained.
This paper isn’t saying that it doesn’t matter what program you do, it’s saying that other variables, not directly related to the method of weight training, matter more. It also assumes that you can extrapolate data from one individual training each limb with a different program to if that individual performs either program on both limbs. Maybe there are carryover affects to the lower load limb that you get from training heavier with the higher load limb that you wouldn’t from training both at a lower intensity.
It's a bad study that can be disproven by anyone with any experience in strength training. The sample size is tiny. This is not good science by any measure.
Except that the paper did not compare different training methods. The used the same method since it has been long established that training to failure anywhere in the 5-30 reps (perhaps even more, the upper limit has not been established yet) gets the same results from the hypertrophy point of view.
So basically the study's results are "there are individual differences in how people respond to training". Wow, such news, so research, much insight. /s
Therefore study itself is dumb and the misleading title makes it even worse.
Also, it's more difficult to reach true failure with lower load, people tend to stop too early.
False,
failing to lift is not the same as lifting until failure.
Consider, if I load up the bench press to 200kg I won't get a single rep. If I try to rep it I'll fail but I'm not lifting until failure.
If I load it up to smaller weight lets say 100kg and crank out rep after rep I'll get much closer to "lifting until failure."
When I reach the end, the last rep is a rep I won't make. But I'm still not at a point where I can't do no more, just the weight is too big, so I must reduce the weight and go again. When I do this I get even closer to "lifting until failure".
It's like integration, the smaller the infinitesimal the closer to the true value you get when you sum up (integrate) all the parts.
While technically true getting very close to failure is only useful if you don't need optimal results and lack the time to do more volume. The damage by going to failure will make high volumes maintained over time impossible.
Ideally you would leave 1-2 possible reps. I think it's important to train to failure to know your body and learn to gauge your reps to failure but other than that and very little time per week to train it's eventually counterproductive.
And if training with lower weights you tend to end very far from failure if just following a program without knowing what you are doing.
> Volume itself is meaningless. The only thing that matters is the intensity of the workout
Not true at all, its well documented that volume is the biggest predictor of progress. there is obviously an intensity floor, and when its not feasible logistically to stack on more volume, intensity is your other knob. But to say volume doesnt matter is an odd claim, maybe i misunderstand.
> you want the maximum intensity with minimum volume to have less wear and tear
Not a helpful way of thinking about exercise induced adaptations. unless you are doing pro athlete amounts of training, would ignore this completely.
For a couple years I did a super low weight time under tension routine.
Almost no hypertrophy, but I was able to step into a BJJ gym and roll for hours, I was still ready to go long after everyone else had gassed out.
The adage that you get good at what you train at is true.
Train to lift a ton of weight 3 times and you aren't going to be able to compete with the calisthenics peeps who can rep out 100 pullups and literally dance mid air.
Doing dumbbell raises to failure with 5repmax will bring more pain, discomfort and wear/tear than doing the same exercise with 20repmax.
From my recollection, this is a quite common issue with studies in this topic area.
Yeah. When was powerlifting seriously I spent months with my deadlift stuck on 525 pounds. I would measure progress by how many times I could just get the weight off the floor, then how far off the floor, etc… The newbie gains were long gone.
this wasn't a study of absolute growth (sure - newbie gains), but rather the difference between high and low load programming within individuals.
> the difference between high and low load programming within [newbies]
Fixed that.
As the comment you replied to noted, newbie gains are remarkably sensitive to any stimulation, and insensitive to the type of stimulation. Because going from zero to any resistance training is a massive stimulus increase, on a long-term under stimulated system.
The study does confirm that. The data it produces is useful.
What this study doesn't do, is help newbies (or anyone) choose the most effective practices to adopt. Because 10 weeks is way too short to identify best practices for any sustained program.
"HN dismisses study without understanding it"
I think you missed the point. The point was that doing lots of lighter lifts or doing a few heavy lifts, you get the same improvement. While it's possible this wouldn't be true for non-newbies, it seems unlikely.
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Yeah, that's pretty much it. The counterarguments don't address what AstroBen noted.: newbies get high gains from any kind of stimulus. The paper has simply confirmed the common knowledge teached in universities.
The problem is, after you are no longer a newbie you may train for years with very little progress, and that's when you need to start differenting stimulus, being strategic about it - otherwise you may stay stuck.
And unfortunately the paper doesn't address or refute that, while it's coverage (or even the title of this hackernews) may suggest otherwise.
this is peak gym bro science