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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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
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 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
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.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 69.0 ms ] threadhttps://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8139349/
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.
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.
The focus was on hypertrophy, so 1RM or endurance doesn't matter in their case
No pain, no gain.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bx3gkHJehRCYZAF3r/pain-is-no...
Not sure how much can be concluded from this.
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
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.
"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.
https://youtu.be/_fbCcWyYthQ?si=gf39MLiqid9e6Szu
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.
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
"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.