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?
> 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.
>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.
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
> 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
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.
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.
> Consider that this paper looked specifically at hypertrophy (size), not strength.
I'm not sure where this idea came from that people do one or the other. Except for the advanced lifter, both will happen from either program. Show me a person who is really big and they are likely pretty strong as well (see Ronnie Coleman). Same with the other direction.
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!
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
Let’s be realistic, everyone goes through periods when they just don’t want to work out.
So optimal in terms of personal preference is defiantly worth considering alongside optimal in terms of results, but optimal in terms of returns on effort defiantly has a place at some point in our lives.
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.
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.
Anecdotally, my gym had a "challenge" some times back where the goal was to achieve the max total volume in one set without pause.
I tried various combos of weight* reps, and in the end the optimum was somewhere in the middle because no matter how light the weight there was a limit for me at about ~150 reps.
In my case, the curve would be: total volume increases quickly initially at you go from max weight/1 rep to something like 20/30 reps, then something of a plateau as things equalise, then it goes down again as you reach the max reps threshold.
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.
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.
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.
Where were you doing this? Were you ever successful? How did you do it, like what were your tactics? So many questions!
I’ve never heard about modern people doing serious persistence hunting, except for a stunt that I read about years ago. I think it was organized by like Outside or some running publication that got pro marathoners to try and they failed because they didn’t know anything about hunting
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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?
> 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?
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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’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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
Even 1 workout sometimes has so many sets prescribed where I cant imagine all of them were actual failure
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.
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.
"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.
I'm not sure where this idea came from that people do one or the other. Except for the advanced lifter, both will happen from either program. Show me a person who is really big and they are likely pretty strong as well (see Ronnie Coleman). Same with the other direction.
A Strong lifts 5x5 program build around squat, deadlifts, bench and shoulder press can always make me feel pumped for the day!
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.
Guys, the study has been refuted by AstroBen. No need to read it.
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.
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.
So optimal in terms of personal preference is defiantly worth considering alongside optimal in terms of results, but optimal in terms of returns on effort defiantly has a place at some point in our lives.
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.
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.
I tried various combos of weight* reps, and in the end the optimum was somewhere in the middle because no matter how light the weight there was a limit for me at about ~150 reps.
In my case, the curve would be: total volume increases quickly initially at you go from max weight/1 rep to something like 20/30 reps, then something of a plateau as things equalise, then it goes down again as you reach the max reps threshold.
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.
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.
I’ve never heard about modern people doing serious persistence hunting, except for a stunt that I read about years ago. I think it was organized by like Outside or some running publication that got pro marathoners to try and they failed because they didn’t know anything about hunting
(And you should be looking at the CDT, anyway.)
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.
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.
Some will, many won’t. It’s clearly not necessary.
Long story short, failed reps get much more risky and problematic as the weight you’re lifting approaches your 1RM.
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.
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.
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.
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
In general YouTube is a good resource. There are a lot of respected coaches that also produce content.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eccentric_training
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
https://www.biopharmadive.com/news/lilly-terminate-obesity-t...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/...
Think about gorillas, who are pretty similar to us - they don't lift weights in the gym, do they?
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.
All of these benefit from weight training, but depending on the sport, the programming will be very different.
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.
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.
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.
https://youtu.be/_fbCcWyYthQ?si=gf39MLiqid9e6Szu
"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.
The focus was on hypertrophy, so 1RM or endurance doesn't matter in their case
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.
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.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8139349/
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
Not sure how much can be concluded from this.
No pain, no gain.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bx3gkHJehRCYZAF3r/pain-is-no...
It's actually fascinating how an ancient proverb could line up with modern science so perfectly.
But yes, if you never train close to failure you will not grow, not past beginner gains, unless you take steroids.
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.
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-...