001 Training frequency - why the diminishing returns of volume makes higher frequencies better

Welcome to hypertrophy pass and present. This is our first episode or a new podcast. And in this podcast, what we aim to do is take the example of prehistoric era bodybuilding and examine it with modern muscle physiology. And I think if we do this, we can actually learn a lot about how these all time is trained and what they knew about how the body worked and how muscle worked and how hypertrophy worked and I actually think we're going to learn some lessons that we can actually employ today. So I'm joined with my co-host Chris Beasley. Chris, how are you today? I'm doing very well, thanks, Ted. And I'm excited to jump into our first episode. This is a topic we've both discussed a fair bit in the past. And something we both realized over time is a really interesting thing to talk about. Because as we look at bodybuilding and we look at high-end culture and hypertrophy and hypertrophy methods, what we see is that as time went on and as anabolic to introduce, we see training methods change completely. And I think we would both say they changed in a way that kind of moved away from muscle physiology. Like it made less sense over time. So what we want to do with this podcast is actually go back in time and examine what were these guys doing before anabolic? When there was only one variable that influenced hypertrophy and that was really what you did in the gym before what you were injecting outside the gym influenced it. And what I think you guys might notice is sometimes when we think about prehistoric neurobodybuilding, I don't know if you guys ever think about it, but when I think about it, I kind of flump it all together. And what I think is really interesting is we actually see, or we can see over time, how these guys developed and what they learned, what they realized was working, wasn't working and how these plans actually shifted. What people don't realize is when bodybuilding started, the first bodybuilding show is 1901. So between 1901 and arguably about 1954, that's when anabolic to introduce and bodybuilding give a take. We have 50 plus years of these natural bodybuilders learning what was really working. And if we look at that timeline, we can actually learn how do they evolve, how do they take these techniques and refine them to become more and more effective. So that's the plan for this podcast. And then we're going to talk about how it fits in perfect with model youth created as far as how hypertrophy works. Chris, is anything you want to start with or should I jump into one of these old timer plans? Yeah, I think that was perfect and I really like, and I'm not going to steal your thunder at all, but I really like the way that you've, because you obviously send me the first routine that you're planning to talk about today for our first episode and I'm really, it's really cool that you've chosen one of the earlier ones, you know, I think, and that fits perfectly with what you were just saying about showing people how these things are going to change over time. So if we can bring one of these routines to people regularly on this podcast and we can talk about it and show a development over time, I think that's going to be a really cool project to do so and I'm really excited about this. As you say, I think we both think that the physiology of hypertrophy fits perfectly with the way that these guys were training. So yeah, I think this is going to be a really exciting point. So let's, let's do it. Let's jump straight into the first one. A lot of these training programs, they were called courses back in the day. And so they would often be like mail out courses, people would sign up, they could get these courses delivered to the letter box. And one of the first or the first kind of main published course that was like widely produced was by a company called Milo Barbell Company. Now, just a quick history 101, we've got, you might hear me talk about the silver era of bodybuilding. That's generally what we're referring to when you talk about the pretty steroid era bodybuilding. We do have before that the bronze era. Now, that is more like circus, strong man type events, Eugene Sandau is the key figure of that time. And that sort of existed, I would say probably up until about 1900. Once we have the first bodybuilding show, 1901, we start to get this shift occurring and we kind of have this like middle ground where it's not quite the silver era people that people will know. That'll be people like Reg Park, Steve Reeves, these big names, yeah, Mr Universe winners. We don't get that until about 1940, but we kind of have the foundation that's leading into that. So what we're going to talk about today is a plan that was produced by company called Milo Barbell Company. And they were the first company selling barbells. And though the first company that put out a course like this, Eugene Sandau had put out his own course, which is a little bit different, maybe we'll cover it another time. But Milo Barbell Company, this was about 1911 give a take where they put out this course or you find it a little bit over the next decade or so. And what I find so interesting about this is this is very much the beginning of this kind of bodybuilding idea. Up until this point, it had been, you know, its circus events, strong man feats. And now they started to develop this idea of bodybuilding. And so we're 10 years post having a bodybuilding show. And what we can actually see when we look at this program at a moment is there's some body parts that are maybe getting a little bit more emphasis, some body parts that are a little bit less emphasis. And I'm going to do a bit of a spoiler here and tell you why because this is very much in this middle ground of Bronze to Silver. And the Bronze Europe, like I said, dominated people like Eugene Sandau, that was actually modeled off like great statues, like God statues. And what Sandau would actually do is travel to these places, take measurements of these statues, come back and try to emulate them. And part of that sort of aesthetic was no chest. So what we've seen these really early programs that are based off that kind of idea or that kind of physique is the tends to be a lot less chest development. So that's something we're going to see here. But I'm just going to talk through what the program actually entails. And then we might pass over to you, Chris, and you can unpack it a little bit more about what you see about it. So as a foundation, what we do is we've got what the course can see is obvious 12 different exercises. Now each exercise is done once and you move through the entire 12 exercises. And then that's it. So there's no sets at this point in time sets didn't exist. So if you look at any of these old books, you might ask like, oh, they're not specifying sets. What's going on? The idea sets didn't even exist. They would tell you how many times you would do that exercise, how many repetitions, and that's it. So we've got 12 exercises, one set of each. And what we begin with is a barbell curl. Now, you've got to remember that these guys are using one barbell, okay? So what they're doing is having to make exercises work around the available equipment. They don't have machines. They don't have cables. They've got a barbell, a kettlebell. That's usually it. And they don't have squat cages or racks or stands or anything like that. So we've got a barbell curl, one set, five to 10 repetitions. That's a really interesting point. I hadn't realized how much of a difference that observation makes. But now, after you've said that, and I'm not going to spoil the contents of this workout just yet, because that's your area, but I'm looking at the list of exercises. And if you look, you can see that they're probably adding weight as they go through sequence of exercises. So they start with the barbell curl, which is going to have very little weight on the bar. And then as they move forward into the next exercises, those exercises will involve more weight on the bar. So it's like, you've got the one barbell and you start with it and you're like, okay, I'll do an easy exercise. I'm sorry, not an easy exercise. I'll do an exercise that requires a little weight. And then I'll add some more weight and do an exercise that's going to require a little bit more weight. And then I'll do another exercise that's going to require a bit more weight. And you can kind of see them, and it's not perfect by any means, but it's just a really interesting observation that you just enlightened me that I didn't think about that when I looked at this program when you sent it to me, but that absolutely does make sense, because some of the really big exercises, the squat variations are towards the end, whereas you've got this easy kind of easy. It keeps you in use. It's not easy. It's just, it requires a lot less weight on the bar to do it. So that's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. At a lot of the time, these programs are actually done in groups of people as well. So a lot of the later ones, some while ago, bought out by York, Bible company, and York, they talk a lot of their programs about, because this is the time of war, right? So often people would be in the military, perhaps doing these programs together. So they would design it in a way that they could do the whole program with one barbell between multiple people. So the sequencing was heavily influenced by what they had available. So a barbell curl, one set, five to ten repetitions, you're going to a seated overhead press after that. Now, this is before benches even existed. So the seated overhead was done sitting on the floor, which I think you would call that a Z press. I think that's what you call it today. And so that was a set of five to ten repetitions as well. And then you're going to a bent over barbell row, an overhand, a pronated grip, one set of five to ten. And you're going to a standing behind the neck press, shoulder press, one set of five to ten. That exercised behind the neck, all silver, your body bill is war by that. That was an absolute favorite. Anyway, they then move into a barbell pullover. So flat, you're on the floor, again, there's no bench involved. And this actually went five to 20 repetitions. Sometimes they use wider ranges, and I assume it's because of limited exercise, a limited weight availability. And then they move into a weighted crunch with a holding, they're actually using a barbell for the weighted crunch. And that was one set of five to ten. And then I straddle squat. Now this, I found quite amusing. So in the course, in fact, I'm actually going to show you, Chris, listeners, you're not going to be able to see this, but I'm going to explain it to you as well. The exercise description actually has an image of them doing a squat, holding a barbell standing on kitchen dining chairs. So again, no boxes, no benches, nothing like that existed, literally standing on wooden dining chairs. I think that position actually, in some places, called a deficit level. Yes. Yes. Good point. And so they did one sort of 10 to 20. Now I found that quite amusing as well because I don't think I'd want to do any fewer repetitions in 10 standing on wooden dining chairs. Anyway, so instead of 10 to 20 of that, then they went into a barbell vertical shrug. A set of 20 to 40, which I'm sure we'll talk about in a moment, and then a hills elevated barbell squat. Now back in the day, they called this a deep knee band. So they weren't even, it wasn't even called a squat at this point. And the hills elevated for a long time, they did all these deep knee bands with their hills elevated. Now they didn't actually place anything under the heels at this point. So they literally, like, I guess, lift it up on their toes and squat it away with their feet very close together of, yeah, a set of 12 to 24. And then they're moving to a one arm dumbbell overhead press. Chris, I don't know if you know the name for this lift, it was, it's, it's not like a strict, like military style overhead press. It's more like a, almost like a momentum type one where you kind of lean into the weight and then as you extend, you kind of lean into the weight again, as you extend. So it's, it's more like a, I guess like a cheating one arm overhead press. I think these are done in the kettlebell community. And I think these guys do a variation of that. So it definitely looks very, very different from the standard overhead press that we would normally do. So I think it probably does create a different effect from the other overhead pressing that they're doing. But again, it's like this very strong emphasis on overhead pressing, you know, kind of that we can see in here, but three exercises. I mean, we've got the seated barbell, we've got the standing barbell behind the neck and then we've got this one one arm dumbbell. It's clearly a huge focus on shoulder training in these programs. And I think as you say, that probably comes from that bronzer or a focus on the Greek kind of statues and trying to create that look. Yeah. So maybe nobody's really picked up on that and kind of done a marketing thing on it now. You can kind of like really go to town, but you can say like a Greek guard. I mean, it's like that's pretty much what people want anyway. So anyway, so it's, it's just really interesting. Yeah, but I think that exercise probably does do a different thing for the others. Definitely. That exercise state is a pretty popular exercise. You have this silver ear and even people like Gredge Park actually used it quite a lot as well. And then we've got a kettlebell swing standing kind of kettlebell swing like you would see people do nowadays, a set of 10 to 20. And finishing off with an exercise that I actually quite like, which was a reverse grip kettlebell curl. But the way that they did this was grazing some themselves supporting themselves with the arm that they're not using against the chair. And they kind of bent slightly forwards over the chair. And then doing the kettlebell curl up. And they actually talk about letting your hand kind of, I guess, curl over with the kettlebell. So you're not having to, there's not as much, I guess, wrist strain or sort of ether from the wrist trying to curl it up. So as far as an upper cracker radius exercise, it's quite good. So it's almost a spider curl in the sense that they've got that inclination forwards of the torso. So again, more emphasis on the bracket radius. And that was a set of five to 10 as well. So those are 12 exercises. As you can see, most of it was five to 10. So you add one repetition until you got to 10, then you'd go heavier and drop back down to five. The lower body exercises were higher repetitions. So, you know, 12 to 24 with the hills elevated squat, for example, or 10 to 20 with the straddle squat. But obviously you're going to destroy furniture if you use a heavier weight. Absolutely. So you're definitely more possible to do, or you don't have enough weight on the barbell. I mean, I think this is a point you made to me a very long time ago when you first started getting really serious about learning all of these routines and analyzing them. And it was basically that they just simply didn't have the kind of the equipment to be able to do the five to 10 rep ranges with those lower body exercises. So I think a lot of people coming to this for the first time would look at them. Oh, well, clearly these guys need something, you know, they use all light loads and, you know, higher repetitions for the lower body. We should do that, because I, well, no, they didn't have the technology to do that, because it just wasn't not technology, sorry, they didn't have the equipment available and have huge amounts of other plates that they could put on the barbells. So no, I think that's, it's really cool to see those five 10 rep ranges, because obviously that is what we talk about when we're talking about the programming today, aiming for those five, six, seven rep man, you know, I think that's a really, really cool observation to see them doing it. And to further your point with the equipment as well, I mean, how would you even get on your shoulders? You know, if you're using doing a set of five with a squat, you have to literally leverage it up, you know, leaning over to the side to get it off the floor. So a lot of it just came out of purely convenience or accessibility. So that's the workout. So Chris, what stands out to you apart from some of those that all, you know, you want to bit about availability and weight and stuff like that? So there's so much to unpack here, you know, in terms of exercise selection, I mean, just picking some of the really, really easy stuff straight to way. As we've already said, there's a barbell curl here, but there's also a reverse grip curl with a slight torso inclination. So straight away, you can see that they've completely understood that there are two really distinctive ways of training the elbow flexors. You've got the bracket really artists with the reverse grip and the bit of an inclination of torso in that situation. And you've also got the biceps bracket themselves where you're training probably with a supinated grip in that barbell curl at the beginning. So thus, again, you know, they understand that you've got different regions of muscle groups straight away. You know, I think also you could probably make a case for the same thing happening with the rear of head pressing, again, they're selecting different variations, then they understand that you can't just do one over head pressing and they're the single part of the deltoid. You know, it's clear that they know exactly what they're doing on that particular front. So now, I think there's some very clear kind of indications that they are on the road, not necessarily have mastered at this point, but they're on the road to understanding that you need some slight variations in the exercise selections that you're doing if you want to absolutely maximize the muscle growth that you're aiming for. And obviously you can see areas where they haven't been able to do that. I mean, you made the point at the very beginning that there's a very limited emphasis on chest strength. It's just only the pullover really is going to do anything for chest in this particular programme. So you can see the bag, again, is pointing outside, but is that an aesthetic choice, like you were saying? It's not necessarily that they didn't know how to do that. It was just simply that they decided they didn't want it, and that's totally valid, you know, kind of choice. And when we have our arbitrary ideas about what, you know, kind of sort of peak physique should look like, and they have theirs, and that it's not necessarily going to be the same thing. So at that point, a bench didn't exist yet. I mean, Hackensmith sort of invented some variation of the bench. It hadn't, so this Hackensmith being a bronzerial lifter, and that sort of hadn't expanded too far just yet. And it was only going to be in the coming decades. It's suddenly people would start using the bench press and actually competing in it. So it seems to be at that point when people started competing in it and trying to set new records. So we start to see more chest development actually emphasised. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think you can also see that exercise selection in that, in the sense that there is a shrug, and there's also a row variation, as a tendency in today's, kind of, so era for people to drop shrugs and say, let's just do rows on. And that's going to do all of my piece of development. I don't think it does. I mean, I answered this question actually on my Instagram questions yesterday, people are saying, do I need to do a shrug variation if I'm already doing a row? And like, well, just go to the row machine that you're doing and look at the weight that you're using, and then do a calso shrug with that same exercise. Just do a calso shrug with that same piece of equipment. And what you'll notice is that the weight that you're using in the calso shrug variation of that exact same row is way higher than what you're doing in the row. And that's showing you that if you are doing the row, the limiting factor is not your trapezius. The limiting factor is some other muscle that you're, therefore, limiting the development that trapezius can get in that rowing exercise. So I think it's really cool to see that, again, they've understood that subtleties. So, as I say, you know, I wouldn't say that this program is perfect from an exercise selection point of view, it's absolutely not. But there are very clear indications that they have understood stuff by trial and error that we've had to do by analysis of moment times. And why have we had to do it by analysis of moment times, we've had to do it by analysis of moment times because people can literally just train with whatever exercises they want and take antibiotics and everything will grow. And it's like, well, so you're not going to know which exercises work. So the silliest thing we can do is ask somebody who's taking antibiotics, which exercises to do it. It's just not going to give you an answer that's meaningful because everything is growing. So how they're going to know what works, it's just not. So you go back to these guys and you start to see that because of the absence of antibiotics, they've had a very, very much clearer perspective on what works for the precise purpose of growing a specific muscle because they weren't doing the right exercise. It wasn't going to grow, the muscle that they were interested in. So I think it's really cool to see that, yes, we've got, as you were saying at the beginning, we've got evidence to show that, you know, they understood this concept of exercise variation per specific muscle areas. And they were making very good progress down that road, but clearly also you can see some of the deficits. The other deficit that I would say is really obvious in this program is obviously the participant's doorstep. Straight away when you sent in a spy message a few days ago, I straight away went back to you and I said, there's no gestraining and there's no lower lat, you know. So with the row, you're getting that upper lat sort of development, but you're probably not getting the lower lat development, which you would need from a frontal plane exercise. And that would be quite difficult for them to do, I think, with that sort of free rate of situation, you know, unless they put a pull up bar in place, they're not really allowed to do that. That's a really good point you made about the antibiotics, because obviously it does change a few other variables. I'm sure we'll talk about at some point in a future episode, but to emphasize how it actually changes exercise selection, not changes, but it takes away your intuition in discovering exactly what exercise works for a particular muscle region. And that's something that I think we'll see that a lot of these guys nailed so well is actually refining particularly which exercise would work for a particular muscle region. And obviously that's why because there's no other stimulus or no other mechanism for growth. So to wrap this up, I'd like to hear maybe one sort of thing that stood out to you that you think these guys nailed. And one thing that you think was definitely a shortcoming at this point. So I think I'll stick with what I said earlier, which is that I think they nailed the ability to see the effects of specific exercises on specific muscle regions. I think that fundamental observation they had absolutely understood it's like if I do this exercise, this part of the muscle group is going to grow in this particular way. If I want it to look a certain way, I need to do this particular exercise. I think you can see that knowledge is there in this program. Now they haven't done it for every single muscle group, definitely not. And it's by no means perfect. I can see ways of tweaking this very slightly to make it better, but that would require equipment that they didn't have access to. So I think within the boundaries of what they were working with, they've done an amazing job in all of being that particular observation. So that would be my fundamental observation regarding the thing that you said is really, really good. Coming's wise is really difficult to pull shortcomings out the aren't just constraints that they're working with it. So like obviously the biggest shortcomings that you could throw it straight away is that well, where's this exercise for that muscle group or where's this exercise for that muscle group, so what are you going to do? I mean, I think, you know, the fact that they haven't quite figured out that if you do pull up sort of wide grip, you can get a lower lap development. I think that probably is the one excise thing that I would look at and go, look, come on, guys, it's not difficult to set the pull up, that's not challenging, okay? So that would probably be the one area of the, like, that's not a constraints issue, that's just the lack of imagination at that point. So that would be my one excise probably criticism that is definitely, definitely do. I probably could find others if I sat down and, like, really, really sort of thought about it, but that's the one that really jumps out at me. And again, floor presses, as you said with Hackensmith and obviously then moving to a bench, you could do something, but again, is that an aesthetic choice or is that actually just a shortcoming? I don't think that's really difficult. I don't think that's a very easy question to answer, it's quite difficult. And again, it's, like, with lower body stuff, doing all the high rep stuff, you know, is that really necessary and you kind of like, then you're into constraints of, you know, like, we haven't got a squat rack, you haven't got this, you haven't got that. Yeah, but there are deadly variations you could have done with heavier weights. So again, it's like, well, he's just the bottom long enough, can he not put enough plates on that? It's like, what are your constraints? I don't know, I'm not a story in that particular area, I don't know what the real limitations were. So it's hard to say, where does the imagination fail and where is the actual equipment? Not letting you do the thing that you want to do. So again, I think, honestly, shortcomings wise, it's very, very difficult to, and especially if this program is being done, you know, single sets three times a week, which I'm guessing it probably was, then, you know, it's just a tremendous, tremendous program really for working within the limitations of time. I think, honestly, I would say that the limitation I would go for is that they could have made better use of barbell deadly variations, because honestly, you know, you can do a lot with that. When we've been talking about that recently, you know, like, how many different variations can you, can you kind of create? I mean, blocks aren't difficult to make, you know, you could have blocked deadlifts at different heights, you could, you could do all kinds of different stuff there. I think, so that probably would be my, my, my sort of shortcoming that I would probably go for is that, you know, they probably didn't make enough use of deadly variations. It's more of a squat focus, but again, is that an aesthetic choice? I don't know. It's like, what do they, what do they want to do? Or maybe they did deadly variations, and they couldn't see a repeatable pattern of where muscle growth was happening. One of the interesting things about deadlifts is that everybody, I think, kind of responds to them in slightly different ways, because everyone's got a different weak point area. So some people, maybe they're, they're like, to Magnus players up. Some people, it's like, some people, it's that bag. And it's like, well, that isn't a reliable stimulus for these guys. So I think a lot of the time is very difficult to identify strengths and weaknesses from a program if you don't fully understand exactly the context and limitations and, which obviously you've explained a lot to the limitations, but, and perspectives and, again, you've explained some of those. But there's so many things we don't necessarily know about what they saw and they did. I don't like sort of necessarily jumping to conclusions and saying, oh, they did this therefore it was wrong, so well, yeah, but what did they know that I don't know, you know? And I'm just endlessly curious about this kind of thing. It's like, what am I not seeing here and is that a choice or was it in a state? So I'm trying not to dodge the question, I'm trying not to dodge the question, but, you know, it's like, I don't have that degree of cubist necessary to look at something like this and say, well, I don't know, sorry, I'm not having the cubist to say, you know, I know everything that there is to know and therefore when I see something, I don't like it's wrong. It's like, well, actually, I'm curious, I'm like, well, what's right about it and what can I learn about it? What did they know? Why are they seen? I'm not seeing. So I'm trying not to dodge the question. So if I'm pointless, but I say, yeah, okay, no, I said, well, I think the advantages are shortcomings. I'd say definitely pull up bars for lower laps and probably blocks four dead variations. That would probably be my two shortcomings in terms of the exosperum. I love everything else about telling this wonderful. It's interesting that this is literally the first mass兵ous plan and I look at this and you know, similar to what you said there, I'm like, you know what, there's obviously things that could be better in terms of at least what our goals would be today. But I look at it and I'm like, this is genuinely better than the vast majority of stuff I would see online and we've had a hundred years on top of this and it's just, it's amazing where these guys started and to see where they end up in the next 25, 30 years is really interesting. I'll cover some of that obviously in future episodes. A component of most of these plans that is similar that you guys will see in future episodes is almost all of them were full body. There's very few exceptions, there might be a couple here and there, but almost all of them are full body and they were almost all, you know, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. They tended to take the weekends off. They tended to take Sunday off, which I think was more like a religious thing. Sometimes they did say that you could train every other day if you wanted, but generally it was Monday, Wednesday, Friday. It was very clear that even though some people were playing with some other splits, full body was by far the preferred split that was used right up until the end of the silver era. Now we're going to cover a lot about full body in future episodes because it was obviously such an important element to these guys, but we're going to talk a little bit more about one particular aspect of full body today. Yeah, so basically, if we kind of go back to the name of the podcast, I personally passed and present, we've just done the past a bit and now we're going to talk about present a bit. So what we want to do for this second half podcast is just to dress a small area within the full body versus other training splits debate in the context of training frequency and say, you know, what is it or what is one of the things that makes full body so much better than many of the other options, especially the really kind of low frequency pro split type options. So the focus we want to take today is to say, why does the dose response of hypertrophy to work out training for you make a higher frequency better, now lower frequency? That's basically the question we want to wrestle with. So a lot of people, when they look at training frequency at the moment, they're talking about atrophy rates and of course, you're going to see less atrophy when you're training more frequently, but that's not what we want to talk about today. We want to talk about those literally just the stimulus side and not the atrophy side. So essentially, just to give some context, and again, this is me doing kind of the history of physiology rather than you doing the history of bodybuilding, but basically history of physiology, basically in recent history, we've seen two very important metronauties come out in the last kind of seven or eight years or so. And there was a metronautist by Brad Shenton and the more recent one by Pelland. Those two metronauties both have done a very clear demonstration of the fact that the dose response of hypertrophy to work out training volume is non-linear. What that means is that there is a diminishing return, diminishing returns effect of each extra set that you do in a workout. So if I do one set, that gives me a particular stimulus of hypertrophy and that muscle that I've just trained, I then do a secondary set. I do not bubble the hypertrophy stimulus. Both of these metronauties show that. So essentially I do a third and I get even less, fourth, I get even less, and it diminishes and diminishes and diminishes. And this is an incredibly important observation. Because what it means is that what we want to do is have as many of those first sets per week as possible. So you're not going to see what people say in the industry, which is that if you do the same number of sets per week, it doesn't have to how you organise and you get the same hypertrophy. That's absolutely physiologically impossible if you have a non-linear dose response of hypertrophy to training volume. So what you're saying there? Literally the only way to be possible if volume equated throughout the end of the week had the same effect regardless of whatever frequency you use would be if there was no diminishing returns. So if the second set is as much growth as the first set. You can't have these two things mathematically in the same model. If you're looking at a non-linear dose response relationship, if you're second, third, fourth, fifth sets of an exercise or a muscle group are giving you smaller stimulus than the early ones, the first ones on the second, then you cannot have a situation where the same number of sets per week is giving you the same amount of hypertrophy regardless of where you're allocating. You can't do nine sets of biceps curls on Monday and expect to get the same results as three sets of biceps curls on Monday when it's doing Fridays. Absolutely mathematical impossibility to have that result. And so technically speaking, the magnitude doesn't even particularly matter. When you mentioned the Schroinfeld and the Pellan meta and you're saying they both had slightly different numbers, right? So the Schroinfeld roughly each additional set was about half a stimulating as a set before it. And Pellan's saying that actually it was in that data was a little bit more stimulating than that. But even if it was 5% less stimulating, that still is going to tell you that actually high frequency is better. Yeah, absolutely doesn't matter mathematically. If you have a nonlinear, those responses that you've got diminishing returns, if the diminishing returns curve is steep or if it's shallow, it doesn't matter. You still end up in the same place. So you can put the Pellan data into a model. You can put the Schroinfeld data into a model and you can get the same qualitative answer. It's still going to tell you that the higher frequency is better than the lower frequency. It might tell you that the difference is smaller or larger depending which of those two meta-analyses you use as data. I think the numbers I tend to work with are that the Schroinfeld is six sets to double the Iperture produced by one, but I think that the Pellan you actually get quadruple Iperture is six sets rather than double Iperture. So it's quite a big difference between two. So, but again, when you look at the difference, and this is a conversation for another day, but when you look at the difference in the studies that have gone into those two meta-analyses, what you see obviously is that Pellan being so much more recent being done just last year, it has all of the last kind of few years of studies, and if you look at those studies, they've all got insane volumes in some of those, and so you get some really extreme volumes in those programs, and of course that magnifies the likelihood of muscle swelling confounding the results. So you end up with a sort of an excessive amount of muscle size, I think, growth, not going to call it Iperture because it's probably not, but you end up with this kind of confounding factor, and I think maybe the answer probably is going to be somewhere between the two meta-analyses, but it doesn't really matter because the point we're making here is that irrespective of the actual numbers, the absolute numbers, the qualitative answer is that if you have a non-linear diminishing returns effect, you're absolutely going to find a higher frequency better than lower. Yeah, I mean, that's actually interesting because what you're saying there is regardless of basically any other variable that we want to look at in terms of atrophy, in terms of how long that protecting period lasts for after someone's done a training session, regardless of any of that, full body still has to be, well, I say full body, but a high training frequency has to be better than a lower training frequency purely based on the fact that this diminishing returns with the volume, unless the second set was as effective as the first, and the fifth was as effective as the first, and tenth was as effective as the first, which I don't think anyone is really going to argue, then. Well, it's interesting you say that. I think anybody with exposure to the physiology is not going to argue that, you know, I think because if somebody accepts that the stimulus that we are producing fibre tree is governed by two factors, it's governed by the number of fibres that you're training, which is essentially no tunic accruement governing muscle activation, when I say muscle activation, I mean the number of activator muscle fibres. So if you've got a high level of recruitment, you can activate a lot of muscle fibres, and by activating the fibre you can apply mechanical loading stimulus to each of those fibres, because hypertrophy is muscle fibres specific, that shows you how muscle growth is working on the whole muscle level. So we are looking for a high level of recruitment, we're looking for a high level of single fibre tension. Now we know that fatigue mechanisms that develop over the course of a workout will reduce both of those things. I mean, this is not contentious, this is just very simple fatigue physiology. Simple fatigue physiology. Those words should never be used in kind of junction with each other. So it's just basic fatigue physiology. So we see reduction in recruitment over the course of the set, we see reduction in mechanical tension to a certain degree over the course of the set. So we're naturally expecting a reduction in stimulus from set to set to set to set. And even if people don't want to look at the physiology, they can just look at their own motivation levels and their levels of effort that they bring to each set. I think most people understand instinctively that they can't bring the same level of intensity to set five as they could to set one. One of my favourite kind of just moving practically just for a moment, one of my favourite experiments is to just show people if they're doing a normal three set protocol, they're just going into the gym and doing three sets. And they're just like, yeah, you know, I can do this number reps on my first second and third set, and I am training to figure it. I'm like, okay, just as a test, give yourself a day or so, you know, kind of wash up and then go back and do that workout again, but just do a single set, like almost guaranteed that you'll get an extra rep on that first set when you know you don't have two more sets coming. So these are really cool kind of things that you can just do. If you're not really into the physiology, there's some interesting ways that you can just test this for yourself. So definitely if someone does that, they'll definitely get more reps out. I know for me when I started doing this, probably two years ago now, I did a long stint where I was just doing single sets and it was mind boggling to me how many more repetitions. And like for me, I used to always take every set to failure. And so it's not like I was holding back in those first sets when I was doing multiple sets. Suddenly I started doing single sets. I'm getting like two to four repetitions more out per set than what I'm used to. And I was just like, what is happening? Am I recording this like wrong? Like what the heck is happening here? And it's, it must just be that motivation aspect. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it all comes back to my core and the psychological model of fatigue. But again, we can jump into that in a subsequent episode. So what we're saying then is that basically, we've got a clear understanding that we're going to get a higher sort of stimulus from the earlier sets in a workout. And that means that we want more of those earlier sets per week. But how many can we fit it? Well, it really comes down to how long the stimulus period is lasting. So, you know, most of the time, and this is a very complex area that again deserves its own podcast, but broadly speaking, it's probably somewhere between 24 and 48 hours, creating a hypertrophy that you've just stimulated. So that fits perfectly with what we're seeing in these four-body routines where people are training, you know, the muscle three times a week. And so you've got this, you know, kind of 48 hour window, you go back in and you do the same thing again. And you're maximizing again across the week. Okay, this is why, you know, people have been asking me recently, on social media, you know, well, could you train every other day? Well, I used that earlier. Yeah, absolutely. With it, make a big difference. Well, over a long enough period of time, it will. Yeah, but people have lives to live and necessarily want to be, you know, organising your entire world around the gym. You know, it's not necessarily something that's going to work out well in a long term, you know, for everybody. So, you know, I think it's just a really nice kind of coincidence between the data that we're seeing in the physiology and the data that we're gathering from these older routines, you know, training the muscle three times a week, fits with the stimulus period, if it's with this non-linear dose response, it's maximising the hypertruine context of this month. There's two points I want to fall up there, just in case people haven't followed it, so that you've talked about first sets and you've talked about each additional set being less stimulating. Now, that's in the context of the same exercise. So, yes, each, you could argue that the latest sets in a workout are going to be less stimulating as well as earlier sets, potentially, but when we're talking about this sort of diminishing returns, this non-linear response to volume, this conversation is always about additional sets in the same exercise. I see people get that confused a little bit online. Same muscle group, okay. I think, because when we're talking hypertruine to a muscle fibers and so, if you're training a muscle with, say, two different exercises and there's a bigger overlap between those two exercises, then I think fundamentally we are doing the same thing. From a, from this diminishing returns effect point of view, yes, there will be some fibers that don't experience that, because there's always going to be different fibers used in different exercises, and again, that's something we can talk about later, but yeah, I think it's probably best to think about the terms of muscle and groups rather than exercise. If we want to think about training frequency, it's, yeah, we've been talking about it in the context of full body training, okay, so that's like comparing full body with a different kind of split, but actually, when we talk about it physiologically, we're talking about it from a muscle point of view. So we are seeing this, this, this kind of need to train specific muscles, you know, three times a week, but if you do a different exercise, you're not necessarily going to train exactly the same muscle fibers in each of those situations. So like the real strength of those early bodybuilding programs, like the one we talked about today, is that they use exactly the same routine three times a week. So you're literally training exactly the same muscle fibers three times a week. If you now start changing exercises, now you can do this, let me give two examples here. If you were to do this with a, like somebody would say, I'm going to do a squat on Monday, I'm going to do a knee extension on Wednesday, and I'm going to do, you know, I don't know, a leg press on Friday. And so I'm training the quadriceps three days a week, that's fine, that's the same thing as doing full body program. Well, no, it's not because your knee extension is training the rectus moris and the other two exercises are not. So you actually now are only training the rect femnas a week. And so now what you've done is you've created a program which has a weakness in it because that program is actually having a training frequency of once per a week for that particular part of a quadriceps and the other two exercises are, you know, kind of, not training that. So that's, that's one example. Another example might be to train, um, I don't know, maybe you've got an exercise that is a, I don't know, a very close grip bench press. And so I will, that's going to give you an enormous amount of clavicular pectus. And it's not going to give you any costal pect stimulus at all because the costal pect is a shorter extensor, not a short inflexer. It's like, well, oh, I'm doing, I'm doing a bench press, I'm doing a bench press, therefore my whole pect is being stimulated. Well, no, it's not because I can literally look at the moment times and show you that the costal pect is doing the opposite thing from what you are doing. So it can't possibly be activated. So it's not getting trained. So you're not actually, so if you've got your narrow grip bench press on one day and you see, oh, that's my chest exercise with that day. I'm going to do a fly on another day and a wide grip bench on the other day. It's like, well, yeah, the fly and the, and the wide grip bench are going to give you the whole pect stimulus. Not a problem. But that, that narrow grip bench isn't doing that. So again, it's like, well, now you drop down to two times a week for the lower part of your pect and you're not actually then training that three times a week. So I think these kind of situations, these kind of analyses are really useful because I think a lot of people just go, well, I'm putting this exercise in for that muscle and this exercise in for this muscle. And it's like, oh, as long as I've got all the muscles covered, I'm good. What you're going to find if you do that is that if you drop down two times a week for a particular region, it's just going to grow slower. Okay, no problem. I hope no problem with that. I don't think in terms of people, oh, I need to be jacked by, you know, the summer. No. It's like, no, it's like, you're thinking longer terms than that. It's like, you've got this year to make something happen. But if you were to drop down to once a week, you'd probably find that that was not going to work at all. And the muscle would just kind of be washing out and not growing over time. The net hypertrophy wouldn't really be meaningful. So I think it's not just about saying, you know, training frequency is going to be better. I was in three times. It's going to be better than two times. It's also about saying, well, look at your exercise selection. I know you're actually training every single, you know, kind of reading the muscle multiple times per week, at least two, if not three, you know, compromises are going to get made if you might not find that you can do everything three times. But it has to be two times. So, you know, I think that's I think that's where you're going with the point you're making. Well, if you remember what the other point I was going to make was, but to follow up on that one, something I often tell people is if you don't know exercise selection well and you don't know by mechanics well, I actually think a bit of programming the same exercises each workout. And that's what we see the silvery guys doing that workout example I gave today. That's what they did. The same same exercises, the same workout each time. And basically just how much humility those guys had, despite that, obviously huge success, expertise, knowledge, training, time, effort. And yeah, they managed to maintain that humility and say, well, if I don't know exactly what I'm doing, I'm going to try and limit the, you know, the risks that we're not working with. As you were pointing out before we start the podcast today, you get, you know, kind of social media today, you get somebody, you know, with 31 followers telling you that you don't understand the mechanisms like virtually. It's just very recently kind of comparison. Yeah. And yet people are scared of doing the same workout on repeat. And I get that sometimes people might get a little bit bored, I get that if that's your motivation, okay. But in terms of it not being flashing after it, showing that, you know, you're not advanced enough or whatever, I actually think you're going to get better results most of the time. If you do just do that same workout on repeat, unless you actually know exercise selection by mechanics well enough to know exactly what region of a muscle is actually being trained in a particular exercise. And most people to be fair, don't know exercise selection that well. So unless, like unless you do, I think just stick to the same exercise. Now the second point, the second point I was going to make is we've kind of glossed over this and I don't expect you to go into a lot of detail here, but just I wanted to touch on it. We're talking about full body either, either every other day or Monday Wednesday Friday. And someone listening to what you said so far about diminishing turns and first sets, et cetera, they might listen to them be like, "Well, hold up. Why don't I just do it every single day?" And I know you made the point of that stimulus window is about 24 to 48 hours. It's a little bit of merciless, I guess, in that. But do you want to just elaborate that on that just briefly just so people understand why they wouldn't just do it every single day? Sure. So basically when a muscle find that and stimulate to grow, it's going to upregulate the rate at which it makes new proteins. And we call that the rate of either muscle protein synthesis or the rate of myfibular protein synthesis. So we're making new proteins at a faster rate. So essentially, we were making them at a baseline rate, which sort of in and out, so being matched. Now we're making them at a faster rate, so we're adding new stuff into the muscle fiber. Okay. Now that rate of protein synthesis has a couple of characteristics that we need to be aware of. So firstly, it tends to go up relatively quickly in the first sort of 12 hours and stop coming down again. And it's definitely coming down a lot by the end of that first 24-hour period, but it does probably then spill over into that second 24-hour period and we're not really sure exactly what it's doing there because most of the measurement efforts of researchers have focused on that first day. The other feature we need to be aware of is that the maximum rate of that muscle protein synthesis is definitely limited. So you have a machinery inside the muscle fiber that are making the new proteins and they can turn out new proteins at a certain rate, but they can't do faster than that maximum rate. So if you're producing a whole load of new proteins because you just stimulate the muscle to increase in size, that hypertrophy adaption, and then you come along with a new signal because you now do a secondary workout later in the same day maybe or early in the following day, then the muscle fiber is going to turn around and look at you and go, what do you want me to do? I'm already turning out proteins as fast as I possibly can. There's nowhere I can go to make proteins faster than I'm already doing, so you're wasting that secondary stimulus. It's like you're telling it to do something it's already doing. So I say the mercenaries that we don't really know what's happening in that second day, is there an opportunity to train on that second day? It's entirely possible, but we just don't really know what that would be. Would it be half as effective? Would it be a further as effective? It's not going to be exactly 100% as effective as waiting that extra day. I think it's very, very, very difficult to say at the moment exactly what that would look like. There's definitely sun elevation in my appropriate proteins in those rates on that second day. It's just how high it is. I really don't know. I mean, obviously, we see people like Olympic Waylifters and they want to strong men, kind of competitors and other athletes training much, much more frequent. They do train every single day. And you can kind of see ways they do my work. But ultimately, I think there's probably a much safer way of proceeding. And this is without talking about fatigue, of course. A much safer way of proceeding is probably just to leave it that that full 48 hours. And then you know, with relative confidence that we've got all of that process from the previous work has been completed. And we're just kind of now starting a new process and everything is going to be, you know, kind of in line with what we're expecting to happen. So it's not cut and dry. It's not black and white. It's absolutely gray area. What's that exact, that's the most period looks like. But what I'm saying is that the 48 hour window is the safer one to go for. And again, this is without talking about management to fatigue at a tall. So again, that's something. I just want to emphasise again, you know, for anybody who's got this far, just emphasise again, that what we're saying is that a higher frequency of training on muscle is going to be better than a lower frequency of training on muscle, because of the non-linear dose response of hypertrophy to training volume. In a sense, that first sets can warm, second sets, second sets can warm, third sets and so on and so on and so on. So you don't need to argue about atrophy to make the case for a higher frequency being better than a lower frequency. That means three times is better than two times, two times is better than one time. So we don't need to have a accomplice in an atrophy to make our case. Atrophy is another reason why high frequency is going to be better than a lower frequency, but we don't need to argue about atrophy in order to make the case that high frequency is better than a lower frequency. So it's like, I think there's a lot of people now starting to get very upset about atrophy rates. And what I'm just saying here is that we don't need to have that conversation. If you don't like the idea for whatever emotional reason, that atrophy is happening between workouts, you don't need to think about it. Just look at the dose response, just look at the diminishing returns and they're all needed and you make it clear to you that training three times a week is going to be better than two times, training two times is going to be better than one time. You don't actually need to even go there to me. So I think that's just something I wanted to emphasize because I think that's really the take home from this particular episode. That non-linear dose response is the key to really understanding why high frequency is better than a low frequency, even without thinking about it. And for any of you guys listening to Chris talk about atrophy and who, you know, maybe questioning, well, what does he even mean by that? We will, I'm sure, go into that in another episode. But as you said, in this context, it's not even relevant. We don't even need to have that conversation because we know purely based on the volume of studies, so we know that high frequency is still going to be better. And like you said, as many first sets, you know, outside of that stimulus period in a week are going to be better. And that's very much the kind of model we see from a lot of these guys. Pretty sturdy area where they give it that 48 hours and then they do another first set. Exactly. And it's just going to be recurring theme, hopefully, of these podcasts that we do where we talk through some of the routines of these guys that were training 100 years ago. We look at the physiology that we can see today. And we see this amazing coincidence between the two things. So that's why I'm really excited about this project. I think it's going to be a fantastic experience. We hope to run for many episodes into the future. So let's keep our fingers crossed and hope that it works out well. So thank you guys for joining us and his journey back in time today and connecting in with a modern physiology and what their modern diet is telling us. So we'll be back next week with a new training plan, another tree story or a training plan and some new muscle physiology for you.