002 How long does the growth stimulus last after a training session?

Welcome back to our second episode of hypertrophy, past and present. Now, if you're joining us for the first time in this podcast, what we endeavoured to do is go back in time and look at bodybuilding before the introduction of anabolic and examine it through the lens of modern muscle physiology. To do that, all the fun stuff, we've got Chris Beasley here, Chris, my co-host, how are you doing? I'm doing well, thanks, Jake, good to be here. And we're going to introduce you to begin with another old school bodybuilding plan. Now, if you did join us last week, we started with one of the first bodybuilding plans that has mass produced, and that was by a company called Milo Barbell Company. Now, when we did examine that, we looked at some things that they did quite well, and some things that perhaps could have been evolved or adapted over time and maybe made a little bit better. But as a foundation, there were some really interesting, I guess, principles or core elements of that plan. And today, the plan is about 25 years later. So what we have to begin with here is a York Barbell Company plan. Now, Milo, here's your little history 101 lesson, Milo Barbell Company turned into York Barbell Company. It was bought by Ghana and Bob Hoffman, and they continued on a lot of this similar work. They made barbells and made plans, or what, you know, they called courses back then. And they developed a number of different courses. And the course we're going to look at today was one of the later courses they developed. And I mentioned last week for you guys who joined us, that the first Milo course didn't have any sets. Sets did not exist at that point. No one talked about sets. What they said is you would do this movement, and you do 15 movements of it. You do 10 movements, and that's how many repetitions you're doing. No one thought about sets. Now, at this point in time, we're talking about 1951 is when this plan, at least, the version of it I have was published. But at this point, they've now started to develop sets, and we're going to talk a little bit more about the sets and the way they do that in a moment, because it's quite interesting. But I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself. I want to tell you about the plan first. So the plan is another 12 exercise plan, which is interesting because they followed that format from Milo Barbell Company. And if you listen to the way they talk about it, they essentially say that it takes about 12 exercises to adequately stimulate the entire body. And I actually think that's a fairly fair observation. There's a couple of exercises. Maybe I'll do differently, and I'm sure we'll talk about that. But that's interesting in and of itself that as a complete body plan, they think you need about 12 exercises. So those 12 exercises were exercise one was a one arm seated dumbbell supinated curl. So not alternating, but one arm at a time. Less two was a flat bench. So this is obviously an adjustment from last week, because they didn't have any real much chest exercise last time they didn't have a bench. So here we have a flat bench, and they specifically state to do the widest possible grip. Then we have a regular deadlift, and I'll talk about that more in a moment as well. But for now, regular deadlift. And then we have a bent barbell pullover. They love the pullovers back then. Then we have a dumbbell side to side bend. Then a triceps overhead extension with dumbbells. Then a bent over barbell row using a fairly wide pronated grip. And then we have a wide lat pull down a pronated grip. Now, they did specify that they prefer to do this behind the neck, and you could also do it behind the neck pull up instead if you wanted. And then we have a standing calf raise with dumbbell. So you're holding a dumbbell in one hand and doing a calf raise. Then we have, now this one, you're going to have to use your imagination with me. So it was called a back press and shoulder spread. And what they did is they used a kind of like a resistance band type piece, a chest expander essentially, but like a band. And they had the imagine that elbows by their side and hands pointing out to the sock. And what they would do is extend their arms, so you're kind of moving it to like a crucifix position. And then once you've extended, you protract your shoulder, or you fully extend, then you retract your shoulder blade, and then you protract again. So this is a frontal plane movement? Yes. Right. Okay. So it's kind of like a lateral raise or it's doing the same job as a lateral raise. Yeah. It's obviously abducting the shoulder, which obviously the middle though is going to put the prime move over there with a little bit of anterior. So I'm not not getting ahead of ourselves too much, but there is a very big difference between this programme and the previous one in terms of the amount of overhead pressing work. Yes. Yes. The last time one of the things that you explained was that there was a really big focus on overhead pressing, or at least on the on the deltoid complex itself, which was achieved through overhead pressing, which because of the focus and the aesthetic goals that those guys had at that time. And it's really fascinating to see that that has changed as we've passed through this generation if you like, 25 year period. And we've moved away from that focus on overhead pressing and shoulder development, and we're now looking at a different selection of exercises, which probably has a different set of aesthetic goals. But I think this is probably the exercise that they're doing for the shoulder complex. It's just interesting. I wonder why they moved away from doing the overhead pressing, and towards this perhaps slightly less conventional exercise. I mean, it's not like overhead pressing is difficult to manage, or set up, or handle. So it's so very curious whether there's a bit of context that haven't given you here. So I will give you some, I showed you this plan, I do need to finish, there's two more exercises. The next one is a reverse crunch, which they call the leg raise, and then it finishes with a squat, which they would have called a deep knee bend. Now, that's all I've shown you, but there's a bit more context, and the additional context to that is firstly, this was what they call the Mr. America course. So they claim that a lot of the Mr. America competitors and winners, and that includes people like a grim air, and Steve Reeves, and George Ifemen, Dealingard, they say that these people follow this system, or something very similar to it. So this was not their standard beginner plan, or a specialization phase, or anything like that. This was like, this is what you do to look like a silver era competitor, someone who's going to get on stage. So that's context number one, context number two, I didn't know whether to start with this and not, but I will say it now is when you look at this in the way that they present it, they're super, super vague with sets and with repetitions. And when they talk about sets, they are now at a point where they say, you know what sets will produce better results. But the way you do your sets are either you add a second or third set to the muscle you're trying to develop, and then everything else gets one set, or better to yet, what they suggest you do is you add an additional one or two exercises for that muscle group. And they actually provide additional exercises for each of these categories. So when you look at the bench, so they've given the wide group bench, the additional exercises they provide are multiple versions of overhead pressing in client pressing. And so that is ultimately what they're suggesting is actually have another one or two exercises. If you want to develop the deltoids, that will include some kind of overhead pressing. Now, there's a couple other bits I want to mention, but I might just pause there, apart from the overhead pressing that you've mentioned, what are your initial thoughts? There's so much to say here, it's really, really interesting, especially as I say, when you compare it with what we talked about last week. So obviously you've already highlighted that we've now got a bench press in the trading programme, which we didn't have in the previous time, and we talked in great detail last time about why that might be. We've still got the pullover though. So it's interesting that that hasn't dropped out, even though they've kind of put in an exercise, which with the wide grip is going to be extremely effective for training all regions of the pecs. So it's like, we've got this additional exercise that does that job, but we're still keeping the pullover in the programme. So there's an interesting kind of overlap there in having that still there to expect that that's not necessarily going to be potentially the perfect combination of exercises, at least as far as I'm concerned. Interesting that you've got, I can't remember, actually, did we have a bleaks in the last training programme? Do we have the side bends in the last training programme? We did not have the side bend. We had, I don't actually recall now. We've potentially had something similar, but obviously we've also now got the leg raise in this training programme, and we've got the regular deadlift. We talked last time about there was a straddle lift, which kind of looked like either a Jefferson deadlift, or maybe something that was a little bit more squat pattern in its kind of function rather than necessarily its appearance, but it was functioning more like a squat type pattern. Now one of the things that we didn't dwell on last time, because potentially it was just too obvious, is that at the time when bodybuilding was really getting going, there weren't things like the extension machines and leg core machines, and all of those type exercises that we rely on a lot today for maximum development of the erects for more recently and the hamstrings. But they didn't really do deadlifts either last time, and they didn't do leg raises. Now, the interesting thing about leg raises is that it's basically a hip flex or exercise. Now yes, you can argue that it involves the abs and other things, and what have you, but fundamentally the first part of hip flexion is actually the rectus for more is. So what's really interesting here is that from last time to this time, we've now got two exercises that do hamstrings to a certain degree, and they do rectus for more is to a certain degree. And that is literally two of the major observations I had last time missing things. So we're starting to see corrections over time, or developments, evolutions over time, to fix or fix or fill in areas that potentially weren't being developed so much last time. And just to- It's worth noting with the deadlift as well that one of the alternative exercises they provide is a stiffly deadlift. Yeah, exactly, which would be really, really perfect for the hamstrings and the context of the equipment that they've got, you know, available to them. So I'm just flicking back to last time's conversation and the exercises that were included there. They did have a weighted crunch, but I can't see a side bend there. So they had the- I think my arm overhead dumbbell exercise that involves that thing. Oh, of course. That would definitely, that would definitely probably count in that category. But just to kind of conclude that little section of that concept that I'm trying to articulate there. So a wide grip pull down here, which we didn't have last time. And I think I probably highlighted that as my biggest criticism last time. I think I said something along the lines of, you know, a pull-up bar is not, you know, difficult to set up. Why couldn't we have a pull-up bar under wide grip? Pull-ups and have lower lat development, you know. Well, we've got that now. We've got wide grip, a pull-ups, which is clearly going to develop the lower lats very effectively. I'm not really seeing a perfect full lat development because I think the grip width on the row is quite wide. So okay, fine, with the pull-over and the wide grip row and the wide grip pull-down, you're getting a 90% development on the back. But if you wanted to absolutely max that, I'd want to see a narrow grip row or a narrow grip pull-down or a narrow grip pull-up as well. When I suspect you're going to tell me that narrow grip pull-ups were obviously a possible alternative for what was in downbill rows as well, yes. Exactly, exactly. So I think, you know, we're probably approaching a point where these guys, if you count the alternatives, then these guys have probably got pretty much everything that you can do with the available equipment of the time. And again, I'm saying that in complete ignorance of when the first, the extension machine was built and when the first leg goes built, you have to forgive me, the historians of machinery as regards to the gym. But I think this is really interesting because it actually does nail so much more in comparison with what we saw last time. So with each of those alternatives, there's about five or six alternatives they provide, and they're fairly thoroughly done. So even just for exercise one, this thing, which is interesting in and of itself, the single arm seated dumbbell supernative curl, even if we talk about body unit recruitment, doing one arm at a time is quite interesting. But for example, the variations that provide for that include a curl with the incline bench, hammock curl, reverse grip curl. So the variations are generally different enough that they are actually providing pretty much comprehensive development of each of the muscles. Now there's another point I wanted to make, and I touched on the loosely with the sets and how they said, well, you could just add in an additional, you know, some of these exercises. Now as far as repetitions, I find this quite interesting, because they were really kind of lies a fair with the repetitions. And effectively what they said was, well, you know, six to fifteen is a sort of good starting point. Like you do this double progression method, start with six out of repertoire, when you get to fifteen, go heavier, go back. But then they kind of like, well, but also sometimes, you know, maybe go for fifteen repetitions in total. And you could do a set of, you know, a set of seven and a set of eight, or you could do three by five, or you could do five triples, and the kind of just like, and the sets don't really matter. Like go for about fifteen repetitions, and however you want to get there, two sets of seven or five sets of three, or whatever, you know, that's, that's pretty good, right? And even that point is quite interesting. Well, if you get a fifteen, twelve to fifteen repetitions in more than one sets, they're generally fairly good set formations. So I find it interesting that there's sort of a de-emphasis on this is exactly how many sets you need to do. This is exactly how many repetitions you need to do. And it's almost like, fifteen, twelve to fifteen reps is good. Get there with five, or with sixes, or with sevens, we don't particularly mind. That's ultimately going to lead you between two and four sets. From a physiological point of view, what's really interesting about that is that that will actually give you more or less the same amount of post-workout fatigue. So if you do one set of fifteen, or you do three sets of five, that's not going to be miles apart in terms of what your post-workout fatigue is going to look like. So in terms of constructing a program that allows you to just keep doing whichever of those combinations you wish, but still keeping the same structure over time, and in the same number of workouts per week, that will work really nicely. So from a physiological point of view, it's interesting to see that they develop that kind of approach to the problem because it will work from a frequency standpoint. What it probably doesn't work from, as a standpoint, is that the idea that it's going to give you the same amount of muscle work, because I don't think that's going to happen. If you do three sets of five, you're going to get way better results that don't want set of fifteen, for example. But ultimately, it's not so far apart that you would necessarily notice that immediately. It's probably something that's going to just kind of catch up with you after a couple of months of training. So that is an interesting observation, because it's kind of too totally separate, kind of sides of things. And you say, well, from a, you know, if they were looking for, can I recover and make this program work, then that framework that you just explained is perfect, because it does. If you're looking at it from the point of view, does this get me where I want to go? That's where it starts to break down, because I don't think it is going to get them to the same place if you persist in that type of training, you know, if you persisted doing single sets of fifteen, and somebody else persisted in doing three sets of five. But that's what you're describing to me is that that's not how it was used. They would mix a match and they would do different things at different times. So maybe it just wasn't being observed, because simply it wasn't being compared with anything. So you can kind of see how they might have got that point. We had a conversation a long time ago, and you made this point that it, there's not a lot of value in periodizing repetitions. And at the time, there was a conversation that was happening alongside that where, you know, we'll kind of talk about this, periodization makes sense at all, and, you know, maybe there was an idea that maybe periodizing different exercises could make more sense to your regional hypertrophy as opposed to different repetitions, because you're not getting a repetition-specific hypertrophy benefit, right? Like you said, a fifteen, a set of five is going to give you the same form of hypertrophy. Now, what I find interesting in this is there doesn't seem to be that emphasis on, well, when you do the fifteen to get this type of growth, when you do the five, you get this type of growth, that even suggested going down, doing a five, four, three, two, one at some point, and they don't say, well, that's going to give you this type of growth compared to the fifteen. So it's almost like they know, hey, this growth is all the same, essentially they do talk about flushing your muscle and stuff, but they don't sort of emphasize you need these different repetitions. It's almost more like an enjoyment sort of aspect or a variety of motivation, and I think that's a really interesting concept where it's like, hey, this is all doing the same thing, change repetitions if you want, because it's motivating. You don't need to get locked into thinking or getting anything different out of it, but you are getting some extra motivation. Absolutely. And I think that if we just trim the edges of that and say, you know, if most of our variation is bouncing between two sets of seven to eight and three sets of four to six, then those two rip ranges are awesome. They're really, really awesome. I think if most of the variation is bouncing between those two, and very occasionally you might bounce up to one set of the higher rep at the end of the spectrum, and maybe a scattering of reps a bit lower than that, but those are done, if you imagine a normal distribution, those are done much, much more infrequently than the two in the middle, then I think that would be the perfect balance, I think, of getting that little bit of variety and enjoyment, and what have you. As you say, all doing the same thing, and still remaining within that framework of always recovering in pretty much the same period of time. So, you know, a lot of the time we try and balance these ideas of motivation and interest and enjoyment with the ideal optimal program that we're all seeking to find or most of us are seeking to find. But I think this is a really interesting way of trying to solve that question, because it says, look, here is a way of making sure that the fatigue problem is nailed down, it's squared away. And you're not having to worry about redoing your entire program every time you change rep ranges, but equally, you've got that ability to move things around. I think that's a really, really nice way of doing it, and just as I say, refining it very slightly and creating a bit of a normal distribution and saying, well, you know, most of the change has got to be between the two in the middle, two sets of seven or eight, now three sets of four to six. But then occasionally, you can drop down to sort of a scattering of lower reps and occasionally, you can jump up to one sort of slightly higher reps than that, 14 to 15 territory if that's something that you really feel that would be motivating to do for a couple of weeks and it all kind of works. I think that's really, really nice. That's very cool. And they also emphasize ideally just doing once a week where they call working on the nerve effectively, that's ultimately going to failure or going near your absolute limit. So that, I think, is quite interesting as well. If you think about the fact that you're repeating this workout plan, say Monday, Wednesday, Friday, then maybe the Monday session, you're, quote, working on the nerves, you're, you're taking that said to failure. And then essentially those that Wednesday, Friday session, you might be matching that. And so it's that little bit easier in a sense, I think, so we're one repair reserve unless we've dedicated a particular session to training to failure. Yeah. Yeah. But it's very much the format I follow with my own programming. Like for me personally in the gym, I change reps as I feel I might do sets of five some days or some weeks and if I'm just doing one set, then I might do 12, 10 or 12 repetitions because I don't need to warm up as much. And then sometimes I might do this five, four, three, two, one type thing and doing generally one of those sessions to failure and then matching it for those other two sessions. So I think for me, I look at that and I'm like, this is a really nice, complete plan. Yeah. Absolutely. And I think there's certainly with access to today's equipment, we would tweak things and do different selections of exercises, but when you look at the limitations of the equipment they had access to, it becomes quite difficult to beat these kind of programs, you know, especially when you look at the, I mean, especially when you look at the alternatives that they provide. And you say, you know, actually, I don't like this, this kind of weird shoulder expander thing that you described. No, I actually just want to do a standard overhead press and, you know, that's by preference. And if you kind of start to select those, or you know, you'd like to say, I don't particularly want to do a conventional deadlift, I'd much rather do a stiff leg to guarantee really good hamstrings development because I know the conventional isn't going to be as good at that. So, you know, when you start to take out some of that kind of exercises that you don't necessarily prefer, and you sort of impose or, you know, replace those with ones that you think are better or just more preferable to you, then I think actually it starts to look like a pretty perfect program in many respects. And as you've made the point repeatedly, certainly a hundred times better than most of what we're going to see online today. Absolutely. Because I know you want to move on and talk about another topic. I have two questions for you in this and then I'm going to let you do that. So my first question is, what do you think is happening in that shoulder expander exercise? So they do talk about going into protection, retracting, protracting. What is the value you think of doing that? And then the second question I have is simply following up St. Question I see last week. What is one thing in particular you think that would make this plan even better beyond the exercise selections? Is it anything else that you think could be improved? So both of those questions are not vanilla in the least. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to do them justice, but I think really the exercise itself to me, as I say, feels like an overhead press replacement in general in the way grip the front of plane. So for me, it kind of is trying to do the lateral raise part of modern program. The protraction bit is quite interesting and it would be really fascinating just to kind of sit down with an anatomy textbook and I'm sure people out there can do this probably better than I can and just think about which muscles that might be working. My gut feeling is it might be serotonous anterior, but again, it's like I just want to sit down and think about that. It's not something that I would want to rush into assuming. You know, I think there's a tendency today, especially on social media, for people to be like, oh, well, you need to have an answer for everything right away. I'm like, no, that's not how this works. You know, curiosity is going to get you to the right answer over a longer period of time rather than just knee jerk jumping to an answer and then having to defend it for the rest of your life, because you said it. You know, that's the problem, I think, with the internet. It's eternal and you can't kind of walk back stuff very easily. So I think, yeah, my answer would be, I don't know. And I, as I say, I think a starting point would be the serotonous, but if somebody comes out and says, no, it can't possibly be the serotonous, because X, Y and Z, I'd be like, okay, that's interesting. So what's actually doing that? So what is worth, they believe that this made your shoulder span wider. That was the point of doing this exercise, don't know if that adds anything to it. Not really. I mean, I mean, that's kind of what we're doing with shoulder training anyway, so yeah. So yeah. I don't know. It's a very interesting question. I'm sure that there are some, not to me, fish and ardos out there that can shed some light on that. It's not really something that I tend to spend a lot of time thinking about. In terms of your second part, as I said, it depends on whether you get to include the alternative exercises or not. Not including the alternative exercises, I think, really straight away. I'm going to be like, I need a stiff leg deadlift in there rather than a regular deadlift. I need a narrow grip row in there, because otherwise I'm not getting that up a part of the lat fully developed. I really don't like the lateral raise imitation, and much rather a proper of air press in it. That's just me. Those are brilliant for what they do, and my personal aesthetics go much closer to what we talked about last time in terms of what those guys were trying to do anyway. I have that tendency to look at the ancient Greek statues and think that that is probably a better look than a lot of what we see, you know, kind of today. So, but again, that's my personal preference, and it doesn't really, you know, necessarily translate to other people's experiences. So yeah, I think that would probably be my list really, and I don't think I've got much more to add to that. Yeah, wonderful. So moving on, we've got another topic we're going to cover, do you want to introduce us to it? Sure. So, as always, that was the hypertrophy past section, and this is now the hypertrophy present section. So, when we look at hypertrophy happening, obviously we are looking to produce muscle growth over time, and that is the net result of us producing a hypertrophy stimulus in a workout, and then losing some of that hypertrophy stimulus at the point when we start the next workout. Now, the way we talk about this is that each workout has a hypertrophy stimulus period. So, we do the workout, and then for a short period of time afterwards, and the duration of that time is going to be the topic of today's conversation, we do a workout, and for a period of time afterwards, there is a stimulus period in which the muscle fibers are increasing in size. Now, during that period of time, the muscle fibers are not able to lose any size, and that's why we're protected in that period of time. When we leave that period of time, we go outside of that hypertrophy stimulus period, we're now losing some of the muscle size and the muscle fiber size that we've gained. And obviously, if you look at low-frequency training programs, where we talk about training a muscle only once per week, for example, then you're going to have a hypertrophy stimulus period for however long, let's say 48 hours just as a starting point, because that's traditionally what the literature has referred to. Then when you leave that 48 hour window, you've now got five days in which you're going to see a loss of muscle size. Now, the maintenance literature is brilliant at encapsulating this problem, because they do one workout a week of three or four sets. You get to the next workout at the following week, and basically all of that hypertrophy is stimulated in the window post that workout the previous week, has now gone. You've lost all of it, but you haven't lost any more. So, that's why we call them maintenance programs, because you kind of create hypertrophy on one workout, and then you lose it by the time you get to the next workout. And that is very, very contentious in areas of the internet where they like to claim that you can do one set per week, you know, once a week and still achieve growth over time. That's just not what any of the maintenance literature studies show. They all show that three or four sets once per week basically just keeps you spinning or wheels and you stay in the same place over time. So basically, what we're interested in is this duration of the hypertrophy stimulus period. Now, the reason this is so important is because when you start to move away from the one set per week program, where you've got this huge period of time, which you're losing muscle mass from one workout to the next, and you start to say, "Well, what happens if I now do two workouts per week or three workouts per week?" And what happens if I want to compare three workouts a week with two workouts a week? Well, in that scenario, you're saying, "Okay, well, the duration of my stimulus period now matters quite a lot." For example, if my stimulus period lasts 48 hours, then I do my three workouts per week, and I get a stimulus period that basically covers almost all of the time, apart from one day a week, and I only have one day a week where I'm likely to lose any muscle size. So if I'm training Monday, Wednesday, Friday, then Sunday is the only day I'm likely to see any atrophy happening, which makes the full body three times a week program really, really nice in that context. If then I'm doing up a lower, and I'm only training a muscle twice a week, now I'm struggling because now I've got multiple days per week, so I do my workout, and I get two days of sort of hypertrophy stimulus, but then I've got a day still of atrophy before I do my next workout to the same muscle group, and then I've got three more days after that, I think. So two more days, two more days, sorry. So total of three days per week, three days per week in total, of atrophy, where I'm actually losing some size in comparison with the full body, where I'm training three days a week, and I'm getting basically only one day. So there's three times as much atrophy over the week as the full body program. That's really important. So just to clarify, in case people lost anyone, so you're saying that because people do talk about atrophy a lot, and they say, and I'm one of them, and they say that, look, we've got all these studies to show you, X amount of muscle is lost in X amount of time in one week, or two weeks, or four weeks, or whatever, and you're saying, look, we can leave that aside for now. What we know is the maintenance studies tell us that there's three to four sets worth that's lost in seven days. So then what the question is, is when over that seven day period, do we lose that almost four sets worth of growth? And you're saying that if it were two days, then that would say that that full body three times per week would mean there's only one day a week where there's some of that atrophy occurring, and you're saying that upper lower, upper lower, where each muscle is getting trained twice a week. He's going to have, was it three days per week of atrophy? If it were, yeah, exactly. It's your most period. So then the question now, the question is, well, is it two days? Exactly. And so obviously, if you are a defendant, a proponent of upper lower split, you've got a very strong motivation to argue that it's 72 hours instead of 48, because you can completely then match what upper lower programs are doing with what full body programs are doing more or less. All this, yeah. You go from three days versus one to one day versus zero. So you close the gap quite considerably in terms of the atrophy. Now, it doesn't actually completely fix the problem because you still have to go back and explain how the maintenance studies work. So if you have maintenance studies are showing that three, as you said correctly, three or four sets per week is the amount of hypertrophy stimulus that's then lost, the amount of hypertrophy that has been stimulated, which is then lost. If you do it with a 48 hour window, you've then got five days, which is basically saying that you lose 20% per day of that previous workouts stimulus. So if you are doing a full body program with three sets per workout, and you're doing that three times a week, then your one day of atrophy is losing 20% of one of those workouts per week, which is really not very much at all. Now, if on the other hand, you said, well, no, we think it's 72 hours, then what you have to then do is go back to your maintenance studies and say, it's not five days anymore. It's four days. So now you've got a four day window, so you're now losing 25% per day. So this is one of the fascinating things that people who argue for 72 hours stimulus periods haven't thought through because when they make that argument, they don't realise that they then have to go back and face the maintenance literature, which is very, very consistent. And that's one of the cool things about it. There's just every single study shows the same thing. So they now have to go back and say, actually, I've just kind of undermined my own argument because on the one hand, I'm arguing that the stimulus period is longer, but on the other hand, I'm now arguing without realising I'm now arguing that my atrophy rate is faster. Which is also that would mean that that not that it matters as much, but it means that that one day, if it were 72 hours stimulus period, it means that one day, it matters exactly. Exactly. So it's like you can't have both things at the same time. You kind of end up in the situation where you're arguing against yourself because you haven't thought everything through. And that's why I think it's kind of weird when people have these conversations because they're not realising that they're arguing with themselves in a vacuum and that actually when they come out and start trying to fit it together with everything else that's having in the literature, it just doesn't work anyway. But the topic of today's conversation is how long is this stimulus period? What a lot of people will do is they will say, we're just going to use the duration of the post workout elevation in muscle protein synthesis rates or myophilic protein synthesis rates. Now let me just clarify a couple of things very quickly. When we talk about an elevation in either muscle protein synthesis rates or myophilic protein synthesis rates, what we're saying is that we're increasing the rate at which new proteins are being constructed so that we add that protein to the muscle fibers. We're always making proteins and removing them. What we're saying is that we're just increasing the rate of making synthesis and that's allowing us to then accrue more protein inside the fibers and that makes them bigger. So what's the difference between muscle and myophilic? Well, muscle includes everything including the non-contractile elements and myophilic just includes the myophilic. So we're saying is anything that is inside of my fibral, that's regarded as myophilic protein synthesis, muscle protein synthesis is more general. Now a couple of quick observations on that. The myophilic stuff is predominant, is what we really are increasing when we're trying to create hypertrophy because you know, 80, 90% of the fiber is myophilic. So if we add new myophilic, that's how we make the fiber bigger and that makes the fiber stronger. And so that's more and more more interested in. The problem is we've got a lot more data on muscle proteins and this is so it's useful to refer to that. And of course if you've got data for muscle protein synthesis, it does include what's happening in the myophilic portion, it's like a sort of then diagram one sits inside the other. The other observation that's very important is that some people, and this is not in the scientific literature, this is definitely a fitness influence of phenomenon. Some people are running around saying that muscle proteins synthesis includes muscle damage repair, whereas myophilic protein synthesis doesn't. It's absolutely not true. So you have to repair myophilic, therefore myophilic protein synthesis rate elevations are doing muscle damage repair in the same way that muscle protein synthesis rate elevations are doing damage repair. And that brings me to where we're going to start today's conversation, which is that you can't actually use the duration of your post workout muscle protein synthesis rate elevation or your post workout myophilic protein synthesis rate elevation to tell you how long the hypertrophy stimulus period lasts, because you've actually got a very large chunk of muscle damage repair happening from those two rate elevations as well as the hypertrophy that is happening. So you've got to look at when and how muscle damage repair is happening and when it's likely to need those rate elevations in the same way that you could look at when the hypertrophy stimulus might be being processed and when it therefore might need those MPS and myophilic rate elevations. So basically, hopefully this is a kind of a sufficient introduction to get people up to speed with where we are in terms of understanding the tools that we've got for measuring the duration of the hypertrophy stimulus period and what the limitations are with using MPS and myophilic rate elevations in this particular context. So just quickly again, some of your eyes in case you lost anyone. So the acronyms are working off here MPS and myophilic, so I'm sure you guys have all seen that online. So we were talking about the stimulus period and when that stimulus period is over is when that actually begins. And so we're trying to work out how long is that that stimulus period and unfortunately we can't just look at stimulus period. We have to look at stimulus period plus damage and you're saying that myophilic is actually telling us both stimulus period and damage. So now we need to work out how can we separate those two. Exactly. And as I've collected three observations which you guys at home can go in and have a look at and there's infographics available on these and studies and various bits and pieces that you can look at. The first thing I want to just describe is that we've got some really nice data on what you can call non-exercise muscle injury. So if you injure a muscle like you bruise because you bump into a hard object or you maybe there's a study where maybe a muscle is cut slightly, it's called elaceration in the literature. So bruises are called contusions in the literature and cuts called elacerations. And you can do also something called volumetric muscle loss which were they actually cut a little piece of muscle out of a tissue. So there's various different models that they can use which are creating damage of a muscle and muscle is extraordinarily resilient and it bounces back from these situations very, very effectively. So we see these models available in the literature where they create non-exercise muscle injury and then they measure the rate of muscle progenitances over time. And one of the really fascinating observations that comes up time and again is that initially in the first sort of 24 to 36 hours or certainly in the first 12 to 20 hours, there's actually a reduction in NPS. The NPS doesn't increase in the first kind of 12 to sort of 16 to 20 hours. And then it starts to come back above baseline again. So we're not seeing any kind of elevation in NPS as a result of this muscle damage. Now the reason for this goes beyond what we're going to talk about today, but it's because for teeth mechanisms and muscle damage mechanisms actually do occur in the period of time after what they technically call an insult, basically the point in which the injury or the damage happened mechanically as in the cut to the laceration or the volumetric loss. You then see a period of time in which you've got subsequent additional damage mechanisms happening, the same way that we see post-workout damage mechanisms happening because of calcium and accumulation. So you've actually got a period of time in which you're actually creating even more damage and you're clearing things away and you're basically just clearing the ground in order to rebuild the structure that you've kind of damaged. So there's nothing really going on in terms of NPS for quite a period of time. And then you start to see an uptake and it starts to increase and increase and increase and really it's kind of around, so it depends on the study I suppose, but I did an infographic of this recently, let me see if I can grab it, that's not the one I was looking for here it is. So yeah, it kind of comes above, it kind of comes above the point where you would say it's an elevation in NPS around about, you know, sort of 24, 36 hours. So we're seeing that muscle damage process really starting to kick up over the second day of our original 48 hour window. Now in these damage models, obviously the damage is quite severe, so you see them kind of continuing up and increasing to 48 and 72 and what have you. So this is not really in the context of what we're interested in, but the important thing that we're starting with then is that when we have muscle damage happening, it doesn't actually elevate NPS in the first probably 12 to 16 hours at all. In fact, it decreases it and then you start to see it come above baseline and really it gets into meaningful territory around about 24 to 36 hour period of that post injury point. So first thing I wanted to just help people understand is that when we're talking about NPS, it happens, it starts much later when we're talking about damage and it goes on for longer. So if you create a large amount of damage, what you're expecting to see is very little happening in that first day or so. And then you're expecting to see days and days and days afterwards of elevated NPS. Now the really interesting thing is if you look at, I believe, the longest duration of myops in the literature and myops, not NPS, I believe, is actually from an aerobic exercise workout. So a lot of people, oh, if I do, you know, this wonderful, amazing high volume strength training program that I've created that I think is the best thing since sliced bread. And I think it's going to create, you know, 72, 9, 6 hours of myops, what it might do, but it's not doing that because it's produced to this wonderful high-perchery stimulus, you know, because we've got this aerobic exercise workout, they'll do exactly the same thing. And I guarantee you that's not producing any high-perchery. Yeah, so knowing how you mean, hey, I can go for a very long downhill run and that's going to get me jacked. Well, the interesting thing is it wasn't even a downhill run, you know, it was actually mostly, mostly concentric. So the really interesting thing is it definitively does look like, you know, if you just do a decent volume of contractions, obviously in the calcium ion late D model, we understand how that works. But you are going to see up sort of perpetuated myops elevation, which is obviously not doing high-perchery, but the duration is extended because you're creating this damage. So first things first, the first point I want to make is that NPS when it's elevated due to damage is going to start later and go on for longer. And obviously that is then very interesting when we look at these studies that are trying to identify the duration of high-perchery stimulus period because quite simply, they can't. Because anytime you create damage in the workout that you just did, you're going to have a trail of myops going on for days, potentially has absolutely nothing to do with high-perchery. So you clarify one point there. So you're saying that there's this delay of 16, 24 hours when there's just damage. Have you told us how, when there's not damage, sorry, when there is damage happening rather than damage repair happening. So just to clarify, what we're saying is that the processes that are necessary to occur before you can start rebuilding the damage tissue involve all of this kelpane activity to start degrading the proteins and then subsequently what an inflammation process, which does the same job, but also clears those broken structures away. And only then when you've cleared the decks and you've got everything where you need it, you can start putting the new structures back in place and that's when you see the uptick and MPS relating to the damage repair or damage replacement is probably a better damage structure replacement is probably a more technically accurate term. So what we're going to do next is talk about two separate situations where we can look at different training variables, training variables are things like respiration, volume and rep range and all those kind of things. So we can look at what happens when you start manipulating training variables to the post workout myops. So when we talked about the damage repair, we talked about MPS because that's what the data is. Now we're going to talk about myops because it's a little bit more precise and it gives us a bit more comfort that we are talking about exactly what we want to talk about. So when we look at myops rates after a workout, so we've moved away from non-excuse muscle injury and now we're talking about strength training workouts, you can look at the effect of things like repetition range and you can look at the effect of things like respiration. Now, the really cool thing is that if you manipulate rep range and you say, "Okay, I'm going to do two different workouts," same number of sets to failure, one with more moderate loads, maybe eight to ten rep maxes, one with light to loads, 20, 25 maxes and you're going to say, "I'm expecting that these will produce very, very similar post training program hypertrophy and therefore the hypertrophy component of my myops should be exactly the same." But we know that repetition range greatly affects post workout muscle damage with light to loads producing way more muscle damage than heavier loads. So what I'm expecting to see is a myops curve that differs between the two workouts only because of the muscle damage component. And what's really cool is if you look at these studies, what you find is that the first 24 hour measurement, the measurement taken in the first 24 hours, is identical between the two workouts. And that's literally exactly what we've just spent the last five ten minutes talking about, which is that muscle damage MPS just doesn't exist in the first 24 hours, so it can't contribute, which is exactly in line with what we're now describing. And the interesting thing is that if you then look at the second measurement in the second 24 hour period when you take that measurement, now myops rates are much higher in the light load group compared to the moderately heavy load group. So literally everything we've just talked about in terms of non-excited muscle injury is jumping off the page at us and saying, "Yeah, that's exactly what you would expect based on the information you've got about damage from different sources." Now when people just does a very, very quick inter-interjection, when people want to argue that damage from contusions and lacerations and excise are different things, that's ignorance. They don't understand how damage works. They need to go back and look at how calcium ion accumulation actually causes damage in every single situation in exactly the same way regardless of how you instigate it. So I'm not having that argument here. I'm happy to have that argument in another location, but that is just how damage works. So we've got this observation that light loads is doing this different thing from moderate loads and only where the damage is high. Now this brings me to the possibly the most important thing I'm going to say today. If we now look at rest period durations, we get the opposite effect. So rest period duration, long versus short rest periods, a long rest period gives me more hypertrophy than a short rest period. So I'm expecting that my ops is going to be elevated because of that extra hypertrophy stimulus that I'm getting from that long rest period. But long and short rest periods don't cause massively different outcomes in terms of post workout fatigue. So I'm not expecting my muscle damage mps to be substantially different between these two situations. If I now go and look at the literature that's compared, my upstreet durations after strengthening workouts with long rests and short rests, what I find is that my difference is exclusively located in the first 24 hour measurement exclusively. And that tells me that when, and just to be clear, that means on the second 24 hour measurement, the second day measurement, there's nothing different between the long and the short rest period groups. If hypertrophy was happening on that second day in a meaningful quantity, if my ops was being directed towards hypertrophy on that second day, we would see differences between long and short rest periods, but we don't see any differences. What that tells me is that hypertrophy stimulus is largely occurring on that first day. And just in synchronization with this, and this is a separate point, if you look at mps rates in the famous Demas review paper, which graphed them out and showed them how they happened over time, the spikes are happening in the first 12 to 16 hours. So what it looks like to me when I'm looking at this literature in its entirety and considering every aspect of it, what I think is happening is that we do a strain training worker and we get a really big spike in my ops that is directed towards or mps my ops which is directed towards hypertrophy. That comes flying down after 12, 16, 20 hours however you want to describe it, whether you're looking untrained or trained people. And you start to see it coming really flying back down. And then the kind of the slow, long, what you call the fat tail in that second day and third day and potentially fourth and fifth days depending on how much muscle damage you created is doing muscle damage repair rather than the actual hypertrophy stimulus. So it's really starting to make us look like, really starting to make it look like the hypertrophy stimulus period is actually a lot shorter. And most of what we're seeing trailing after it is actually doing muscle damage repair. In that Demas study that you just mentioned, so you said this is big peak in that sort of 12 to 16 hours comes down. Does it tick up again or does it then continue to trail down after that 16 hours? So basically if you look at untrained people it kind of peaks around a sort of 16 hour mark and it comes back down to a lower level around the 24 and then it kind of just sits there. You look at trained people it's even more kind of shortened, it's kind of peaking around six hours and it comes flying back down already at about 12. And then again from that point it then just ticks onwards. So I think we've been thinking about myelps in the wrong way for quite a long time because we've been kind of looking at it in its entirety and go and this is and this is a methodological issue because what happened I forget the exact number of years ago but what happened that maybe eight or ten years ago approximately was that research is switched from using very short period of time in which they would measure myelps and PS over maybe three or four hours using one particular technique and they started using a totally different technique and they measured it area under the curve for say 48 hours or 24 hours and that means you don't see the shape of the curve anymore. And I think on the one hand it's fantastic to be able to do area under the curve measurements and see what's happening across 24 or 48 hour windows but we lose something when we do that because we no longer know what the shape of the curve is. So I've got a couple of questions for you but just before I ask that so just to again sort of summarize what you're saying is when we look at the injury caused without any hypertrophy stimulus we see that there's no elevation in myelps for that well in MPS for that first 16-ish 24 hour period then when we look at two conditions where we have the same hypertrophy stimulus a different amounts of damage what we see is a first 24 hour period of myelps looks the same and it's only after that let me see a change in myelps and then all almost the opposite not quite but almost opposite condition where we have a variance in hypertrophy but not in damage in the group that sees more hypertrophy we see a change in myelps elevation the first 24 hours but then after that time period it looks relatively similar again. So my question for you off that is do we have data in like a single set how long that causes an elevation myelps? So this is actually the third point that I wanted to describe so basically the two previous examples I gave one of repetition range light versus moderate loads one of respiration short versus long respiration we can do exactly the same study design or they have done exactly the same study design and they've compared one set and three sets now this is really really interesting so basically if we now look at how myelps rate of evations work with single sets we essentially get a elevation which now there's two ways of thinking about this you can either do it statistically or you can do it numerically if you look at it statistically then what the research will tell you is that basically one set will elevate myelps for 29 hours 28 29 hours also the issue with that is that it doesn't numerically get all the way back down to baseline so if you do it in extrapolation just extend the line in a linear way then you'll get down to baseline around about 35 36 hour point so that's really really interesting because one set probably doesn't cause a sufficiently large amount of muscle damage to really produce mps myelps rate elevations for very long at all I think really if you want to start with a very good estimate of what a hypertrus stimulus period duration is then you would look at the single set literature and you would go you know coming back down to baseline numerically around about 36 hour point 35 36 hour point that is probably what the hypertrus stimulus period duration is most of the time which is obviously shorter than the standard of estimate to 48 hours but you know we wouldn't necessarily expect a linear line going back down to zero you might have a long tail that sort of dribbles on for say 40 42 you know maybe even 48 hours I think at the outside but the point is that ballpark we're not seeing 72 hours or anything silly like that you know what we're probably seeing is half that and maybe just a kind of very low level of sort of five-period stimulus lasting a little bit longer now if you look then at the three set group in the same study now you've got a elevation which is still high at the point when your single set has come back down to baseline more or less around that for a 30 30 hour point so you still got the elevation now obviously some people are going to argue that the greater degree the greater number of sets is producing a larger duration stimulus rather than a larger simple magnitude estimate now this is really interesting because what you can do is you can say well any hype any my ops rate elevation that happens in the first 24 hours is only going towards high-period that's not really that contentious if you read the literature now if we accept that point which as I say I do not think is contentious then what you can do is you can say well okay I've got my one set data here and I've got my three set data here for the my ops rate elevation and I know that all of that my ops rate elevations happening in the first 24 hours has got to go to high-period well that means I can now compare the sizes of those two my ops rate elevations in my first 24 hour period and I can see how much bigger is my three sets compared to my one set and all of that extra my ops rate elevation I'm getting in that first 24 hours is going to go to high-period so if you do that what you find is that when we use data from say dose responses regarding high-period I mean there's two metric analyses available you can use the shurn felt one and you can use the pelland one so if we use the shurn felt one basically what the shurn felt one tells you is that three sets is going to give you about 1.6 times as much high perched fee as one set approximately I think if I remember that correctly ballpark figure maybe it's a little bit less doesn't matter the point is it's not three times okay so so obviously that then means that I can look at the difference in my ops rate elevations area under the curve for the first 24 hours and I can say is that giving me you know the extra 60 percent that I'm expecting in terms of high-period fee stimulus compared to the one set and it pretty much does and if you extend it to around about the 30-hour point it absolutely does so okay there's a little bit of a gray area there but more or less what we're saying is that all of the extra high-period fee stimulus produced by the three set my ops rate elevation area under the curve compared to the one set my ops rate elevation area under the curve is happening in the first 24 to 36 hours now if you then instead of the shurn felt use the pelland which I don't like doing because it shows some rather odd results when you get to the top end of the dose response curve but if you accept that the lower end of the dose response curve is not horrible then then you're dealing with maybe two and a half times as much high-period fee as one set you know and then you're starting to say well actually maybe there's a bit of an extension of duration in terms of the high-period fee stimulus period from doing higher volumes and again that doesn't sit right with me it doesn't make sense but ultimately if you do want to do that and you do want to argue for that and what you're going to find is you get back down to based on around about the 42 hours now if you say that you've obviously got some kind of damage that's pulling away from that you've got to extend that with the longer and you might end up at 48 instead but again ballpark figure what you're ending up with is inside of that 48 hour window you're ending up at the bottom end of the spectrum sort of 24 sorry 30 to 36 hour high-period fee stimulus period estimate if you use the shurn felt matrices which I think is probably better in terms of getting to the right number and the reason for that I think is because the top end of the pelland matrices is skewed upwards because of muscle swelling caused by very high volume training if you look at the if you use the pelland matrices you can end up with 42 hours at the minimum probably more likely 48 if you accept that there is some damage pulling away my ops in that later part of the curve so I think you can actually use one set of those three set analyses to get very precise answers about when you're likely to see the high-period fee stimulus period ending but the important thing is it actually stacks perfectly with everything we've talked about already so the difference between long and short rest periods difference between high and my repetition ranges and now the difference between volumes everything actually fits and tells you that the high-period fee stimulus is probably sitting around 36 hours and volume doesn't really lengthen it or unless that lengthening is associated with damage repair. I don't think there's much I want to add to that in case anyone wasn't familiar with what you were saying at the shurn felt in pelland so that's just we talked last week about the diminishing returns of volume and they're the two volume meta analyses and so they're looking at well you can start to get an idea of how much more stimulating additional sets compared to one set and you're saying that the two meta analyses do disagree with each other a little bit in a magnitude of that and you're saying well it's a little bit really really really big difference but they do both show diminishing returns that's not negotiable right so they do tell us that each additional set is less stimulating and you're saying well if we looked at three sets it's somewhere between the shurn felt one was what 1.6 compared to the single set and then the pelland one was 2.5 compared to a single set and you're saying regardless of which one we go with that magnitude of increased hypertrophy stimulus that seems happening within sort of 42 to 48 hours absolutely definitely and in the case of the shurn felt is done with by maybe 30 hours or so so you know there's no need to speculate that high volumes are dragging the hypertrophy stimulus out longer because if you do that you can't explain why you literally can't explain what the extra myelps is doing in the first 24 hours it's like you say oh well no we think that the higher volumes are dragging out the stimulus period for 72 hours am I okay well tell me what this myelps rate elevation is doing in the first 24 hours because it's not you've got an allocated myelps it's like how are you getting higher myelps in the first 24 hours and also longer myelps that that doesn't stack with the dose response data we've got so it's really cool basic very simple arithmetic calculation that you can do you know literally at home with a piece of I actually did it and I actually did it on this back of this envelope here when I'm with a piece I did the use the trapezium rule and just did it with a pen and a ruler and you can do it literally with the data that's available so very very simple calculation to do you can just estimate how long you think myelps is going to be elevated for assuming that first day is just doing high-perch fear not doing damage repair which as I say is a very defensible position it's really not easy to criticise that when you've got tons of non-excuse mass of injury data showing that there's just nothing happening in that first 24 route period so potentially there's a little bit of this gray area and that's sort of between the 24 hours of an hour period absolutely yes you're saying if anything we're falling on this side of 48 hours and it's yeah absolutely I would say if I if I if I were to you know use outcomes razor and say what do I think the simplest possible answer is to this phenomenon I would say the vast majority of hypertrophy stimulus is happening in the first 12 hours and there is a fat tail that comes down to about 32 ish 30 to 32 hours and I would say by 36 it's probably back down to baseline that would be my expected result if we had star trek type you know level of technology where we could just kind of point a scanning device a muscle and see exactly what was happening you know in that scenario I would expect that profile to happen the peak 12 hours and over and done with and fat tail down to probably around about 30 to 36 I don't think there is much happening after that point anything after that point I would say would be muscle damage repair and I don't think the volumes would change the duration I think they would literally just change the magnitude of the peak in the first 12 hours or so maybe a little bit of the fat tail leading up to the 36 hours point and being very very generous and trying to be as open as possible about the calculations in the possible likelihood of numbers being different I don't think the pattern matrices is correct in terms of its dose response curve slope I don't like the fact that it continues into infinity at the top end of the scale with very high volumes that's just physiologically impossible so I don't think that's right but I'm trying to be as open and as kind of clear as possible and what I'm doing in my calculations so people can see whether they would come into a different conclusion which is cool you know everybody can form their own views it doesn't bother me what other people think particularly I'm just doing this because as I say to you when we have personal conversations I'm doing this because I find it interesting you know if other people find that useful that's fantastic but it doesn't bother me if they find if they disagree with me that isn't important that you've potentially opened a huge can of words which which are not going to go into here but that is if a lot of that hypertrophy stimulus is done within 24 hours people are going to be asking will hold up can I train again in that 24 36 hour period we're not going to do that here but the question I have is you started this by saying we need to consider this question because if we're looking at full body three times a week up or lower of repeated twice a week we want to know how many days of atrophy essentially are we experiencing so based on what you said there so what is the implication of of all this I think people probably aren't going to and obviously we both study what happens on social media just from a academic point of view and because it impacts on what we do and also just because it's fascinating how human beings behave and so of course there will now be people who argue that we should be training every 36 hours and I've already started to see some of that popping up in my questions on social media I'm not going to go there I'm not going to go there I really don't want to go there I mean I was dragged kicking and screaming into saying that full body every other day is better than full body Q does week because technically physiologically it has to be I'm not going to train like that I like to go to the gym on the days that I like to go to the gym I'm not changing my behaviour but obviously some people are competitive and the edge might make the difference for them so I have to be intellectually honest and say I don't want to train like that I don't like training like that I'm not even going to programme like that if I ride to programme for somebody but I have to be intellectually honest and say it is probably better than what I am programming because physiologically it's better ultimately we build a model and then we have to be we have to accept what the model answers tell us we can't just build the model and go I don't like the answer so I'm going to now change the model why did you bother them I mean it's like just do what everybody else does and just form opinions and ideas based on what you want to do it's like the whole point of building the model is to find an answer that you wouldn't have got to just by feeling the answer you know it's like you want to feel the answers I like train like this therefore it's the right answer okay which that's what everybody else does but not doing that we're trying to do is figure out how things work and then look at what the answer tells us and then go okay well does does that mean that you know full body every 36 hours would actually be the secret source to the next mr. Olympia or highly doubt it but it's just like you have to be intellectually honest and say well yeah that might be an answer that is an interesting thing to have a look at no I mean it's the difference between what's probably optimal in physiologically determined situations and what's optimal in terms of your personal kind of preferences not really necessarily the same thing we just got to have the ability to hold those two things in balance in our heads and go this is the answer on paper and because of these reasons and this is the answer in practice because of these reasons and I can hold that tension without having a kind of meltdown about it because you know you're able to do that and I think that that's an important skill set but yeah I do expect there will be people running around saying yeah Chris said that we should now train every 36 hours you know instead of full body every other day I don't honestly know but I'm just telling you what I think is physiologically going on I don't recall if I said this last week but some of the old school like the silvery guys actually did have that conversation about how often to train in terms of you know the optimum time period and some of them and I believe I've read Steve Reeves talk about this actually did try to space their workouts out in a similar fashion sort of be like like Monday afternoon Wednesday morning and they actually talked about doing it exactly like that and obviously the expectation was not everyone could do this but if you can this is one way of doing it and Bob Hoffman in the the program we looked at today he also talks about that you could do this every other day and you know that would be a perfectly good way of doing it except that that means you would have to work out on Sundays every other week and people didn't necessarily want to do that it's very cool to see and we repeat this often in this podcast and I hope we'll continue to repeat this it's very cool to see that when you remove the effects of anabolic from a anecdotal experience you learn so much more you know and those guys have the opportunity to learn an enormous amount without the confusing effects of the anabolic and without the confusing effects of social media and they were able therefore to which I actually kind of filter out to be honest as you will know but you can kind of get this perspective and see just how much knowledge they were able to attain and how much how close their practices were to what we're talking about physiologically I'm just endlessly fascinated and and and just I just enjoy seeing that that connection between those two things which is ultimately what this podcast is designed to do is to share our appreciation of these two phenomena and show how close they are and just how cool that is for cutting through the nonsense that you're going to see on social media today when people are talking about things that have absolutely nothing to do with either how people have trained for hundreds and hundreds of years or in thousands of years we go about the ancient Greeks and ultimately how people are we can construct a physiological model today to explain how high-perture works you know those things are ultimately so close together it's just it's just so fascinating and enjoyable to talk so ultimately in a nutshell the most effective way to train would be to train as soon as possible once that stimulus period is over assuming recovery has occurred at that time point and you're suggesting that based on everything you've gone through today and the available information you've got that seems to be this side of two days yes in that 36 my my personal bet is on it being around the 36th point if it were to be 40 42 I would not be surprised I do not see it going beyond 48 hours anything else you want to conclude with or should we wrap up for today I think that's been a tremendous second episode I had great fun I'm really hope people were able to follow most of not all of that I know that I'm sure there'll be people asking me questions to clarify my messages over the next couple of days but that's past the process so yeah I think that's that's good for today exactly thank you guys so join us like comment subscribe all the good stuff and hopefully you'll join us again next week for a new episode