005 Training volume and post workout fatigue - how many sets are recoverable in 48 hours?

Welcome back everyone to another episode of high-perchvy past and present. And actually, you know what Chris, I haven't told you this. I was uploaded our last episode. I looked at web viewers or listeners who are located. And you guys who are listening are located in over a hundred different countries. So, yeah, so whoever you're listening, welcome and thank you for joining us. So as always, I'll be introducing us to another old-school plan in a moment. During the past part of the podcast and then Chris, you'll be introducing us to a new topic later today on the present part of the podcast. Is there anything you want to jump in and lead with today? No, I'm good. I'm looking forward to hearing about this strength training program from the past. Is it Reg Park that we've got today? It is Reg Park. So last week we spoke about Steve Reeves. And today we've got Reg Park. So we've got two of the great Missy Universe's back-to-back. And last week I said that the Steve Reeves plan we were talking about was my personal favorite silver era plan. And I made a comment that there was one other that I really liked. And this is one of those. So Reg Park obviously, oh well, I say obviously but maybe you don't know, he published quite a lot of different plans. And people will know Reg Mosifer's 5x5 and we're going to talk about a variant of that at a moment. But contrary to how the Steve Reeves plan looked last week, Reg used less excise variation and he used multiple sets per excise. So I personally love that combination of combining kind of what Steve did with what Reg did. But let me introduce you guys to this particular Reg Plan and then we can talk about it. So this one, like I said, he had a lot of different plans and this was what he called the Missy Universe bulk course. Now, bulk is a word, like we kind of colloquially use it a little bit today and he talked about bulking and that sort of associated more with kind of a dirty bulk and just weight gaining. And they used it a little bit like that but there seemed to be a slightly different nuance to the way that they were using it back then. It was very, very common, very commonly where they talk about their bulking routines. And their bulking routines tended to be more like their weight gain. It was kind of like he had someone who needed to gain muscle mass and you would do a bulk routine. And then after you've gained a considerable amount of muscle mass, then you might look at a definition or that would call it defining I think workouts where you might sort of isolate muscles or whatever. Getting to like show and can not just conditioning but to I guess maximally develop particular muscles. So this bulk course is a little bit more of a guess what we would call a mass gaining course or program. So I'll just read through it and then I'll make it come. Actually, I'll tell you guys first kind of the instructions for it and then I'll read through the exercises. He made it very clear and actually I want to make a point about this as well. When you look at a lot of these plans, I don't know if you've known this is so far Chris, but a lot of the time this is a little bit of like almost vagueness in the way that they they give instructions. So they talked about reps or they talked about sets and it's kind of like sort of do something like this. And they kind of give people a few options and read sort of give this as well. So he would say never train more than three times a week. Well does that mean always train three times a week or does it mean maybe you can do two as well. Like it's a little bit vague, but he goes never do more than three times a week. Okay. And then he kind of talked about ramping up volume. So he would say perform. So in the first first week, I think you actually said start with one set and the next week go to two sets. But it was sort of a gradual increase over the first couple weeks. And then he said for one month, you can do three sets per exercise. For the next month, you're going to do four sets and then for the next month, you're going to do five sets. So that sounds a lot. We're not talking warm upsets here. We're talking actual work sets. So worked up to five sets per exercise. And again, he made this very clear. He said you're never going to do more than five sets. Do not do more than five and do not do five sets for more than a month. He said. Now, one other sort of somewhat vague instruction that he gave is with the repetitions, he said never do more than X. And I'll tell you what that number is for each exercise. But it was a little bit like, you know, do you do a couple less? You do a double progression method. I assume he was suggesting you do a double progression method. So the first exercise was a barbell squat. So again, you would do three sets for the first month, four for the second, five for the third. And you do your sets and he would say never do above five repetitions. And the instruction was once you can do all of those sets with the five repetitions, then you go heavier. Now to me, that's suggesting when you go heavier, you're probably going to drop the repetitions and you're probably going to drop down through repetitions or so. So I'm assuming that that's what the indication was there, but it was very much don't go above five. So we got the barbell squat. Now this was supersetted with the breathing pullover and I believe we've talked about the pullover. We've touched on it briefly in the past. We might have touched on it again in a moment. And that was for a set of 10. Now typically with that, you wouldn't go overly heavy. It was it was not really like a go to failure type exercise and you do that immediately after the squat. Then he moved into wide grip bench press and it was very specific. It had to be wide grip. And again, this was never more than five repetitions. And the fact elsewhere he actually talks about doing this for as few as two repetitions. And then you go into what he, I believe he calls it a power deadlift, which is basically like a rack pull. So a knee height rack pull. And at the top of the lift, you do a shrug with it. And again, this was sets of five, never going above five. And then he, after that, would do a barbell vertical shrug. Now with this, he would recommend doing his mini reps as possible with your max deadlift weight. Now here, he actually said never go above 20. I don't, I've never tried doing vertical shrugs on my max deadlift weight. So I don't have a ballpark for how many one is likely to do. But he did say don't go above 20 with that one. And then we've got a wide grip bent over barbell row again, never going above five. And finally, we have an exercise, which I've actually been using a little bit more of in my training groups, which is a barbell cheating curl. And it's quite an interesting exercise if you guys haven't done it. It is basically just a looser tech, a looser form barbell curl. Exactly what it sounds like, use a little bit of hip involvement in it. And he was doing this very heavy. He was also doing this for no more than five repetitions. So very heavy loads. What do you make of all of that? So there's quite a few things that we can say here. I mean, it's really interesting to look at this program in comparison with the Steve Reeves program that we looked at previously. Because we're kind of going from one extreme to the other. We had a program that had an enormous amount of exercise variety in with pretty much full coverage for every muscle region that you can think of with one or two minor exceptions. And then we look at this and we're like, wow, this is this is so different. This is much more minimalist and I can see some really big holes in this routine. You know, there's there's a lot not here. I mean, straight away, you know, we're very limited on the amount of work. I mean, I know I kind of make this point all the time. You know, I've just seen here that we've got a row, which is wide grip. Well, okay, so where's the lat work then? So I've got no narrow grip, no sagittal plane pulling and I've got no frontal plane pulling. So there's not even a pull up in here. You know, you could radically improve this program just by putting a pull up in it. That's that. And this is the point I've made multiple times when we've been looking at these routines. Like pull ups are not difficult to set up. You know, this is not an equipment issue really. So it seems to be a huge kind of failing in my opinion of many of these older routines. So you just don't think in terms of that frontal plane pulling, which was a summary of this as the frontal plane pull up a pull down. So I'll bring one for you soon, just to alleviate some of this anxiety over the lack of lat. The anxiety is just noticing a trend, you know. But here, there's no lat training at all, really. Unless you put the pull over into the lat category and it's a very kind of limited lat exercise. But yeah, so essentially we've got the pull over is really the only thing that gets close to touching the lat. And obviously the back workers is very transverse plane focused. Also, this is a big shift away from the very early programs. I think we started out. Did we start out a sundown? We did, didn't we? We started out with a Milo Bible company. Kind of Milo Bible company. Which was kind of like the bridge between sundown and yeah. But we were modeling on kind of the sundown heritage. So that focus on overhead pressing was really big when we first looked at the early routines. And now it's gone, you know. So like we've got kind of two shrug exercises in here. But we've got literally no overhead pressing at all. So again, it's really interesting to see these changes in the focus of the exercises they're doing. So I think that the lack of sort of lat work, like a from the law says to plane pulling. I mean, you can argue that the pull over does that, but it's so far outside the range of motion with a lat. So, you know, got leverage. It doesn't really count in my opinion. And then the lack of overhead pressing again, I think is a really interesting emission. But again, like I mentioned in some of the early routines, there was a lack of deadlift variation. When you could again say, look, you know, it's not difficult. If you got a barbell, you can pick it up off the ground. So why haven't we got deadlift variations making a bigger impact in those early programs? And we just didn't see that. And now we see it, you know. And a record also really interesting kind of choice to sort of shift focus and work on different muscle groups. So again, very, very interesting just to see the sort of diverse choices that are going on here in terms of exercise selection. So I think that would probably be my. sort of immediate observations. I mean those are observations obviously ignoring the stuff that I will say every time which is obviously we haven't got the equipment so we can't do you know rectus for more as training with knee extensions we can't do hamstrings training with leg curls because those kind of things didn't necessarily exist so you can't really argue that that's a failing because there's just no real meaningful way to do that obviously but yeah those will be my initial impressions just on the exercise section side I think. What do you make of the polova? I know you briefly touch on it potentially being a little bit of Latin but you know obviously not the most ideal exercise. A lot of these guys did include this as part of this squat routine they would do this squat with a polova and they did talk about a morph of a ribcage chest perspective. Do you have any thoughts on that or do you think this is just something weird they kind of got grandfathered in and people followed it? Well essentially if you're doing a polova where in the way that they would have done I imagine which is where you're using a standard weight like a barbell or an easy bar basically your peak external moment on is in the most extended position the most stretched position of the movement okay. Now if you're doing it that way it's basically going to be a coastal peck exercise with you know some posterior adult there you know to help you. So I think that is it's valid to categorize it in that way. I don't think I would categorize it as a Latin exercise first and foremost I think I would probably categorize it. I've talked around this issue many many times before but it is kind of a mixed bag. You've got lots of stuff going on but I think arguably the coastal peck is probably the kind of the key factor there. So I would agree with them. I would say you know yeah if you're treating that as a chest exercise that's not wrong absolutely obviously it's not going to be going anywhere close to the upper part so the peck because those are shoulder flexors rather than shoulder extensors. Well it's interesting because they talk about it very much as I can expansion exercise you know the goal here is to make the chest large and not I don't just mean you know obviously the bench was the main mass buildup but it was that very iconic like if you guys look up photos of red park like you'll see just how well developed and large his chest was and they're talking about it from that perspective of literally like it's expanding the ribcage it's expanding the chest and it's interesting you're saying it's more kind of lower chest which I guess is somewhat neglected a lot of the time potentially it would have that aesthetic kind of impact. Yeah and it's again I'd like you say aesthetic choices probably play into this so like we talked at the beginning of this series of podcasts that we did about the aesthetic choices of people from the sandal kind of heritage where they were thinking mainly about the overhead pressing producing that sort of deltoid development to not really wanting chest development to pull in and you can see that I mean just look at the photos of those guys you know you can see that and as you say you know you look perhaps the photos of this group of bodybuilders and you can see that the chest development is very much marked by comparison is that the pullover doing that is that the bench press doing that I mean obviously the bench press again was something that we tended to not see in those early training programs so there's there's there's different things going on but yeah I mean obviously it's designed to be a minimalist program so I don't want to just kind of stand here and poke holes in it and go they don't have this exercise and they don't have that exercise but yeah of course they don't because it's designed to be a minimalist program but for me there's just a couple of things that I really don't understand why they didn't have them in there. Yeah and they do often talk about these bulking type routines essentially being minimalist they call them like an abbreviated type plans where they are intentionally reducing the amount of exercises for the sake of just gaining as much mass as possible and then they are these exercises back in which is probably why they talk about not doing this for more than you know 12 weeks or however long I will show you a red spark work out in a future episode which is hopefully a little bit more to your liking as far as exercise selection goes but what I found particularly interesting about this one was these are pretty high volume per exercise so he's going up to five sets per exercise and suggesting that you can do this Monday Wednesday Friday a typical kind of 48 hour sort of part per workout now for you guys who have you know listened to our content you probably know the generally speaking we would say that probably that three sets per 48 hours is kind of the sweet spot for recovery so how is it that in the silver era where you know before steroids people were presumably doing for five sets and you know seem to be getting good results yeah so I think we've got two observations to make on that point firstly is the one where you you described in your kind of introductory instructions that he provides so he's saying you don't do you know the five sets for more than one month so he's already kind of he's kind of accepting or taking into account you know acknowledging is kind of what I'm going for he's acknowledging that you can't just run this indefinitely which is kind of indicating that they know that some post workout fatigue is going to accumulate so I think we can kind of straight away just point out that there's this recognition that this is not a sustainable state so I think that's a really good observation from them to say that you know you start pushing higher than you know three or four sets per muscle group per workout three times a week and you're going to run into this fatigue accumulation problem the second thing is of course that we're dealing here with heavy loads more or less so he's kind of working with you know sort of three four five repetitions per set and as you said even going down as low as two in certain cases like the bench press now that's really interesting so the is in terms of post workout recovery is really really good for the classic strength training range of about six to ten reps per set so if you want to draw a graph and I've done my own version of this but you can collect all of the data in either untrained or trained people I've done a chart in strength training people of all the studies I could find where they measured post workout recovery after doing sets to failure or close to failure with six to ten repetitions per set and essentially you can graph the amount of volume that you can do and recover in a certain period of time and that's where we get this kind of you know three sets as recover within 48 hours five sets as recover within 72 hours and so on and so on so that's there's a huge amount of data available for that and it's really well established you can kind of do the analysis yourself if you try and do the same analysis with heavy loads the wheels come off you just can't do it because what you find and I did this as a table I couldn't do as a chart because there's just not there's not enough granularity in the data to do it because what you find is that basically pretty much any number of sets of singles doubles triples or even up to you know kind of getting close to five repetitions per set anything you do in that is recover within sort of you can't really do you know enough sets to really see a significant kind of effect of fatigue at the 48 hour point you see it 24 hours and higher numbers of sets we don't really see it at the 48 hour mark not not not not not very often anyway and and that's really really interesting so basically what we're seeing is this massive difference between the post work out of T created by moderate loads and post work out of T created by heavy loads heavy I mean up to sort of five repetitions per set now just to kind of finalize this observation the time kind of presenting here if we now look at lighter loads so off the top end of the sort of 15 rep max as that you kind of say is the top end of the moderate load rate range between 6 and 15 if you go off the top end of that and you start doing sets with lighter loads you're going to find that a single set of light loads to failure is going to give you 48 72 hours worth of fatigue it's absolutely nuts so there's this perception I think in the fitness industry as a whole obviously where kind of you think about for centuries a gigantic kind of pyramid where kind of this tiny little tiny little drawing or at the top that talks about the scientific bits and the majority of the incentive is just people who want to be motivated to exercise and of course that's the majority of this pyramid but if you look at this majority of the pyramid most people would just kind of go well heavy loads take longer to recover because because but the reality is it's the opposite so what we see is incredibly strong trend for being able to do quite high numbers of sets of single doubles triples and not actually see any post work up to say 24 48 hours and you start increasing the rep ranges you immediately start seeing that post work up to and you get as high as lighter loads and absolutely you know the wheels come off you can't actually do light loads train training to failure with single even with single sets three times a week you're just fatigue is going to be there every time you come back and that's going to then create cumulative deep problems so we're seeing this very strong like observable trend for rep range to have an enormous impact on post work up to this is really significant and so I do actually want to go for some of it again because it will be new to a lot of people I think who are listening to this so you've made that that obvious statement there that you know a lot of people do believe that actually this post work out fatigue is is worse or higher with heavier loads and lower repetitions and you know that was a a match that I heard all the time as an early PT you know heavy loads cause CNS fatigue like that was just what people said and no one really questioned that and ultimately what you said there's there's there's very very high ceiling if anything to how many sets you can do of very heavy loads if you're doing singles I mean what there's in the table you put out there there was a study whether you use what 20 sets of singles yeah so just to be clear for people who are struggling to understand that table when research is test things things like that. You don't obviously expect your subjects to lift their 1 rep max 20 times. I mean, I don't think I've lifted a 1 rep max 20 times in my life. So nobody's going to do that, you know, in a single workout. What happens is they do a sort of their initial estimated 1 rep max and then the researchers will reduce the weight slightly based on the rest period that they're going to have and what they think the likely 1 rep max will be in the next attempts. They kind of drop the weight by, you know, sort of 5% or so and then you do it again and then you drop the weight by a bit more and you do it again. So you end up with these 20 singles, no they're not 21 rep maxes but at the point when the attempt was made, it's kind of pretty much the maximum weight that they could lift. Now even with that scenario going on, as you say, you don't really get any post workout fatigue and this is a really perfect moment for me to just like add in a quick observation on what fatigue actually is. And I'm not going to run for, you know, kind of 10, 20 minutes here. I just want to make a very quick observation, which is that when we say fatigue in exercise science, what we mean is that there is a temporary period of time in which exercise performance is reduced. And you can see that in the workout itself, like what I've just described. So they do the 20 singles and exercise performance drops and you have to reduce the weight in order to be able to do your next single. Okay. So we sing fatigue happening during the workout fatigue is the temporary reduction exercise performance. It is a measurable outcome. It's not anything physiologically kind of defined as in we can't say what the mechanisms are unless we kind of drill into that and start investigating, but it is the outcome. It is the measurable reduction in strength. If I come back the following day and I measure again my strength and it's reduced slightly, then I can say that there is fatigue present. Now, if I come back the following day and this is the point I want to make, this is the point I want to make. If I come back the following day after that workout, after that 20 singles, which honestly I would be very unhappy about doing, if I did that 20 singles and came back the following day and discovered that I actually like many of the subjects in this study, there was no reduction in strength for 24 hours. Then I am not fatigued. I'm going to say that again. If I've done that 20 singles and I come back the following day and I'm still capable of producing the same amount of force I was a previous day, I'm not fatigued. Now I might feel miserable, might feel I might ache, I might be in extreme discomfort, I might dread the thought of going near a barbell again. I might feel all kinds of emotions and feelings associated with the workout I did the previous day, including up to hating the people who maybe do it, but I'm not fatigued. And this is the thing I really want to emphasise that when exercise scientists use the word fatigue, they're referring to an objective reduction in exercise performance and not referring to how you feel. Yes, when we start drilling into mechanisms and we talk about central nervous system fatigue at the supospinal level, yes, that's absolutely related to feelings and emotions and those kind of things and that can create a reduction in strength. But if it doesn't, then technically fatigue is not present. And I think this really is one of those things again, I say this all the time and there's so many of these things that I could just do. But if I literally just said that for the rest of my time in the fitness industry, it wouldn't be a waste of time. Because everybody in the fitness industry thinks fatigue is a feeling, it's an emotion, it's a sensation, it's this kind of like state that kind of creates problems and nobody really knows what it is. And that's why we've got these ridiculous things being said by some people in the fitness industry, in our section of the fitness industry, the bit that talks about the science and things like that. You've got people saying, well, you know, fatigue doesn't affect your ability to stimulate adaptions. I'm like, sorry, what? You know, if you have a reduction in exercise performance and that's caused by reduction recruitment or mechanical tension, then it has to affect your ability to stimulate adaptions because those are the two things that stimulate the adaption, at least in hypertrophy too. So again, there's just massive confusion about what fatigue actually is. And so really, I just wanted to emphasize that fatigue is the objective reduction performance. So yes, if we have a workout comprising 20 singles, starting with one max and decreasing downwards as required to complete their workout. And you come back the following day and there's no reduction in strength present as a result of that previous day's workout. No, we are not fatigue. The subject is not fatigued. And that's the really interesting thing that we're addressing here with. Yeah, there's lots of really good things there. And I think you've touched on probably why this myth has been perpetuated as to what fatigue is because people are just simply associated with the feeling. And like I said, you could do those 20 singles. You can come back feeling like, you know, absolutely awful. Not wanting to touch a barbell, but you may not be fatigued. And so you could do these 20 singles, not be fatigued by the following day or certainly by two days, but in that study, the following day. And then you and we're not even talking, you know, 20 singles of a barbell girl. I mean, we're talking like compound lifts squats. And yet you could do a single set of 20, 25 repetitions in a leg extension and still be fatigued days later. Absolutely. And that's that's the issue because that then requires us to say, well, what's happening then? Why is this happening in this particular way? And so that requires us to then say, what's that? What is the underlying physiological state that we need to investigate to understand post-workout fatigue? And ultimately, what it comes back to, and I posted about this very recently, I did a slide deck where I showed people that post-workout fatigue is not actually primarily happening during the workout. It's actually a process that we undergo in the post-workout periods. In case people have missed it, could you just quickly cover again? So you said sort of singles, you could do 15, 20 sets and be recovered. And then you said in that graph that you put together six to 10 repetitions. And then you said that these high repetitions, you know, 15, 20 plus, they'll be seeing more fatiguing still. Is there, can you just quickly cover that sort of continuum? You know, where do we see these significant steps up in post-workout fatigue? Sure. So this is really, really interesting. And this is something that is becoming more obvious the more time I think we spend looking at this data. You know, the more we look at these groups of studies and go, okay, what's what's happening here? So basically, we can start with those three categories. The 1 to 5, 6 to 15, and then 16 plus. And exactly as you've just summarized, we've got very little post-workout fatigue happening in the heavy group, moderate to mount, happening in the moderate group, and then just silly amounts in the light load group. Also, if we drill down within those categories, especially when we're looking at the heavy end of the spectrum, we can do the same thing again. So like example of the 20 singles, there's just no fatigue happening at all in the post-workout period. But when you start to get up to even 8 to 10 sets of, you know, sort of the, kind of the 3, 4, 5 repetitions per set, then suddenly it starts to display fatigue at 24 and even 36. And then if you push it up to this, I think there's one of the studies I've got on my list as sort of brushing the 6 rep mark, 6 rep max mark, then you start to see 48 hours as well maybe, and in certain cases. Interestingly of that, I think that 6 rep actually was only 36 hours. But the interesting thing about that 6 rep max study is that they did have a much more granular measurement of post-workout fatigue. So they took multiple measurements over the period that were measuring not just at 24, 48, whatever. And that showed a secondary muscle damage effect. So we'll get into that in a minute when we talk about what post-workout fatigue actually looks like. But when you see something like a secondary post-workout fatigue effect where you get that initial strength loss as a result of the workout, and then you come back 4, 8, 10, 12 hours later and it's dropped again, a secondary reduction in strength, that tells you you've got an inflammatory process going on, which is part of the key kind of post-workout fatigue effect. So in answer to a question, what we see, not only is differences between heavy moderate and light loads, but we also see differences within those rep ranges. So it's a sliding scale all the way through. Yeah. And I think this is a really interesting thing, which is that if you're working with singles doubles triples, which is kind of how Olympic weightlifting is constructed, if you're working in those rep ranges, then they can literally just train every day and bash out a whole bunch of singles and doubles and come back the following day and do it again. And that's why it works because ultimately those kind of repetition ranges just don't really cause much post-workout fatigue. And if you're managing that kind of other side of the problem, which is, you know, hating the barbell and not wanting to do that and it hurting, and if you've got the resilience to those issues, you know, for whatever reason, maybe you're just constructed in a way that by mechanically means that you can squat perfectly with absolutely no, you know, kind of discomforting sensations or problems or any other soft tissue issues, then fine. I mean, you can basically do that forever, not forever, forever, but you get the idea. As soon as you start to push a bit towards that top end of that racket and you're doing 4, 5 and 6 as well, that's then a very different category. So I think we do see a difference in the 1 to 3 from the sort of the 4 to 6. I want to make one observation based off that. So in the program we've just talked about the Ridge Park one, he actually can grow a, I guess like a secondary program for people who wanted to do weight lifting instead of bodybuilding. And it was very much a same kind of thing, but he made a few exercise substitutions and he added in several additional exercises. So it was actually more volume per muscle, but they were doing triples instead of fires. And that's interesting what you've just said there that if you drop down to triples is a much higher ceiling and that actually follows exactly what we saw in that program. Exactly. And you know, I think, I mean, we obviously probably would consider dog hat burns programs to be a little bit outside of our focus on this podcast, but you look back at those and you're sort of doing eight sets of two and three. That I think really is one of those sweet spots where you're an enormous amount of work done, tremendous strength gains, very effective I personally recommend you to watch this video. that program for about two years. I absolutely loved it. I only really kind of struggled with because I was probably at the older end of the spectrum of the kind of people that would be doing that program, but I only really found it was just occasionally I would get a discomfort that maybe hit pain doing squats or something like that. I never really have any issues with fatigue, always making progress. So personally, I really kind of found those programs to be very, very effective for what they were trying to do. So yeah, I think again, what we've got is not just differences between these categories of rep ranges, but also within the category. And there's actually quite a steep curve, like we've just been saying, the curve going from the singles doubles triples up to the four, five and six is a very, very big shift. So singles doubles triples, eight plus sets, fours and fives in a 48 hour recovery period, fours and fives, what four or five sets they're about. I think that's probably right. And that would fit perfectly with what Richard Park was doing. I think probably that's true. I think a five sets of five is probably toppy. And again, but we have to stop and just remember that that's not five sets of five all the time. That's five sets of probably a bunch of threes, some fours and the five here and there. And so maybe start out and you get five when you first set, but maybe you four and then three and then three. Well, happy. It's not actually spending the whole time doing fives. You've got maybe just one or two weeks here and now where you've got fives. And then six is sevens eight. I think we're pushing into the moderate load spectrum now. I think you're starting to get to the zone where realistically, where I would be always trying to keep a three sets as my as my target. I don't I think ultimately we have to remember that, you know, across and this is something we were talking about before we start to the this podcast actually on a completely separate topic, which I went I won't raise here because it's entirely different kind of a problem. But when we use statistical significance to identify the presence of a particular phenomenon, we got to their mind that we're using that in the context of our measurement accuracy levels. So we're only going to find stuff if it's really, really obvious. So I think when we're talking about post work out of tea, we have to remember that when we're using statistical significance to identify the presence of something, that's when it's really screamingly obviously there that that kind of tells you if you just kind of extrapolate logically without getting emotionally attached to our statistical significance works. If you just extrapolate logically that implies that we're probably missing a presence supposed to work out of tea in a lot of other situations. So I'm not trying to kind of, you know, a lot of people say that I overestimate how important for tea is I absolutely don't. But I'm just kind of pointing out here that there will be scenarios where we can say what statistically there's no fatigue now. I'm like, I bet there is though, I bet there is some. I bet there's a tail end of some there. So realistically, yes, you know, if you're doing three sets of say five, six, seven, you're probably going to find that there's a lot less likelihood of post work out of tea being present and comparison with somebody is doing the top end of that range eight, nine, and ten, higher than that 12s, whatever. Absolutely. But I would still probably say that my limit is probably three sets, realistic kind of sensible limit. It's probably three sets for that zone. So yeah, I think you're probably able to five sets when you're going below five all the time. I think if you're going above five, like I tend to train above five a lot because it's just convenient to do so. But, you know, I think if you can do that, I think I would still sit with the three sets in the same way that because it technically is a moderate load at that point. And when you think it would have to drop down to two sets. So the chances are, I've never thought about that question. The chances are that if you're training all the time in the rep range between ten and fifteen and you're pushing the higher under that spectrum, then I would imagine that you're probably going to need to ameliorate your three sets standard that I would say is a moderate load standard. If you're always training that ten to fifteen rep max range, I would say probably want to be on two instead of three sets. I just don't understand why you would train in that in that rep range when you can probably just as easily train in the six to ten. Maybe there are certain practical situations where people just lower that I'm so strong and this exercise is the only one I've got. Okay, fine. Okay, well, you know, understand that. But I think practicality is a good argument there. Exactly. I do use a preference for some exercises and it's almost always. Exactly. Exactly. You know, but you're like eight feet tall. So I mean, so that, I mean, that's the advantage of being a small guy. So, I think, yeah, in ten to fifteen, I would say, if they're in that rep range, then I'd probably drop from three times to above fifteen. Obviously, it's just not going to work. You're not going to be able to train three times a week with any number of sets per workout if you're in the above fifteen. I think that was really interesting. Hopefully people have enjoyed that. I derailed you wanted to talk about fatigue mechanisms. So I'll let you go now. Sure. So people are going to be really sick of me talking by the end of this podcast. So basically, I just wanted to take five, ten minutes to walk through exactly what is happening in the post workout period and why these rep ranges produce the effects that they do. So essentially, very quickly, as a preamble, there is a kind of, again, in the fitness industry as a whole, there's a perception that post workout fatigue is produced by muscle damage and muscle damage is caused by muscle flies tearing themselves apart during exercise. Neither of those two statements are really true. So basically, post workout fatigue is a collection of four or five separate mechanisms and they all trace back to biochemical processes that occur during a workout in relation to calcium ion accumulation. So the reason we talk about calcium ions is because when you activate a muscle fiber, if you activate it electrically from the central nervous system, then what happens is the electrical signal travels along the sole membrane, goes down inside the transverse tubule and triggers the release of calcium ions into the fiber. So you're basically converting electrical signals into chemical signals to make the fiber do the crossbridge formations that produce force. So it's kind of like communication process. The issue is the calcium ions when they enter the muscle fiber, they don't just tell the actins and myosins to bind with each other to produce force, they also trigger a whole bunch of other processes which create fatigue. And so I kind of call these calcium ion-related fatigue mechanisms. Now, during the exercise, what you're going to have is a couple of calcium ion-related fatigue mechanisms, one of which is called excitation contraction coupling failure, which is where the communication process breaks down. So you kind of you fragment the triadjunction and the electrical signal arriving no longer produces a kind of a signal internally to produce cross-produced. And that's a little tiny damage mechanism essentially. I mean, we call it excitation contraction coupling failure because it's a failure of the excitation contraction coupling process, but the reality is it's damaged to a little protein that holds the junction in place. So we get this tiny damage mechanism. You can also get a little damage mechanism in the surface of the cell membrane. That's produced by when the mitochondria are dealing with calcium ions, they will produce reactive oxygen species, which trigger the release of an protease, which damages the cell membrane. And that then prevents electrical signals from transversing the muscle cell membrane. Now, interestingly, very quickly, a lot of the time when we see reductions in electromography readings, it could be because of this cell membrane excitability reduction. So we've got to be careful when we kind of try to deduce what's happening from a sort of central nervous system point of view into what's happening on the muscular point of view, because you can get reductions in EMG signals because of this activation failure locally rather than centrally. So anyway, so you've got these mechanisms happening during the workout, which are creating our reduction in muscle fiber force. Again, when you hit the post-workout period, the calcium ionic accumulation has triggered the release of proteases, which start damaging the myofibrils, and that's when you start to see what we would call as muscle damage happening. But that's happening in the post-workout period. That's not happening during exercise. When that protease damage starts to kind of settle down, you then have an inflammatory process, which clears away all of that damage, creating essentially even more damage in the sense that you've got to think of this inflammatory process as a clearing away process. I like to call it a Pac-Man process because it's kind of the macrophages coming in and just eat stuff. Basically, it's a clearing away process. You're clearing well the process, and then after that's happened, you're then going to start building new myofibrils. This is essentially the heart of the problem that I've been battling with some people on social media recently, where they've been trying to tell me that damage gets repaired before hypertrophy can happen. I'm like, "Well, we know that hypertrophy happens in day one after a single set exercise, because my ups comes down to baseline after like 29, 30 hours." But we also know that any damage that's happening is getting basically occurring in that first 12 to 24 hours, so damage can't actually occur before hypertrophy can't actually happen before hypertrophy is being processed, because the damage hasn't even happened at the point where the hypertrophy is already done, so or at least not all of it. So what happens? You've got these two-phase process. Calpanes, proteases, causing damage to myofibrils followed by separately, secondarily, this inflammatory process. So what I've just done there very, very quickly is describe three key post-workout体 mechanisms all deriving from calcium and accumulation. Firstly, you've got excitation contraction coupling failure. Secondly, you've got damage to the cell membrane preventing conductivity of the action potentials, and thirdly, you've got the myofibrilidamage. So very, very briefly, what's happening here is that the cell membrane excitability reduction and the excitation contraction coupling failure are switching the muscle fiber off internally. They're stopping you from actually creating cross bridges completely. The fibers just won't do anything. It won't produce some mechanical tension at all if you've created either of those two-phase mechanisms. What's the timeline when do those two mechanisms? Excitation contraction coupling failure is happening inside of a workout. So if you do a set to failure with, and we'll get into rep ranges in a moment, but if you do a set to failure with a sort of a rep range that's kind of above 5, 6, 7-ish, you're going to have some excitation and traction coupling failure happening then. If you do a bunch of sets in that situation, you're going to start to see some marine damage as well. So this is slightly delayed in comparison. And that's the only specific obviously. That's fiber specific. That's muscle fiber specific because we're talking about individual fibers experiencing that issue. But if you're doing full body and you take a set of failure with 10 repetitions and then you go to another muscle relevant, then yeah, exactly. And then thirdly, the third of the three mechanisms I've described is this muscle, my fibroid damage. And of course that, you know, you could still be activating a fiber at that point, but you don't have as many fiber, my fibros therefore because you damage some of them. And the protein is basically causes damage, but then the inflammation just clears it away completely. It takes the my frugal out. We talk about repair. And I mentioned this a whole bunch of times, but we talk about repair, but it's not really repairs replacement. So you can't really think of the repair process as like you might, for example, if you've got a shelf that you need to repair in the house, you can't look to any tinker about it and you fix the thing that's missed. That's not how repair processes work inside muscle fibers. The analogy in this situation would be you would take the old shelf down, remove it throughout a way and put anyone in place. That's, it's a replacement process, not repair process really. So that's a three key post workout for team mechanisms that are happening inside the muscle fiber, how they're all going to be basically triggered initially by the calcium ion accumulation. Now you can have, like you mentioned earlier, central nervous system fatigue. The reason that happens is because the inflammation that is creating this second wave of damage and mentioned that earlier, the second wave of damage creates a secondary loss in strength. That inflammation gets into the bloodstream, creates a sensation of the brain, produces supospinal CNS fatigue. Now that is going to be whole body because it's the brain level phenomenon. So what we've got here is three localized team mechanisms, which are fiber specific and a whole body CNS fatigue mechanism, which is going to affect everything. Now that is only going to kick in when the inflammation kicks in, which is going to be, you know, 6 to 12 hours post workout. Finally, if you really want completeness, you can also say, well, if I've got post workout fatigue locally in a muscle, I'm also going to have a coordination disruption. Now that's something for the athletes to worry about. That's not something for the bodybuilders to think about. So with these four mechanisms, plus one, if you want to think about it, from an athletic perspective. Right. So that's the super quick version of post workout fatigue in a nutshell. The reason I'm explaining this now from a repetition range point of view is that different rep ranges are going to create different amounts of calcium ion accumulation in the muscle fibers. So if you literally just do a couple of repetitions, you're not giving the muscle fibers enough time to accumulate calcium at. It's literally that simple. So if I do singles double triples, then there's almost no calcium ion accumulation because I haven't actually activated the muscle fibers for long enough to allow calcium ions to accumulate. If I start doing higher repetitions, and you start to accumulate more and more calcium ions, because you're activating muscle fibers for a longer period of time, that's it. So if you look across the entire rep range that we've described today, you go from single all the way up to 2030 repetitions per set, all you're doing is changing the amount of time you're spending activating the muscle fiber and exposing it to calcium ions and allowing those calcium ions to accumulate. So if I do low repetitions, I don't allow that to happen. And if I do higher repetitions, I do allow that to happen. So rep range is one of the key factors that determines how much post-workout fatigue mechanism you're going to generate. And as I've described earlier, all of them bottleneck through this calcium ion accumulation problem. So essentially, I think one of the biggest misconceptions in the frameworks that people use when they think about post-workout fatigue is they think, Oh, well, I might have this mechanism or I might have some CNFT or I might have some muscle damage. It doesn't work like that. Every single post-workout fatigue mechanism comes through calcium ion accumulation. So it's a it's a package deal. You get all of them or you don't get any of them. So it's like you get the excitation contraction coupling failure. And if you've got that because you've accumulated calcium ion, you must also have to some degree some cell membrane damage. And if you've got that you must also have some diaphragm of that is because you've created some proteases in response to the calcium ion accumulation. The way to train that like more like you could instead of cause more one particular type in particular. Because it all bottlenecks through the same original phenomenon. It's actually although when people listen to me talk about this stuff, they get, Oh, wow, that's really complicated. I'm like, yeah, but just stick with it for two minutes. Because when you get to the end of the explanation, what you realize is it actually is really simple. Because it all coalesces into a single problem, which is if you are creating a calcium ion accumulation during the workout, then you're going to create a lot to post-workout fatigue, all of the mechanisms. It's a package deal. So a set of 20 being more fatiguing or occultive vitatal last longer than a set of 10 is that because there's more muscle fibres that are experiencing this excessive amounts of calcium ion accumulation then. It's not that there's more muscle fibres because if you train to failure, then you're probably seeing a very similar number of fibres being activated. It's the duration to which they're being activated. But the presumably kind of failure is going to cause the muscle fibres of the highest threshold mode units to be active for a similar duration. So is it that there's other fibres that are active for longer? Exactly. So you're basically, you're continuing to the point where because these is the way to think about it is the other way around. So if you start with where your fatigue levels have to be at the end of the set in order to fail, that kind of helps. So if you're imagining right, you've got a sort of 15-wreck max and you think you've got a calculation that allows you to establish that's approximately 70% of your warm-room max. In other words, you've got to reduce your strength by 30% to get to the point where that 70% of warm-room max is now impossible for you to lift. That's the process you kind of got to go through. So like that 30% obviously there's going to be a chunk of central node system fatigue associated with the exercise that you've just done. There's going to be some metabolite related fatigue and there's going to be some of this calcium-armolated fatigue. Essentially what we're saying is that because of that larger percentage, because if I just do like a 5-wreck max which is 90%, then I'm only going to drop strength by 10%. The big chunk of that is metabolites, a little bit of CNS fatigue and I'm done. It is almost no calcium-armolated fatigue at all. But if I push onwards and try to do 10-wreck max and 15-wreck max and now I've got a 70% and I've got to find that extra 20% of reduction in strength, a big chunk of that's going to come from calcium-armolated fatigue. And the reason for that is because if you look at the individual fatigue mechanisms during a set CNS fatigue and metabolite related fatigue and calcium-armolated fatigue, the metabolite related fatigue is fastest. So if you're only doing a couple of reps, you get it all from the metabolite related fatigue. If you're doing a few more reps, you're going to get some from CNS fatigue as well. And if you do some more, you're going to, it sort of just works like that in the sense that the fewer repetitions you do, the more you're going to get from metabolite related fatigue, the less you're going to get from calcium-armolated. I hope people follow that because what you say is you can get a failure through different repetitions and what's getting a failure's ultimately different types of fatigue. The fatigue mechanisms vary depending on how long you're exercising for. So if you were to just literally measure everything from one rep max through to a marathon run, you can literally just see the change in fatigue mechanisms as you go through that sequence. So it's exactly the opposite way around for what most people think, literally the opposite. So if I look at the one rep max, what's the thing that causes me to experience fatigue in the one rep max? It's metabolites. It's nothing else. If I start to do doubles and singles, sorry, doubles and triples as well as my singles, then I'm going to start to see a bit of CNS fatigue creeping in there. Just a little bit. Start to do more repetitions. You're going to start to see some calcium-armolated fatigue creeping in there as well. If you push things right the way up through the rep range and you get all the way through the top end of the light loads and out of the other side to the point where you've now no longer got any vascular occlusion happening. So now you can't accumulate metabolites and you don't have metabolite load fatigue. Now what happens very interestingly is that the number of reps you can achieve suddenly skyrockets for a given percentage of on max skyrockets. You can now do low loads more repetitions and that then starts to change the thing completely. And ultimately it pushes all of the fatigue now across to the central nervous system. Because ultimately you can always kind of just do one more repetition if you put your mind to it. And then you end up in this scenario where pretty much 50 to 70% of your actual fatigue you're experiencing is supospinal in nature. So when we look at fatigue across the entire range of human activities and there's almost no CNS fatigue in a heavy load one rep max and there's pretty much exclusively CNS fatigue at the upper end of the spectrum. So you could basically have like a bar like a 100% bar and you can have like an x percent is coming from this fatigue, x percent coming from metabolites, calcium, that would be yeah so failure is not failure. You know like obviously it's always the same thing and this is the again an argument I get into with people because they're like oh well muscular failure is when the muscle can't produce enough force. Yes and no. Yes and no. I mean technically from the outside it's going to look like that but the reason you hit failures because you reach the maximum tolerable perception effort. You can see this happening like there's very famous endurance runners ultra endurance runners who can run for days and days and days and days and they're basically when you put one against the other it's literally just a mind game. It's like who can psych the other one out because ultimately you can always do one more step. There's nothing really stopping you do more one step if you're motivated enough. If you increase the tolerable perception effort if you suffer pain to a great extent then you'll just be able to do that extra step and so it becomes this really crazy situation where people can push themselves to absolutely insane limits. Now you don't see that as visibly at the other end of the spectrum but it's still there. It's just the the magnitude of effect is much smaller, many, many, many orders of magnitude smaller. But it's still there. So ultimately, we're always hitting muscular failure, task failure, because of the maximum tolerable perception of effort. It's just much less visible at the high-intensity end of this spectrum. But the consequence, I guess, from a post-workout perspective is quite different. Now, you've given us timelines as to when these start to occur, but you haven't really touched on how do they differ in how long they persist for in terms of excitation, contraction, capping failure, or my individual repair or replacement. What's the difference in length? So, excitation, contraction, coupling failure seems to have a fairly tight boundary around it. I mean, I'm sure the last study is showing that it runs longer or shorter, but generally speaking, if we measure excitation, contraction, coupling failure after a workout, it usually sticks around for, say, somewhere between two and four days. Two at the, obviously, so at the end of the spectrum, where we're dealing with normal strength training, and you're going to push it up to maybe four days, if you do a little bit of eccentric overload in there. The damage to the cell membrane is contentious. It really depends on what data you look at. If you look at data, which has measured just the cell membrane excitability, directly, it tends to go away quite quickly within probably about six hours, so it maybe isn't a post-workout team mechanism that we need to worry about too much. But other data in direct data suggests that you could have sort of quite a permeable sand membrane for a couple of days post-workout. So in that case, it might fall in the same category as excitation and contraction coupling failure. It doesn't really matter because the two are doing the same thing. So whether it's excitation and contraction coupling failure or both excitation and contraction coupling failure and cell membrane damage, loss of cycle and excitability, it doesn't really matter because they're doing the same thing. They're both switching off the fiber. You can't load a fiber that you can't switch on. Again, let me emphasize this moment when people say, "Oh, you worry too much about post-workout fatigue." No, I'm not worrying about post-workout fatigue. I'm worrying about being able to stimulate the fiber and I can't stimulate the fiber if it can't switch done. Post-workout muscle damage through the cow pain process, the protein process followed by the inflammatory process. Those are really interesting concepts because they literally expand and contract according to the magnitude of exposure to calciumides. If you expose the muscle flowers to a very small amount of calciumides, you're going to have a tiny amount of muscle damage. It's going to get cleared out within a day or two. You can push that process to silly extents. Obviously, this is not done in human studies, but you can do it in animal studies and you can see three or four weeks worth of muscle damage. It takes that long to fix the problem. Generally, it doesn't take longer than that because what we have, again, and a bit of a terminology issue, but exercise scientists differ in shape between muscle fiber repair and muscle fiber regeneration. Technically, and again, for instance, she doesn't do this, but exercise science does. So, exercise science will say, muscle fiber repair is when you keep the existing muscle fiber and you just replace bits of it to the tie damage. Like the example I gave over the shelf, you take the shelf essentially down and you put a new shelf up, that's the repair process as it starts. Regeneration is where you would, like, keep the same analogy. You would not have a whole house down and build a new house. So, regeneration is where basically the old fiber goes in the critic inside the cell membrane, completely dies. You clear it all the way. It's absolutely completely gone apart from the cell membrane and you completely build a new muscle fiber inside the old space and that is regeneration. It complete an utter rebuilding of a fiber from the ground up and the only thing you keep is the cell membrane. That's regeneration. And the house goes back smaller in that scenario. Well, that's an interesting question. I mean, I don't actually know and I don't think anybody's really done any work to establish what they would look like. You end up with a new muscle fiber inside the old cell membrane. How many my fribles you end up with, I could not say, but you end up with a new cell membrane. Sorry, a new fiber inside the old cell membrane. The reason I mention this is because regeneration tends to take about four or five weeks to happen. So, in that scenario, we would say that we're highly unlikely to see repair processes push past that number of weeks because if the fiber detects that the amount of damage is so catastrophic that it's going to take four or five weeks to do all of the repairing, then why bother? You know, makes no sense. Just regenerate the fiber and start again. So, and interestingly, I was looking at this yesterday because I was a little bit aggravated by people saying that muscle damage doesn't happen in trained lifters. I actually went and found a whole bunch of data showing regenerating muscle fibers inside power lifters. So biopsies were taken of very high level power lifters and you can actually see regenerating muscle fibers inside their muscles. Now, that's really interesting because basically that says you can get catastrophic level damage on a fiber by fiber basis in people who have high levels of all intractivation, who are very well-strength trained, large amounts of muscle mass, and perhaps their muscle fibers at the top end of their motina pool were being accessed. They're very fast-twitch, very vulnerable to these calcium iron related fatigue mechanisms. You can get essentially regenerating fibers in those situations. So, totally and utterly invalidates this idea that, you know, trained people don't get muscle damage. I don't know where this idea comes from, but I see it all. Now, I've got a couple of questions and I want to stick with a fatigue before I ask you a more application-based question. But in terms of, so, you know, you sort of, when the fatigue makes it to the start, when, how long the life the last four, and that they're kind of all being driven by the same thing, by calcium iron accumulation. So, we've sort of talked about different rep ranges influencing that. Do we want to touch on anything else? Does influencing that as well? I think it's worth mentioning in just so that we've got to reference here. So, basically, there are, you know, kind of five things and I've done a bunch of articles on my FAQ to list these out and they're all available if people want to look into it in more detail, but essentially, rep range is just one of those five. So, obviously, proximity to failure is going to work more or less the same way as rep range. So, if you start leaving reps in reserve, then you're going to dial things back a little bit. Now, the interesting thing here is that if you recall the moment to go, we were talking about how the different fatigue mechanisms have different appearances in time over the course of a strength training set. So, if I do doubles or singles or even triples, basically, because metabolite relative fatigue is so much faster in its appearance than the other fatigue mechanisms, I just end up with metabolite relative fatigue happening and nothing else. The same thing kind of happens if you start taking reps in reserve. So, because Kelsey and my relative fatigue is backended in the set, I can really miss a lot of it by just leaving a rep or two in reserve. And I've pointed out to people that if they're doing moderate loads and they leave two reps in reserve, they can pretty much avoid the majority if not all of that Kelsey and my relative fatigue. If you're doing heavy loads, you probably only need to leave one rep in reserve. So, I really, really like the kind of sort of five rep max with one rep in reserve, something like that, doing four reps with a five rep max. I think that brilliant, brilliant sweet spot really, really does mitigate a lot of that problem. So, proximity to failure is the first one I would look at. Volume, of course, obviously, you do a whole string of sets, you can end up with more exposure of the muscle fibres to Kelsey once because you're activating for a longer period of time. So, those are the kind of, like, the three that I would say are duration driven. So, essentially, volume, proximity to failure and rep range, all you're saying here is how long are you activating these muscle fibres for? That's really all we're saying. The other two are caused by a different phenomenon. They're caused by stretch. So, essentially, you've got the resistance profile or how you're conducting the exercise such that, you know, are you activating the muscle fibres in a stretch position or not, basically. If you are, then you're going to have the opening of stretch activity. Nine channels, that's going to cause accumulation of calcium ions through a different mechanism, and you're basically just going to turbocharge the problem that you've got. So, I like to say to people, imagine doing something like, I don't know, a couple of sets of heavy hip thrusts versus one set of high rep squats. They're just completely and utterly different animals when it comes to post-workup tea, because you've got this kind of heavy load situation with your hip thrust where you've got a contract position exercise. You're not going to get a lot of post-workup tea from that. Your high rep set of squats, stretch position, high repetitions. Again, you could modify that further and say, well, you know, I leave a rep in reserve on the hip thrusts and I train to failure on the squats. There's literally a perfect kind of combination to see the difference in post-workup tea. So, stretch, really big deal. And then, of course, just finalizing this. If you start messing around with the eccentric phase, either making it really long in duration or overloading it by using extra weight, you're going to end up with a lot more post-workup tea as well, because, again, you're exposing a lot more fibers to stretch or exposing those fibers to stretch and for a longer duration of time. So, that's the five basic features. That's essentially the only things that are going to drive post-workup tea from a point of view of this sort of calcium-armilator mechanism. So, if you're doing a short position exercise, you think potentially you could do actually an extra set than what you would be doing. Well, that's it. I mean, that's, you know, historically, you know, we've talked about this idea of volumizing at those kind of exercises. So, you know, if somebody would say to me, look, I want to do more volume, then I'd be like, well, okay, we'll pick exercises. Yeah, exactly. Pick exercises that have those contract positions. And if you look at the leverage curve, you can generally find something that would work. Not always. I mean, you can't do that with a gastroc. It's not going to happen, but you can do it with many muscles. You can find a range of motion or a position or what have you that will advantage that muscle, but still keep it close to the contract event. So, you've mentioned, you know, people often say, oh, who cares if you're fatigued, they're still going to make that sort of difference. So, you know, fatigue may even help as far as I purge for you. They're all kind of misconceptions. For me, an actual kind of outcome base, I know you know, it's hard to quantify some of this, but if you were to say, okay, we've got, if fatigue is being a measurable reduction, a temporary reduction performance, we've got someone who is in this post-workout fatigue period where there is, you know, I can't. a couple of percent reduction in their performance capacity, what is actually happening that's going to negatively impact that perturbation? Just so people all clear why this matters. - So if we're talking about post-workout fatigue, which is today's a kind of focus, then we're only talking about these sort of four or five post-workout fatigue mechanisms. So we've got Southern brain damage, excitation, contraption, cup, and failure. My favorite of the damage, the CNS fatigue caused by the inflammatory process. And then as I said, the fifth one is coordination disruption if you're an athlete and you need to worry about that. So ignoring the athletic one, we've got these four mechanisms. Excitation, contraption, coupling, failure, and the cell membrane damage literally switch off the muscle fiber. So you can activate it and nothing will happen internally. So you're not getting crossbridge formations, which means you're not getting mechanical tension, which means you're not going to be able to stimulate that fiber to grow. So if those mechanisms are present and you come back and train the muscle again, the fibers are experiencing those fatigue mechanisms, we'll just ignore you. Literally, they just don't even know that you're training because they're not being activated. My favorite of the damage is a little bit of a great area because if it's present, then you're reducing the number of my referrals to reducing the number of crossbridge as you're reducing the amount of tension. So that's not actually switching the fiber off. It's just kind of reducing the amount of force production. Now, if you want to get really granular, you can say, well, there's other damage as well and that's interfering with in force transmission, it's just the same thing. Just reduces the tension of the. The annoying one is the CNS fatigue because that's created by the inflammatory response and it's triggered by the brain perceiving the presence of that information. Now, the reason that's annoying is because it doesn't just affect the fibers that you've damaged. It affects the whole body. So if you've done, this is ultimately the issue with brosplytes. So if you go in the gym and you smash a muscle to bits with your brosplyte training program and you come back the following day and you train a different muscle group, that inflammation that you've created in that previous day's workout is going to hamper your ability to hit high levels of recruitment in a completely different muscle the following day. And that's the annoying one because that's the one everyone ignores when they're putting programs. And that's effectively. It's almost falling to the same categories of first two thousand fatigue you were talking about because it's maybe not actually activating those muscle fibers. It works the same way from the muscle's perspective in the sense that the two calcium amuletivity mechanisms we mentioned, they switch the fibers off that are affected by that fatigue mechanism. They're super spun off the effect does that same thing but it does it to every muscle in the body the same way. So you can smash your calves and next day you go to biceps and there's going to be a reduction in the amount of muscle fibers. I would pick those two muscles as an example really because those are ones. I mean, calves are not going to get that easily damaged and biceps are got such a high volumetric deviation. Maybe we go the other way, maybe say biceps and then come back and extend your calves. That would be a much better example. If you do it all day and then you come back the following day and try and train another muscle group, you're not going to get the same level of recruitment you would do if you'd had a day off the day before. So, you know, and again, this is like very, very obvious mechanistic logic that we're using. We're not, you know, sort of just making stuff up. We're looking and saying, what is the stimulus for this adaption? Well, it has to be accurate in the fiber and mechanically loading it. That's not contentious. - Yeah, it's not contentious. - So you said hypertrophy, I think you said this last week, you know, we would remember one thing, it's hypertrophies muscle fiber specific. And so in this situation, you're saying you're literally switching off the fiber. Like it cannot experience this mechanical tension. It cannot experience a stimulus with growth. Now, is there any way of quantifying, like, are we talking one fiber? Are we talking, like, how do we, how could you possibly get your head around what kind of practical impact that might have? - So generally speaking, you can extrapolate from like, the fact that muscle fibers produce very similar forces if they're of the same cross-sectional area. So muscle fiber type, a lot of people think that fiber type effects force production, it doesn't really that much. So you can have a slow-touch fiber of a certain diameter and a fast-reached fiber of the same diameter and they'll produce very similar forces. Five, 10% difference, really. Now, shortening velocities are different animal, that's massively different. Again, athletic problem not a body-wording problem. So that being said, if you have a post-workout fatigue reduction and you can measure that as a percentage change, then you can get a handle on how much of your muscle mass is being affected by fatigue mechanisms. Because ultimately, the fatigue mechanisms start at the most fast-reached end of the spectrum and they work the way down. Because the more fast-reached fiber is, the less capable it is of handling might come, sorry, calcium ions because of the mitochondrial content. So if you have a lot of mitochondria and a muscle fiber, it will just deal with calcium ions and not let them accumulate. If you don't have as much mitochondria, it won't let you do that and you'll end up with accumulated calcium ions very quickly. So you can basically just say, well, this is my muscle and I'm dividing it into like 100% worth of fibers. If I come back the following day and I reduce strength by 30, 40, 50%, I mean, generally speaking, post-workout fatigue doesn't get much more than 50%. You can get worse than that, but that is specific populations of people that have a lot of fast-reached fibers. You know, in the following day, maybe you've dropped strength by 30%, which is a lot. That basically tells you that you've kind of lost access to about 30% of the muscle more or less. Now, whether that's happened due to calcium ionility locally or due to metabolite, sorry, due to a supospinal fatigue, due to the inflammation response, it's difficult to ascertain. But if, I mean, you can kind of do it by maybe looking at non-local fatigue a really, really nice one. If you say do, like a really horrible knee extension workout with only one leg and you come back the following day and you measure fatigue in both legs and you've got like a 30% drop in strength in one leg and a 10% drop in strength in the other leg. That tells you you've got like, you know, 10% of like a third of your post-workout fatigue is supospinal and the other two thirds is local more or less. So I think that's one way you could do that. But basically, you're kind of saying that if you've got a 30% strength drop, then 30% of your muscle fibers are not really playing ball with you the following day. Because I often hear people say, oh, you know, some of these fatigue studies, there's only a, you know, 4%, 5% drop in performance. And it's like, well, what you've just said there's, that's still going to be very significant if you're goals to maximize hypertrophy. If you're an advanced lifter who's only really capable of growing the muscle fibers at the top end of the motor unit pool, and that could be your 4% that you're trying to train. I mean, so, you know, I think again, it's about saying, what is actually happening? You know, I've rumbled on a lot today, so I don't want to rumble on too much more, but it just occurs to me that a lot of the time when I have disagreements with people on social media, they can't actually tell me how this stuff, they think this stuff works. So I'm like, this is how my model works. I'm working through this logically here's the beginning, here's the end, and this is the reasons why I think it. And then the other person will be like, I disagree with you, am I okay? Well, how do you think it works then? Crickets. Is that, well, no, come on. I mean, like, if you're putting yourself out there and you're trying to, you know, take part in this discussion, at least tell me what you think is happening. And I don't get an answer. Like, well, you know, I'm open to talking about this stuff, but I need to hear an opposing position, because I'm not going to throw my position out the window, just because you don't like it. If you can't give me something better, you know? So I think that's ultimately where I'm always coming from. It's like, let's create a model, let's work it through logically, and let's figure out what we think is going on. And if there's bits wrong with it, let's try and fix that. But what I'm not going to do is throw the whole thing out the window, just because somebody else doesn't like it, which is happening more and more recently. But it's like, well, give me an alternative, then. - So this stuff is significant. Like, if you go some maximize growth, this really matters. And you can find, like, you've published, you've put out tables and stuff showing this stuff, so people can see at what point are these for T mechanisms in place and how these reductions, like, you can find this information relatively easily. So the last question I've got here is, we've talked about singles, doubles, triples, even fours. You can do many sets of these things. These are still stimulating hypertrophy. Like, people who are aware of your model, they know that, well, ultimately, those last five repetitions give a take to failure, should all be maximally stimulating, they should all contribute hypertrophy. If you're doing doubles, you're doing triples, you're stimulating hypertrophy. Does this mean we can just all go train with, you know, 10 sets of two and stimulate more growth in your conventional sets of eight, two, three sets of eight, 12 kind of training program. So physiologically, yes, practically, it's not going to be very much fun. So, you know, I think, ultimately, there are reasons why people don't do it. You know, there are people out there who can absolutely do it by mechanically suited to it, but I think generally speaking, it's not a lot of fun to try and train like that. I think the sweet spot, as I say, is in that kind of four to six rep zone, you know, I think that's probably the place where the weight is not creating other problems, but at the same time, is also not creating a lot to post-work opportunity. I think we just got to, you know, sort of look at the traditional moderate load rep range, traditional traditional. Obviously, we're looking at Ridge Park here and he's working with 3 to 5. And Sandal, obviously, they're probably lifting a lot heavier, but the issue is we've kind of got ourselves into this zone where we tend to use moderate loads, and I think we just need to correct downwards a notch. I'm not going to be the one who goes out there and tells people to lift with the singles doubles and triples. I don't think it makes sense practically, but I do think working at the lower end of the moderate load rep range, you know, if we say that 6 to 15, I think working at the lower end of that 6 and 7 is really going to make a big difference to a lot of people. It's going to be a lot easier to recover from the workouts they're doing. I like working in the 4 to 6 zone. I think it's a really nice sweet spot. I think just just moving down from six to four is a huge, huge shift in post-production. But again, not everyone's going to tolerate that, not everyone's going to want to do that. I think it's going to come down to that balance between what people feel comfortable doing and safe and, you know, not getting soft tissue discomfort, but at the same time managing that post-production. Everyone's going to have an individual sweet spot, you know, I think for that. But generally, I would say, if you've got a moderate load range of 615 and you start moving from the top end of that down to the bottom end of that, I think that will make a big difference to people post-production. I don't think that's too heavy for the majority of situations. A couple of thoughts that I have on it. I'm interested to hear if you think anything differently about this. So I do program low repetition sets for my hypertrophy clients. And again, at the start of this podcast, I said I love that combination of Steve and Regis program. And one of my favorite ways to train is actually to alternate those two. So do one day or single set work and that'll usually be in that sort of 8 to 10 repetition range. Sometimes even higher because, again, based on, you know, weight availability of a machine or whatever, I'll just use a stack and just do AMR or whatever. But I'm doing single sets. And then on the alternate day, I tend to do sort of like a 3 by 5 or 4 to 5 whatever. And what I find with that is obviously your ability to use as many exercise variations in that second heavier workout. You know, that's going to be limited because you know, you multi sets is going to be a very long workout. But obviously, you know, if you're using more compound lifts, if you're training at home, whatever, that's going to be a very effective workout. Now, when I am programming this stuff for clients, a couple of points are made. So firstly, if we are using, say, sub 5 repetitions, we don't need to be using it. If you're doing doubles or triples, you don't need to be using your 2-3 repetition max. Like you can be using a 5-rept max. So, you know, a lot of the criticism here is all if I'm doing doubles, it's so, so heavy, and it'll load it so much. Well, no, you need a load of the same as you would load a set of. So from a loading perspective, it's not only more difficult. Exactly. Because ultimately a 5-rept max is going to be stimulating on the first rep. So you can absolutely just do a bunch of 5-rept maxes as singles or doubles. And I think that's probably the most elegant way of addressing the problem. So then the other thing is obviously allows you to volumize, like you're talking about before. So if you did have a priority muscle, a priority left or whatever, you could do 5, 6, 7, 8 sets, whatever with that 5-rept max. You're doing doubles and triples. And you can effectively get more stimulating volume in that work out than you would otherwise. Again, a limitation here. If people listen to me say that well, and think, well, I'm going to go do that for every exercise. Well, you can only do it for so many exercises. Otherwise, you'll be doing 60 sets in a workout. Right? So time is going to be a limitation. But either you could pick 4, 5, 6 exercises and do that within a single session and then have your longer session, 20 different exercises, whatever in the other day or, and what I often program is one or two exercises in a session where we do this and then we do all our exercises as single sets. So that's where I'm using it. And then the other thing I'm using it for is exercises where I say something like a squat, a hack squat, a pendulum squat. If I simply or something that's easily damageable, very, very sort of cardiovascular demanding as well. Like if I'm doing a pendulum squat and I'm doing a set of 10, Daddy's just going to kind of ruin that session for me. Like I'm going to need to wait, you know, 10 minutes before that's not going to be affecting my next set. So for me, I would prefer to low that pendulum squat super heavy, do, well, you know, five or max, do doubles with it. I get my three, four sets out of doubles. And that's going to take much less of a call and impact your rest of my workout. I hell of a lot less. If I'm doing one or two sets of 10. Totally, you know, I think, no, yeah, absolutely. I think there's, there's a lot of creative ways to work with this information. It definitely starts to go off the top end of what I'm kind of focused on though. So it's like, I could listen to you talk about this stuff. I'm like, yeah, that makes all the sense that my brain is just wondering, thinking about Kelsey Mind. It's just like, I think again, it's, I'm always, I'm always interested and I'm always kind of curious to see how this model gets implemented. And it's really cool to see the different solutions that you come up with and other people come up with. But it's, it's really not something that I think I'm ever going to really try and do. It's just not my wheelhouse. And I've been told you to explain to people that I'm just, I'm trying to solve the problem of the physiology and people try and put me in their box. I get this in my Instagram questions. Actually, I do Instagram questions every Saturday. And a lot of the questions I get, many of the questions I get tend to assume that, well, I feel like they're putting me in a box with other people that they recognize doing some of the things. And they go, oh, well, you're like this person or you're like this person. I'm like, well, I'm really not because pretty much every person you want on that list is selling a training, but you know, and pretty much everybody is trying to get you to train in a particular way that they think is right. I'm not trying to do that. I'm trying to teach you a physiological model that explains how all of this stuff works. So I'm not in that box. I'm in a different box. You know, and yes, I can interact with people that are doing those things and I do enjoy doing that. But ultimately, their creativity is around the program design side of things. My creativity is trying to figure out how this stuff works on a physiological level. So, you know, I'm always going to just kind of be a little bit behind the curve when it comes to program design. That kind of thing, I'm just, it doesn't light me up. I think it's helpful nonetheless to come to you and be like, does this make sense physiologically? And we're not, you know, I'm not saying exactly. I'm not saying that what I've just suggested are the only ways to do things. You know, obviously, like you've said, the model can be applied in ways we haven't discussed. And that's sort of out there for people to think about and creatively engage with and utilize. So at no point in we trying to put a limitation and say it has to be used in this way. Exactly. Exactly. And I think a lot of people are surprised when they say, they send me like a program or a workout and they go, you know, they go, you know, is this, is this going to work? And I'm like, yeah, probably. And I think they expect me to go, no, you should not do it like this. You should do it like this way that I have said is the only possible way you can do it because they, they see other people doing that because everyone's got their own little pet programs that they want to kind of advance. I'm like, well, no, I mean, I think it would solve the problem. And you can have better and worse kind of solutions and you can have more creative and less creative solutions. But ultimately, from my perspective, I can tell you physiologically what's going on. And then whether there might be which you could change it in a given direction to make it better. But ultimately, I'm not going to be standing there going, no, you must program like this or you must program like that. I will say to people that if their program has a very low frequency of training each muscle that they're losing out by doing that. And that's a choice that I wouldn't make. But I'll equally be able to tell them whether I think the net eye poetry over the week is going to exist or not. But he's on the date. Anyway, we're kind of a long way away from the purpose of this podcast. We are. But hopefully people find it helpful and interesting. And the final point I want to make on that is why I find this conversation so helpful. Because again, like you said, it's not something that lights you up. But I still force you to talk about this stuff with me all the time because I remember talking to someone once and, and they were abusing. And they said, if someone asked me to write a song, I'd be like, where the hell do I start? What kind of song? But if they say, I want a song about this or like this in this time signature or whatever they give them some guideline, then they're like, oh man, I've got so many ideas. And that's how this works for me when I think about programming. It's like, well, actually having these conversations with you over time has just expanded the possibilities. And it's like, wow, there's so many creative ways to use this model, take it, apply it, shape it and come up with new ways of doing training that makes sense as opposed to just not even knowing where to start. I think that's, that's a really nice way of putting it. And I hope that, and I would be very happy if people were to do that. I mean, I think, you know, that the model is not designed to be constrictive. It's designed to be a facilitator. You know, it's to, as you say, it's designed to facilitate saying, look, anything that you do that fulfills these criteria will work, you know, and that hopefully is liberating rather than being constricting. I think a lot of people, I mean, I get this criticism. People say, oh, Christ just says, you've got to train in this way. Otherwise, it won't work. I literally see that being said all the time. And I have never said anything like that at all. You know, listening to what I'm saying, you know, I'm saying, this is how the physiology works. If you can't figure out a way of training programming within that framework, then I'm sorry, that's not my problem. You know, that's, that's a lack of imagination. Because I think the problem is actually that the framework is actually really clear. But anyway, that's, that's a complaint. I'm just complaining at this point. So stop me talking. That's okay. We're done. We're done. Thank you guys for tuning in, sticking with us for our gambling. Hopefully you enjoyed the episode and hopefully join us again for another episode.